Ban them
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
1021 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
60462 readers
3886 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Just don't use them.
Tell that to schools or companies etc. You can't just not use them. Maybe you can, but not everyone has that luxury.
The annoying part is how many mainstream tech companies have ham-fisted AI into every crevice of every product. It isn't necessary and I'm not convinced it results in a "better search result" for 90% of the crap people throw into Google. Basic indexed searches are fine for most use cases.
As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than "agile", which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I skimmed the article, but it seems to be assuming that Google's LLM is using the same architecture as everyone else. I'm pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips instead of a regular GPU like everyone else. Those are generally pretty energy efficient.
That and they don't seem to be considering how much data is just being cached for questions that are the same. And a lot of Google searches are going to be identical just because of the search suggestions funneling people into the same form of a question.
Exactly. The difference between a cached response and a live one even for non-AI queries is an OOM difference.
At this point, a lot of people just care about the 'feel' of anti-AI articles even if the substance is BS though.
And then people just feed whatever gets clicks and shares.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I hadn't really heard of the TPU chips until a couple weeks ago when my boss told me about how he uses USB versions for at-home ML processing of his closed network camera feeds. At first I thought he was using NVIDIA GPUs in some sort of desktop unit and just burning energy...but I looked the USB things up and they're wildly efficient and he says they work just fine for his applications. I was impressed.
Yeah they're pretty impressive for some at home stuff and they're not even that costly.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It's immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it's being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
load more comments
(5 replies)
I switched to Kagi like 6 months ago and I still love it. Almost never have to go back to google except for maps.
I'm genuinely curious where their penny picking went? All of tech companies shove ads into our throats and steal our privacy justifying that by saying they operate at loss and need to increase income. But suddenly they can afford spending huge amounts on some shit that won't give them any more income. How do they justify it then?
It's another untapped market they can monopolize. (Or just run at a loss because investors are happy with another imaginary pot of gold at the end of another rainbow.)
Perception. If a company isn't on the leading edge we don't consider them the best.
Regardless if you use them or not, if Google didn't touch AI but Edge did you would believe edge is more advanced.
It doesn't even need to appeal to you the user, but given the AI Gold Rush, they would have very unhappy investors if they did not.
Very good point
load more comments
(1 replies)
And yet it's still garbage....like their search
With adblock enabled I feel like their results are often better than for example Duckduckgo. I recently switched to using DDG as my standard search engine but I regularly find myself using Google instead to get the results I'm looking for.
Interesting, I'm actually the exact opposite. I always start with Google, because it's usually good enough, but whenever it takes 2-3 tries to get something relevant, I switch to ddg and get it first try.
My issue is mostly with image search results. DDG's images tend to be less relevant than Google's. DDG also lacks "smart" results (idk the official term).
For example when you search "rng 25" on Google, it will immediately present you with a random number between 1 and 25. On DDG you have to click on one of the search results and then use some website to generate the number.
Or when searching for the results of a soccer game, Google will immediately present all the stats to you, while on DDG you will only find some articles about it.
Of course it really depends on the kind of search and I'm sure DDG will regularly have better results than Google too.
One example I had with DDG image search was transparent electronics, I couldnt find a way to get electronics with a transparent case, DDG would only give me generic electronics images that had transparency. Google got it though
load more comments
(7 replies)
I wonder what the power consumption of getting to the information in the summary is as a whole when using a regular search, clicking on multiple links, finding the right information and extracting the relevant parts. Including the expenditures of energy by the human performing the task and everything that surrounds the activity.
There are real concerns surrounding AI, I wonder if this is truly one of them or if it’s just poorly researched ragebait.
I'm surprised it's only 10x. Running a prompt though a llm takes quite a bit of energy, so I guess even the regular searches take more energy than I thought.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Wow AI is just so amazing
All of this just to give rich shareholders even more money.
And it’s only 10x more useless :)
To be fair, it was never "hidden" since all the top 5 decided that GPU was the way to go with this monetization.
Guess who is waiting on the other side of this idiocy with a solution? AMD with cheap FPGA that will do all this work at 10x the speed and similar energy reduction. At a massive fraction of the cost and hassle for cloud providers.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Don't worry folks, if we all stop using plastic straws and take 30 second showers, we'll be able to offset 5% of the carbon emissions this AI has!
Google ghg emissions in 2023 are 14.3 million metric tons. Which are a ridiculous percentage of global emissions.
Commercial aviation emissions are 935.000 million metric tons by year.
So IDK about plastic straws or google. But really if people stopped flying around so much that would actually make a dent on global emissions.
Don't get me wrong, google is a piece of shit. But they are not the ones causing climate change, neither is AI technology. Planes, cars, meat industry, offshore production... Those are some of the truly big culprits.
But they are not the ones causing climate change
The owners of google are capitalists. They are as responsible for climate change as any other capitalist.
Capitalists serve customers and do not operate in a vacuum. This finger pointing does nothing productive.
Capitalists ~~serve customers~~ hoard wealth through reckless profiteering irregardless of the costs to the rest of human society and do not operate in a vacuum.
FTFY. I do agree with your last part, though. The political racketeer establishments that enable them and the fascist security institutions that protect them are equally as culpable as they are.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Capitalists have captured regulation and to a large extent democracy in the US. So finger pointing towards them is entirely useful. Especially given they spend good money to point the finger at us.
load more comments
(11 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)