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US Slows Plans To Retire Coal-Fired Plants as Power Demand From AI Surges (news.slashdot.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for your effort.

Couple of takeaways:

I think we can use Bitcoin difficulty chart to approximate how much crypto weighs in the AI / crypto mix. BTC difficulty stopped increasing in 2024 which could be partially explained by both competing for same resources. The other big one, Ethereum moved to proof of stake fairly recently and I think it's an attractive proposition for other crypto given the above. With this in mind it's fair to say crypto won't be a big factor compared to AI growth and I would expect researchers to come to somewhat similar conclusions.

As to how good AI is at things:

Effectiveness of AI powered search is debatable but it's a subjective thing so I don't want to get into it.
Translation tech was one of the early ML implementations and it's good to see it improving even more. Transcription is one of the great uses but how many people need that on frequent basis?
I remain unconvinced that many multimedia generative AI use is legal due to how training data was obtained. We're in a limbo until this gets decided by US / EU etc.
As you've mentioned there is concern that we'll see a lot of wasteful applications of AI. I was horrified when Googled demoed assistant that would find your car plates by scanning your photo library.

The last one is key I think. Since AI is the current buzzword companies will try to shoehorn it everywhere, regardless of it making sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Bitcoin difficulty chart - good point.

Effectiveness of AI powered search - Agreed, it is a very subjective topic. I don't use LLMs for the majority of my searches (who needs hallucinated dates and times for the movies playing at a cinema near me?) and it sounds like Google is trying to use their LLM with every search now... In my opinion we should have a button to activate the LLM on a search rather than have it respond every time (but I don't really use Google search anyway).

Translation/Transcription tech - It's incredibly useful for anyone who's deaf. Your average person doesn't need this, although I'm sure they benefit from the auto-generated subtitles if they're trying to watch a video in a noisy environment (or with the volume off).
In my own personal use I've found it useful for cutting through the nonsense posted by both sides of either the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Gaza conflict (in the case of misinformation targeting those who don't speak the language).

Generative AI - Yeah, this will be interesting to see how it plays out in courts. I definitely see good points raised by both sides, although I'm personally leaning towards a ruling that would allow smaller startups/research groups to be able to compete with larger corporations (when they will be able to buy their way into training data). It'll be interesting to see how these cases proceed on the text vs audio vs image/art fronts.

Wasteful AI - Agreed... too many companies are jumping in on the "AI" bandwagon without properly evaluating whether there's a better way to do something.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read through everything.