You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI.

And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.

> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI.

You mean except the bit about how GenAI included his work in its training data without credit or compensation?

Or did you disagree with the environmental point that you failed to keep reading?

I often find that when people start applying purity tests it’s mainly just to discredit any arguments they don’t like without having to make a case against the substance of the argument.

Assess the argument based on its merits. If you have to pick him apart with “he has no right to say it” that is not sufficient.

> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI

Except it definitely is, unless you want to ignore the bubble we're living in right now.

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A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:

1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs

2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.

3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias

I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.

Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.

Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.

The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.

This is based on assuming 5 questions a day. YouTube would be very power efficient as well if people only watched 5 seconds of video a day.

How many tokens do you use a day?

Thankfully YouTube provides a lot more value to society than gen-AI.

It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters.

I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).

Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.

As it so happens Rob Pike performed absolutely 0 tradeoff analysis

No, which is why I didn’t say that. I do think astroturfing could explain the rapid parroting of extremely similar ad hominems, which is what I actually did imply.