> That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn.

The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard. I don't understand why we have to bend-over backwards when it comes to humans being exploited by AI companies.

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echoangle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard.

Yeah, which is why it's only used to compare cars etc. among each other. Nobody would calculate the equivalence of a car to a horse using their HP rating because a horse doesn't even have 1 HP. They have more or less depending on the task you're doing. It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.

In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

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kshri24 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.

Except it is actually taxed based on HP in various countries. Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy use engine horsepower to levy annual car taxes.

> In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Citizens are paying taxes for betterment of roads irrespective of whether they own vehicles or not. In India, betterment charges are collected for construction/maintenance of roads if you own land. Property tax collected every year has a certain allocation for maintenance/upkeep of roads. Apart from that, money from direct and indirect tax collections are allocated for roads upkeep as well. It just is done indirectly rather than a direct road tax if you have vehicles (road tax is actually an extra tax you pay APART from taxes you already pay for upkeep/maintenance of roads).

> Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. Some countries use HP while others use CC. But end of the day, they use some measurement to determine taxes to be paid. It is not free.

EDIT: Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

To answer this in more detail: HP/CC and all other measurements were created to equalize with human specific metrics. Bridges, for example, have safety measured based on how much weight it can sustain at any given time (called load limit). Weight, in this specific case, is an equalizing measurement (it can be in tonnes, kN, PSF, Pa etc). A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities.

	▲	echoangle 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. I was talking about humans vs. cars as an analogy to you comparing GPUs and cars. Nobody is taxing humans the way cars are taxed, so why should the computing speed of a GPU be compared to that of a human? > A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities. And you do not think that comparing weights to measure bridge load makes a lot more sense than comparing FLOPS to determine learning of GPUs vs humans? EDIT: Maybe let's just go back to the original point > We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified. So you want to compare the learning rate of a GPU to that of a human by comparing their respective FLOPS. Why would FLOPS be a valid proxy for learning ability in humans just because that works out in GPUs, if the way they learn is fundamentally different? Is the effect of someone reading a copyrighted book dependent on how fast they are at doing math in their head?