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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byBothPartiesAreEvil ( 9063691 ) writes:
why measure GW instead of flops? wouldn't using flops as a metric incentivize more energy efficiency?
wouldn't GW measure usage whereas flops would measure capacity?
byGideon Fubar ( 833343 ) writes:
They're explaining that they don't understand why flops were important before, they were just big number go up.
They don't understand that there might not be a fixed or linear relationship between flops and watts. They don't want you to think about it either, and I'm not joking when I say that I've had several supposedly notable people in the AI space have claimed to be unfamiliar with the term 'computational complexity'. I still don't know whether they were serious or being rhetorical to preserve their payc
bySpinyNorman ( 33776 ) writes:
The relationship between FLOPS and watts is a function of GPU generation, and will certainly change (and be very disruptive - increased power density may require entire datacenter cooling to be redone), but what may change even faster is tokens per FLOP as the models get tweaked for efficiency, and this is what counts since customer pricing is in tokens. The production capacity (tokens/sec) of the "factory" is certainly far from fixed and defined by the power it is consuming.
GW really is an odd metric to fi
byGideon Fubar ( 833343 ) writes:
with respect
I think you have missed my point. What you're saying isn't wrong, but what I mean is that any operation performed by an LLM will necessarily be orders of magnitude less efficient per watt than just doing it directly. Necessarily.
This is what computer science is about, and no amount of business guys trying to rewrite the (spoken, purely semantic) language will change that. No amount of token generation or discarded hashes will ever be necessary to perform basic, defined, known arithmetic... let a
bySpinyNorman ( 33776 ) writes:
Yes, when there is an alternative it is almost certainly more efficient, and people no doubt are sometimes asking LLMs to do trivial things like math where when they could have just used a calculator instead, but surely you don't believe that the majority of paying LLM users are stupid and using it for things like this? The excitement about LLMs is because they can do things, like writing code, where there is no alternative (other than doing it by hand).
byGideon Fubar ( 833343 ) writes:
what?
No I think it's much worse than that. I think by volume the average active use is somewhat literally the act of pushing pixels around a bitmap so that it looks more like a naked lady.
I understand that a functional positive use of LLMs is to enable people to grapple with ideas they wouldn't necessarily have access to... And as such my net experience of them has been that I have undergraduate researchers trying to log into HPC systems with cursor and wondering why there's a problem, and also my friends w
bySpinyNorman ( 33776 ) writes:
You seem to be completely out of touch with what people are using LLMs for.
Incidentally, if you want to use an LLM to do everyday computer stuff like logging into a system (some people use it as their system administrator) then what you need is an agentic client that actually runs on the system you want to control, such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, etc. You seem to be blaming the stupidity of your undergraduate researchers on LLMs, when it is in fact their own stupidity and lack of having bothered to understand how these tools work.
I'm not sure what your anecdote of entrepreneural friends not having all their needs met by LLMs is meant to prove? Did they try Google search? If the information was neither in the training set of the LLM (or maybe it was, but they failed to create a prompt to elicit it), nor findable by Google, then reaching out to someone who can help seems an entirely reasonable thing to do.
I think there is an underlying problem of non-developers hearing all the success that developers are having with LLMs, and so thinking that they do can just "vibe code" some new app, and then discovering that LLMs are just a tool, not magic, and that you do indeed need to be a developer to use them for development work.
LLMs are for sure an odd and flawed technology, but if you haven't been able to find a way to use them productively, then maybe you are not trying hard enough. If you are from an academic background, then maybe Ethan Mollick's extensive writing about and experimentation with LLMs would be of interest.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org... [oneusefulthing.org]
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byGideon Fubar ( 833343 ) writes:
I see.
I have this nice bridge over here for sale, and you seem like a canny investor.
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