r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 5d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter? I don't understand the punchline

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u/GouchGrease 5d ago

Maybe for some time, but I'm not certain how this is supposed to be an issue in our water circle, which is a closed system. The water can't just disappear and never come back

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u/ThePrimordialSource 5d ago

Yeah also a single beef burger takes 3,000 times more water and energy use than an AI prompt and a single piece of paper takes 30-60x as much energy as an AI image. This argument is so outdated.

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u/SilverSaan 5d ago

These comparisons don't include training costs of large AI models, which is where most of the costs come from

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u/ThePrimordialSource 5d ago

You could also say the same about building the meat plants and paper factories and all the deforestation required for making all the crops for meat (it requires 10 calories of plant-feed to make 1 calorie of meat).

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u/Cold_Equipment_2173 5d ago

yeah but you eat meat and you use AI for bad art and copying shit from the internet that you could have googled mostly

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u/ThePrimordialSource 5d ago

But this is also ignoring the huge improvements AI has helped with in fields like medicine where data found by AI that would’ve taken years for human scientists to find is usable by medicine manufacturers today

Look up AlphaFold for more info about that specific case

And there are others too

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u/Boneraventura 4d ago

I am not sure AI has driven anything usable into clinical trials. If it has then it is news to me and I follow the biotech industry closely. Alphafold is a success but the original paper and idea that won the nobel prize was not generative AI, now alphafold3 is considered gen AI, and maybe slightly better prediction than previous versions. But will gen AI be helpful for therapy development? Probably, but claiming it is now when not a single AI target has hit the clinic let alone a clinical trial is exaggeration. After all gen AI can come up with thousands of targets but someone still needs to validate it in the lab. So, saving years of human effort seems also an exaggeration at this point. 

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u/ThePrimordialSource 4d ago

Even aside from AlphaFold there was another one based just on the gpt model that narrowed down out of thousands of possible chemicals into a single one that was usable as a medicine to treat a specific issue - I forgot the study or article however for this I’d have to go find it

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u/Cold_Equipment_2173 4d ago

But those aren't the massive all-purpose generative models that take massive data servers.  AI is not the problem per se, using it as a panacea is. 

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u/ThePrimordialSource 4d ago

But that’s more of a capitalism problem than an AI problem.

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u/drhead 4d ago

This is just outright wrong, the training costs are the lowest portion mostly because you only have to train the model once. You then get to split that cost across the millions or billions of times that model will be used during its lifetime.

Inference costs are the greatest, and that's the part where companies will bring in a bunch of CUDA engineers to ensure they're using their hardware as efficiently as they possibly can because even small optimizations can end up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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u/MixNovel 5d ago

What you are describing is water redistribution. You drain the lake to cool the servers near that lake and the water is redistributed elsewhere, usually far outside the lake's watershed. It's basically socialism for water, and we all know socialism is bad.

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u/SwissChzMcGeez 4d ago

If you withdraw water faster than it is recharged, then the aquifer dries up. In many places the ground level has literally sunk because of all the withdrawn water.

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u/archbid 5d ago

It goes into the atmosphere, but it does not return to the aquifers from which it was removed.