@manton Such a lovely company too. Led by a saint.

@aral Assuming you're being sarcastic, is he really that bad? I can't tell from the outside, other than rumors when the board shook everything up last year.

@manton Assuming you’re asking in good faith, are you aware of the criminal effects of the AI industry on the climate? The potential benefits of AI won’t ever compensate for the damage it’s doing physically to our world right now, with the technology in its infancy. Being a CEO and evangelist for the technology is only slightly less wrong than being the CEO of an oil company, at this point. Him being in this position is what you need to know in order to understand if he’s good or bad.

@aral

totally agree with your assessment. Also, can you make it as easy to block/mute AI deniers here on micro.blog as it is on Bluesky??

@joachim @aral That is pretty absolutist. We'll see how it plays out, but energy use for server farms in particular feels like a solvable problem, unlike oil fields. I don't think this is a repeat of Bitcoin.

@jhull How are you muting that on Bluesky? I need to catch up on what they're doing with moderation. Right now we just have basic keyword muting in Micro.blog.

@manton “we’ll see how it plays out”

How long are you planning to wait in order for AI to be a benefit for the world, climate-wise? And when I mean a benefit, I mean that it compensates its carbon emissions and its past emissions. And I’m not talking only about emissions linked to power generation, but also those linked to the manufacturing of the hardware. It’s one of the industries with the fastest growing climate footprint. I don’t see anything happening right now to mitigate it.

@aral

I have a list called "AI-Deniers", when they fit that description I just add them to the list and never hear from them again. It's heaven. AI Deniers

@jhull can you share your list? Want to make sure I mute them, too.

@rom definitely. You can subscribe to it here: bsky.app/profile/d... hundreds and hundreds added since January :)

If I understand correctly, energy consumption can be lowered considerably by tweaking the processing with minimal effect on the overall process. The main source of conspirative thinking seems to be lack of transparency, not telling us how green the AI companies really are. Also, I think that incorporating analog computing will be even more energy efficient, since data models don't need the high accuracy of power-hungry digital computers. The latter will take a while, and constraining power in hardware can be done right now, as well as sharing data on power consumption.

@jhull whoa, thanks for sharing! This is a nice thing to have!

@jhull yay! Thanks.

@renevanbelzen That is really interesting. Thanks for the link.

@renevanbelzen thanks for sharing! This is very interesting