@manton The massive energy consumption is downside.

But as the use of AI to assist coding becomes widespread, there’s pressure to use it to maintain a new normal of productivity.

I think that’s fair.

@markstos that’s interesting, I wasn’t aware of that. What is the relative energy consumption compared to, say, daily tasks involving blogging/content editing, or something like gaming?

@manton I used the last app. I built Mio Vino as a case study in using AI for development.

I was really shocked at how much I was able to accomplish.

Besides feeding a ravenous corporation and technology, there’s maybe your personal brain function to consider. Prolly worth considering what LLMs do for your agility and creativity over time, and what the value of these are vis-à-vis productivity in life.

@markstoneman I do think about that a little. Technology can make us lazy. But it could also free more time to use our brain for other things.

I get that. The trick might be to consciously not use it for certain types of projects.

@jasraj @manton First, there's a massive amount of energy to train the modules to get them ready to use. And then because the competition is stiff, they are constantly training new modules to replace yesterday's model.

Then, when run queries, it still requires massively parallel computation to deliver the answer quickly.

Blogging and content editing don't compare, as they are using primarily simple processing on a single computer or two.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions

You’re right. The problem is that you know how to code, but a lot of people are starting to use AI to create software that they have no idea how it works.
If you use AI-generated software in production without knowing how to fix it, there can be several security flaws.

@prealpinux I agree with that. It’s fine if it’s just for fun, but to ship software you really should review the code. I edit pretty much everything AI gives me.

@markstos interesting. Thank you for the examples, and for the link. I’m now wondering how much energy I powered thru with the SETI@home project when I was a kid; it was meant to run ‘in the background’, CPU usage was often in the 90-100%s

@jasraj Did you or your parents notice a different in the monthly electric bill? That would correspond with the difference.

@manton Curious if you use the ChatGPT interface or some kind of IDE integration?

@everysummertime Mostly ChatGPT for Mac, which can also read open files in some IDEs.

@markstos 👍