This is off topic, but toms hardware is one of a growing list of pages using “ad recovery” services that intentionally break their own page and then blame DNS-level filters for the problem. It’s disingenuous at best and I really don’t think a site willing to employ a such deceptive tactic should be allowed to get page views.
That sucks. I remember everyone pointing and laughing at California because the state was being defrauded by Enron, which caused regular brownouts.
I ain’t do that. If you are in Virginia (or anywhere else, but since this post is about Virginia) and need help cooling off, pour water on your forearm. I learned it as left forearm because it’s barely closer to your heart, but I haven’t noticed a difference. You’re getting better air cooling because of the water, and it’s on your forearm which gets a lot of bloodflow. Also you aren’t getting your clothes wet. Old farmer’s trick.
Mentioning Enron never ceases to make my blood boil. People died for market manipulation. Arguably the best public utility in the US was cannibalized for corporate profits.
The reason Texas didn’t bother connecting to the grid was because it had a higher uptime than the rest of the nation. It was literally, the energy capital of the world.
They privatized the public utility and within a year Texas went from the cheapest electric in the nation to the most expensive.
Worst of all, no one at Enron got the chair for their murders. In fact, because it was based in Texas when things went to shit and the execs took their golden parachutes. A judge ruled that no return of the stolen assets was required because one of the executives died. Imagine robbing a bank, giving the money to your wife, and then dying and your wife gets to keep the money.
Fuck those stupid fucking conservatives and the republicans representing them. Ultimately, the tolerance of their corruption and greed has brought the USA to its knees.
It’s becoming painfully obvious that there is no way to ethically use frontier models powered by these monstrosities. It is currently 100 F in Tuckahoe, the largest city in Henrico County… and they’re asking people to not use electricity so that these heat-and-pollution-generating slop factories can use it instead.
This is insanity.
Oh, there are definitely ethical ways to use these models. It’s just that those methods are not being enforced by local counties or your governments. Thus, companies are able to do whatever the hell they want, which means it’s going to be unethical by default.
What we need is regulation, enforcement, and a stop letting these companies trample all over everything they want to.
No, there really isn’t. The frontier models are created through massive plagiarism. They’re designed to be addictive to use. They consume massive amounts of resources to feed you slop. They are inherently unethical. We’re burning the planet down to keep them running, and we don’t even have a demonstrable financial ROI to show for it.
Stop using them. If your employer makes you use them, maliciously comply by wasting tokens until the financial pain is too great for them to bear and they stop. If you yourself are addicted, switch to small, local, open-source, open-weight models you can run yourself. You won’t burn the world down running a small model on your own computer.
You have that backwards. The only thing you gain from running local models is privacy. It is not cheaper, it is not more efficient. You are actively hurting the environment MORE by using a local model on your own. LLM efficiency sky rockets the more users there are on a single loaded model.
IMO the only way we get to efficient LLM usage would be by having very efficient non frontier models running only for its local community to use, where you can have assurances on whether its power source is clean or not. That doesn’t help with the plagiarism aspect though
Are you serious?
- Local model: Spends most of its time turned off. Only active when I want it to be active, and only for a little while. Dedicated solely to generating the small amounts of code I use it for. Does nothing else. Costs $0 per token, and electricity costs are negligible.
- Frontier model: Always on, running on millions of GPUs. Would be burning down the planet even if hardly anyone was using it. Incredibly wasteful, being used for trivial tasks and convincing people that their horrible ideas are visionary every day. Misspelling “strawberry” for the masses. Trained specifically to be addictive. Can easily cost a software developer who is addicted to AI thousands of dollars a month, with the recent price increases.
I’d love to see some data to back up the assertion that frontier models are somehow cheaper and more efficient than running a model locally.
You’re probably burning more energy turning it off and on again. It doesn’t really use any noticeable power sitting idle.
Anyway, a direct comparison would be pretty difficult because your model is probably tens of billions of parameters, not over a trillion. Energy consumption per output token will probably be a bit higher for the frontier models but something that people have found is that higher quality models often need fewer tokens to achieve the same goal. Plus how many times do you re-prompt your local model vs Claude Fable or Opus for example to get the desired result?
You’re probably burning more energy turning it off and on again. It doesn’t really use any noticeable power sitting idle.
I am absolutely not burning more energy than a frontier model by doing things like putting my laptop to sleep or shutting down unused services when I want to conserve battery power.
Anyway, a direct comparison would be pretty difficult because your model is probably tens of billions of parameters, not over a trillion.
True.
Energy consumption per output token will probably be a bit higher for the frontier models but something that people have found is that higher quality models often need fewer tokens to achieve the same goal.
That’s actually not true. In fact it’s much the opposite. Frontier models churn through tokens at a much higher rate, because of their higher complexity and higher number of parameters. Research is still new on this, but having a frontier model analyze your code files versus a small, local model for the same task seems to be enormously wasteful. If you must use a frontier model for something, have it do that work after receiving the output from an agent using a small model to read and summarize your code.
Plus how many times do you re-prompt your local model vs Claude Fable or Opus for example to get the desired result?
…Almost never? I’m not a fan of letting AI do much of ANY of my coding, because it will inevitably bloat my codebase with garbage regardless of which model I use. So I severely restrict my model usage to simple, clearly-defined, narrow-scoped tasks that can save me a bit of time, and that’s it. With guardrails and discipline like that, I barely ever have the need to re-prompt.
