Yeah, lots of videos of it, looks wild.

Yes, and my point is that operational cycle of the model dominates total energy consumption. And turns out that it’s not actually that high in the grand scheme of things, and continues to improve all the time.

Meanwhile, it’s absolutely necessary to contextualize AI energy use in relation to the other ways we use energy to understand whether there’s something exceptional happening here or not. All the information for figuring out how much energy AI is using is available. We know how much energy models use, and rough numbers of people using them. So, that’s not a big mystery.

Whether they’re trained from scratch or not is very much material because it takes far more energy to do that. Meanwhile, we consume energy as a civilization in general. And frankly, a lot of energy is consumed on far dumber things like advertisements. If you count all the energy that goes into producing and displaying ads, that dwarfs AI energy use. So, it’s kind of weird t0 single AI energy use out here as some form of exceptional evil.

Models training is a one off effort. Model usage is what matters because that’s where energy is used continuously. Also, practically nobody trains models from scratch right now. People use existing base models to tune and extend them.

At this point, I’d trust the AI over the clowns running the Burger Reich.

It’s comforting to know that anyone who opposes actually existing socialism is indeed a fascist.

I’m pretty excited to live to see western hegemony over the world finally breaking.

I get a strong impression that the whole extinction of humanity narrative is really just an astroturf marketing campaign by AI companies. They’re basically scaremongering because it gets in the news, and the goal is to convince investors how smart these things are. It’s the whole OpenAI claiming they’re on the verge of AGI right before pivoting to doing horny chatbots. These are useful tools, and I also use them day to day, but the hype around them is absolutely incredible.

I think we have plenty of real risks to humanity to worry about, like the US starting a nuclear holocaust. We don’t need to waste time worrying about imaginary risks like AGI here.

I’d also argue the whole energy consumption argument is very myopic. The reality is that these things have been getting more and more efficient, and there is little reason to think that’s not going to be continue being the case going forward. It’s completely new tech, and it’s basically just moved past proof of concept stages. There’s going to be a lot of optimization happening down the road. And even when you contextualize current energy usage, it’s not as crazy as people seem to think https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/

We’re also starting to see stuff like this happening https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html

every thread about DPRK will have at least one fash in it

People tend to have a tendency to assume that their values, needs, and desires are universal. But in reality they’re a product of their material conditions. People internalize the values of their society as they grow up, and that shapes their world view and their desires. People growing up in DRPK would necessarily have different world view from people growing up in a western society as a result. For somebody who’s lived their whole life in the west, DPRK would likely not be a pleasant place to live. But that says absolutely nothing about people who come from that society.

there’s just no other logical explanation

it’s almost certainly the latter

this is so unreasonably effective

Sure, that’ll be the priority, but again, look at solar and EVs. Once production ramps up, these things start getting exported globally at way lower prices than western competition.

I’m not so sure there’s much of a difference.

I see what you did there

Exactly, and the rate of progress there is just stupefying.

as shocked as you are that India will not abandon billions in trade just because the US is mad

They’re not nice. They wanted to be part of the western club since the fall of USSR, but the west chose to have an antagonistic relationship instead which pushed Russia towards the Global South, because it’s the only option they had. Iran is important to both Russia and China geographically since it creates a route to Middle East and Africa, and it acts as the key force to contain US and Israeli influence in the region.

What an amazing counterpoint you’ve mustered. I can really tell I’m dealing with top grade liberal intelligentsia here.