I like Hank, and this is a shitty article.
That aside he should be facing a revolt.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye. It’s very hard to take anything he says as objective truth when his research and fact checking consists of asking an LLM. Considering hallucinations and straight up lies are not only common but not even unexpected for an LLM you can’t believe anything that comes from one nor can you believe anyone who uses one.
I don’t know about going that far - LLMs can be a great starting point …. As long as you click through to the sources rather than blindly accept
Creating science Youtube videos is not more important than maintaining a livable planet. AI is unnecessary and harmful, and should not be used outside of certain brute-force type of applications like protein folding, simulating new drug structures, or preliminary cancer diagnosis.
Golf courses use 30x the water that data centers use. Lawns, 100x. Standby mode for appliances costs more energy, by a lot. I wonder how much carbon emissions are offset by people no longer driving to work at call centers and the like.
Out of curiosity do you eat meat? .2% of water is used on data centers. 9.8% is used on beef. For carbon emissions one pound of beef consumed is equivalent to about 640,000 prompts.
AI is an environmental concern but the way people act about it is straight up ridiculous.
Edit: I am very proud of all of the vegans who unplug their appliances who are downvoting me. I, too, am a vegan who unplugs their appliances.
I don’t have a golf course or a membership so
thanks for that irrelevant factoid
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
Just in defence of your point:
I prefer to self host, and am in the process of setting up my entire system to run off solar now (tiny 2x250 watt solar array, 3 deep cycle 100Ah marine batteries and sundry equipment).
End to end, my AI rig - a BC-250 (a cut down PS5, basically, though I’m thinking of down sizing) consumes 50w standby / 200w on inference and can run Qwen 3.6-27b (Ternary Bonsai specifically, about par with Sonnet 4.6 on the AAII) at good speeds (~30 tok/s)
With a smart power plug and Raspberry pi (uses about 5w) as the pilot fish, I can run my entire system “off grid”, to say nothing of the excess solar that accumulates (several days battery back up to run home router, pi server, hard drive array and 2-3hrs daily of inference).
For $1500 AUD, “Poor man’s Sonnet 4.6 at home” ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
Outside of folks such as myself, this blog post may be of interest -
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for
I don’t know about a “revolt”, but it sure is disappointing.
I like the guy, and most of what he does. I also like, contrary to some, that he usually keep quiet on some controversial topics. Well, I liked that; it seems that he wasn’t just “staying quiet”, unfortunately.
And, the worst part is just that he, as we know him (remember, parasocial stuff and so on), should have been on the side of people that “know better”. I don’t understand how you can be that curious of a person, and not seeing the issues here. I understand trying the tools, to see what it’s about and what it can actually do; in a sort of experimentation kind of way. I would even understand (but not condone) regularly using them in some ways, once you find something that you can confidently say “it works well enough”.
This, however, is not it. And maybe I’m putting him on a sort of pedestal when I say he should have known better, but that’s how I feel it. There’s a large list of things LLM are known to not be reliable for: searching anything beyond surface informations, properly summarizing actually complex subjects, picking out what’s pertinent and what isn’t, being consistent, not having blind side, and being truthful (assuming we can decide what truthful means in the first place). All of this is intrinsic to the technology at hand. And while some people argument that “humans are imperfect too”, the difference is that humans can spot their mistakes.
And yet, here we are; one of the most prominent science communicator, heavily leaning on this to start his researches, undoubtedly being led astray on some topics by hallucination, missing some big issues on others because the models simply didn’t get something out this time (for whatever reasons), getting very heavy confirmation bias (because of course at some point you ask a prompt that’s oriented, and the LLM will oblige). And recently, a few things he kept saying, like, we’re needing more code… sounded silly. In fact, most of the time I hear something in a field I’m reasonably knowledgeable about, I find things that I don’t really agree with.
That’s the part that worries me about this. Not that he used large, corporate LLMs “responsibly” (assuming that’s a thing one can do, which I’m not convinced of). But that he muddled the image of a reliable source (and we have to decide, at some point, that this or that source is reliable or not) with lots of approximations wrapped in a pretty ribbon. And now, the little things I was slightly weirded out in his videos are taking way more space in my mind, and I’m starting to doubt topics I’m absolutely not knowledgeable about that he’s talked about, too, because that’s just how trust works.
At the end of the day, reliable people come and goes, but the “disclosure” sure sounded like he didn’t actually grasp the issues, only barely that there might have been issues.
A lot of weird things in this comment, like implying that it is OK to use llms to search for surface information. That is just as biased as searching for more complicated info, and the tone of the llm response white-washes it all away.
I don’t know where you think I implied it was ok for surface search, but it’s the exact opposite of what I wanted to say.
There’s a large list of things LLM are known to not be reliable for: searching anything beyond surface informations
This implies that it is reliable for “surface informations” which i disagree with, though a lot of people get sucked in that way
If you ask any big LLM a mundane question, it’s likely to get it right. And as you put it, it’s one of the way people get sucked in. But it does work, very inefficiently, for that purpose. Saying it does not is lying to yourself.
I disagree. A big LLM might get a mundane question right, but it might not. To call it reliable is laughable.
What it is is confident, and if you don’t know the answer yourself, it will seem plausible.
christ this comment section is unhinged