Very useful post Laurie - thanks. I find they are useful at traditional NLP tasks too - entity recognition, sentiment analysis etc. I suppose it’s a type of “turn text into less text” use case..

Enshittification in action..

It’s also been an engine for significant growth and productivity (and significant downsides). I think AI (or LLMs to be precise) are powerful general purpose technologies which already have boring and beneficial uses. I understand your point of view but have a different opinion 🤷🏾‍♂️.

We are still in the Model T era of LLMs. They will improve and by a lot. It is a fair assessment to say that moaning about today’s energy consumption is not indicative of where things will be even a year from now. In any case, thanks for the discussion!

But you are comparing a Model T to a pick up truck.. I agree that the energy use of AI needs to be discussed and the hype around these models is ridiculous. But I am also frustrated at the reflexive dismissal of capabilities of LLMs - which, today, are going to be the worse they will ever be!

This post is like taking the MPG of a car from 1925 and assuming that it will be the same for all cars in all perpetuity. The inference costs for using LLMs are declining very fast. Even the training costs (see DeepSeek ) are going down. A conversation needs to be had about AI, but this is FUD.

It just requires an LLM or an offshore dev making 50k armed with GitHub copilot. I think this debate is a sham and a smokescreen to distract from the coming apocalypse of knowledge work jobs globally. Elon has spent and is raising billions building xAI. Immigration is a convenient distraction.

Love the lines of the fence, the road and the river. Beautiful.

Yeah - it’s basically cable tv at this point 🤷🏾‍♂️

Sports. I pay for YouTube TV so I can watch sports that I am interested in and are not available on other streaming services.

Last week, with encouragement from a friend, I set out to a lake near Vadodara with my dad’s kit. My preference probably will remain people and places but I enjoyed myself. There is something about standing around with a huge and heavy zoom lens waiting for the light and the birds to be just so..

I think it just pushed into to spiral of existential despair. Why ChatGPT, why?!!