this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
1105 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
16 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)

Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these "hallucinations" are an "inherent feature" of  AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature "is still an unsolved problem."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, for me, young me had no fucking clue how bad tech could be for the world just physically. The massive power draw, the massive water consumption, I'm sure there are nestle level employee and child abuse situations to boot.

Noone ever talked about the cost of fucking anything. Just blinders all the way until it crashes and we tally the victims and how much money was lost or it cost to fix it.

The one thing the Crypto bros did was show everyone how absurd this all really could be, and all for less than nothing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I agree.

It's very cool to have a personal computer that can play music, display pictures, play videos, render scenes in POV-Ray, so on. But I don't think I need a new one every year, I don't think I'd need anything as performant as what I have (not considering network effects), and I'd be happy to use a year 2003 (or even 1993, with dedicated chips Amiga-style one can make it usable for playing video and music too) performance PC with modern power efficiency.

I don't think there's any need to press for building machines able of doing even more of mostly useless work.

And about hidden costs of that power efficiency too - making modern chips is so complex that the production is more centralized than that of intercontinental ballistic missiles. That means rot in the society that only shows itself when it's too late, like with any overcentralization.

So maybe power efficiency doesn't have to be quite modern, ha-ha.

Overcentralization applies to other things in that industry too, I think I just wanted to add it to your list of hidden costs.