"Contrasting this modest effort [of Seymour Cray in his laboratory
to build the CDC 6600] with 34 people including the janitor with
our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have
lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer
the world's most powerful computer.
-- Thomas J. Watson, IBM President, 1965"
"It seems Mr. Watson has answered his own question. -- Seymour Cray"
On an induvidual level people are beating them by creating vapourware Ai startups and selling them to the big tech companies for stupid valuations, before proceeding to the roof for a bit of rest and vest.
At what impact to the environment? SV’s obsession with bitcoin has been an ecological disaster. Fueling this arms race is insane. Monopolizing green power for AI crap that hallucinates, gives mediocre and incorrect answers, is like getting life advice from a drunk bar patron.
Training Llama 3 models emitted 2290 tons CO2e (https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/MODEL_CARD.md), and took 7.7 million GPU hours. Those GPU hours are for H100s, which consume 700W. So the conversion is approximately 2290 / (7.7e6 * 3600 * 700 / 1e9) ~= 0.12 tons CO2e per GPU-gigajoule.
So Huggingface's offering will emit ~781 tons CO2e. Less if they've inflated the value of the compute they provide, which they have an incentive to do, but let's round to 800 tons.
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According to https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html, one Boeing-737-400 flying for 926km emits (3.61 tons fuel/flight * 3.15(g CO2e / g fuel)) = 11.37 tons CO2e .
So $10million in compute is like ~72 Boeing-737-400 international flights.
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Every day the FAA (so only in the USA) handles, on average, 45,000 flights (https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers). If only 1% of these are international (very rough calculation), the total amount of compute released by this Huggingface announcement is like 16% of one day's USA international flights.
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This may sound like very little or like a lot to you.
When you were growing up, did you ever see people from previous generations just not "get it" when new technology comes out and make comments like "its worthless, just a novelty"? Did you ever expect to become one of those people?
Frankly "Youre just making an ad hominem" is itself an ad hominem attack & "Youre just being unconstructive" is also an ad hominem attack.
So you've established they're useful in a rhetorical argument and we've established they're applicable to this thread. If you're allowed to use them, the other commenter is allowed to use them.
