Humans are bad at writing secure code, and GNOME developers are no exception. GNOME is primarily written using unsafe programming languages where simple mistakes in our code lead to devastating consequences for our users, and we make these mistakes all the time. No matter how much we try, GNOME developers will fail write secure code...
I also don’t think you can get the same results as $1 million on pentester salaries with $100 in tokens, but whatever.
You will certainly get an equivalent security analysis for orders of magnitude less than $1m in tokens though.
Anyway, your alternative scenarios for humans (pentest or loaf at home) leave out the obvious: move humans away from activity where computers do it better, and have them do something more productive, like high-level architecture and design. It’s the same logic as switching to power drills and cranes, instead of making artisanal woodworking.
Your focus on the costs without mentioning the benefits, assumes LLMs are useless (given you call them “slop machines”). But since they have workable use cases (and in the case of security, they clearly do), then it becomes like any other tech, where we weigh tradeoffs.
I personally think the environmental harms will be short-term, and mitigated over time in a variety of ways. More efficient models, cheap software rewrites into more efficient langs, increased model efficiency from more software, model-driven research into environmental tech, etc.
(Now, whether humanity would actually build the current amount of stuff more efficiently, or just build more is a separate question. But that’s much older than LLMs, and is more your-underlying-problem-is-actually-capitalism again, which cannot be solved by addressing the symptoms instead of the root cause. But that’s a whole 'nother conversation.)
There is some very strange cognitive dissonance in your comment. On the one hand, you say that efficiency will solve the climate impact of LLMs. On the other hand, you recognize that efficiency won’t solve the climate impact, in the same comment! You handwave the problem with efficiency away by blaming it on capitalism, but who cares why efficiency doesn’t work if you’ve just invalidated your own solution?
For those not familiar, we’re discussing the Jevons Paradox, which says as we make a technology more efficient, we use it more, thereby increasing use of resources. I recently saw a fantastic framing of the Jevons Paradox:
Making use of a resource more profitable increases the return on investment of exploiting that resource.
So increased systems efficiency increases, not decreases, resource use.
Unless your approach is to have a fixed expectation for capability and just optimize for lower and lower resource use to achieve that capability. Which is not how capitalism works, at all.
I agree that this problem is almost impossible to solve under capitalism, capitalism needs to go, but let’s be fair, it’s still a very difficult problem for any alternative economic system. I’d say we should reject any alternative economic system if it doesn’t have some answer for this formulation of the Jevons Paradox; it seems like a good test for whether it can handle existential threats like the climate crisis.
Ahh, the “dissonance” is you’re thinking of the Jevons Paradox as being about increased energy use, when it’s more specifically about the increased usage of goods and services, not necessarily energy.
You’re on the right track, but e.g., if LLM use increased 10x, but we’re able to make them 20x more efficient, the energy use will drop, despite Jevons. Alternatively, Jevons could drive 20x more carbon-neutral solar/wind development making the increased energy use of LLMs (and everything else) a moot point. This is what I think (and hope) will happen, even under capitalism.
It’s unclear to me that the Jevons Paradox would be as much of a problem under other economic systems. To use its original observation about coal: yes, ordinary citizens would continue to want coal and electricity, but much of the usage was by capitalist-driven industry. Companies had to use more coal to ensure they weren’t out-competed by those who did.
A more democratic economic system could weigh the trade-offs, and voters could decide how quickly and how much to adopt a new tech.
You will certainly get an equivalent security analysis for orders of magnitude less than $1m in tokens though.
Anyway, your alternative scenarios for humans (pentest or loaf at home) leave out the obvious: move humans away from activity where computers do it better, and have them do something more productive, like high-level architecture and design. It’s the same logic as switching to power drills and cranes, instead of making artisanal woodworking.
Your focus on the costs without mentioning the benefits, assumes LLMs are useless (given you call them “slop machines”). But since they have workable use cases (and in the case of security, they clearly do), then it becomes like any other tech, where we weigh tradeoffs.
I personally think the environmental harms will be short-term, and mitigated over time in a variety of ways. More efficient models, cheap software rewrites into more efficient langs, increased model efficiency from more software, model-driven research into environmental tech, etc.
(Now, whether humanity would actually build the current amount of stuff more efficiently, or just build more is a separate question. But that’s much older than LLMs, and is more your-underlying-problem-is-actually-capitalism again, which cannot be solved by addressing the symptoms instead of the root cause. But that’s a whole 'nother conversation.)
score 1 · canonical
There is some very strange cognitive dissonance in your comment. On the one hand, you say that efficiency will solve the climate impact of LLMs. On the other hand, you recognize that efficiency won’t solve the climate impact, in the same comment! You handwave the problem with efficiency away by blaming it on capitalism, but who cares why efficiency doesn’t work if you’ve just invalidated your own solution?
For those not familiar, we’re discussing the Jevons Paradox, which says as we make a technology more efficient, we use it more, thereby increasing use of resources. I recently saw a fantastic framing of the Jevons Paradox:
I agree that this problem is almost impossible to solve under capitalism, capitalism needs to go, but let’s be fair, it’s still a very difficult problem for any alternative economic system. I’d say we should reject any alternative economic system if it doesn’t have some answer for this formulation of the Jevons Paradox; it seems like a good test for whether it can handle existential threats like the climate crisis.
score 3 · canonical
Ahh, the “dissonance” is you’re thinking of the Jevons Paradox as being about increased energy use, when it’s more specifically about the increased usage of goods and services, not necessarily energy.
You’re on the right track, but e.g., if LLM use increased 10x, but we’re able to make them 20x more efficient, the energy use will drop, despite Jevons. Alternatively, Jevons could drive 20x more carbon-neutral solar/wind development making the increased energy use of LLMs (and everything else) a moot point. This is what I think (and hope) will happen, even under capitalism.
It’s unclear to me that the Jevons Paradox would be as much of a problem under other economic systems. To use its original observation about coal: yes, ordinary citizens would continue to want coal and electricity, but much of the usage was by capitalist-driven industry. Companies had to use more coal to ensure they weren’t out-competed by those who did.
A more democratic economic system could weigh the trade-offs, and voters could decide how quickly and how much to adopt a new tech.
score 1 · canonical