Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

satireplusplus t1_iznuvy5 wrote

Reply to comment by ReginaldIII in [P] I made a command-line tool that explains your errors using ChatGPT (link in comments) by jsonathan

Generating this takes a couple of seconds and it can probably be done on a single high end GPU (for example, eleuther.ai models run just fine on one GPU). Ever played a video game? You probably "wasted" 1000x as much energy in just one hour.

The real advantage is that this can really speed up your programming and it can program small functions all by itself. It is much better than stackoverflow.

5

ReginaldIII t1_iznvys0 wrote

Okay. But if you didn't do this you would not need to crunch a high end GPU for a couple of seconds. And if many people were doing this as part of their normal development practices then that would be many high end GPUs crunching for a considerable amount of time.

At what scale does the combined environmental impact become concerning?

It is literally a lot more energy consumed than is consumed by interpreting the error yourself, or by Googling and then accessing a doc page or stackoverflow thread. And it is energy that gets consumed every time anyone gets that error, regardless of whether an explanation for it has been generated for someone else already.

> Ever played a video game? You probably wasted 1000x as much energy in just one hour.

In terms of what value you get out of the hardware for the energy you put into it, the game is considerably more efficient than an LLM.

> The real advantage is that this can really speed up your programming and it can program small functions all by itself. It is much better than stackoverflow.

If an otherwise healthy person insists on walking with crutches all day every day. Will they be as strong as someone who just walks?

−6

dasdull t1_izo1b23 wrote

If you run a Google search, Google will also run a LLM on your query.

8

ReginaldIII t1_izo2mww wrote

They also cache heavily. Sustainability is a huge problem in ML and HPC.

In my job I spend a lot of time considering the impact of the compute that we do. It is concerning that the general public dont see how much extra and frivolous compute hours we are burning.

It's one thing to have a short flash of people trying out something new and novel and exciting. It is another to suggest a tool naively built on top of it with the intention of long term use and wide spread adoption.

The question of the environmental impact is legitimate.

3

Log_Dogg t1_iznww2c wrote

"Why would you use a calculator when you can just get the solution using a pen and paper?"

5

ReginaldIII t1_iznxeag wrote

A calculator can be significantly more energy efficient than manual calculations.

Crunching a high end GPU to essentially perform text spinning on a stack trace is not more efficient than directly interpreting the stack trace.

E: See this is a weird comment to downvote because it is literally correct. Some usages of energy provide higher utility than others. Radical idea, I know.

−2