1514
nah it's natural
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
1514 points (100.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
8968 readers
789 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Sam Altman (OpenAI) is a Millennial. So is Zuckerberg. LLMs are one of the big energy sinks right now, reaching 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026 and the current rate of use is doubling every year. For comparison, total global commercial (excluding industrial and transportation, so, office buildings - lights, AC, computers) energy use is 50,000 TWh.
It's still being ignored. Boomers are out of the work force (if not politics), and Gen X is just starting to retire. Between Millenials and Gen Z, they hold 32% of the voting power in the US, the same as Boomers. And Gen Z is only just entering voting age, at 8%.
Half the voting population is under 50 and global temperatures keep increasing. There's every indication sticking your head in the sand is a cross-generational behavior.
Altman isn't sticking his head in the sand, he's delusional and selfish. He doesn't care what happens to the rest of the world after AGI.
He's also delusional if he thinks AGI is coming if you just keep pumping up LLMs.
We didn't invent the automobile by breeding faster, and faster, horses.
He's not delusional, he's lying. He saw a chance to be the first trillionaire and grabbed at it
...and in the past we were fighting and losing to similar billionaire corporatist figures.
Gen Z is 1997-2010
How are they just entering voting age?
well, those who are born in 2010 can't vote, and those born in 1997 can vote. Some of them are too young to vote and some are not. So they're entering voting age.
Well the last couple of years still can't vote, so I imagine that's what they meant
Perhaps "just entering" was an overstatement.
Wikipedia has the Gen-Z range from 1997-2012, so they're 13-28. This year, about 68% are eligible to vote; something over 50% were eligible to vote in the last presidential election, and one statistic I saw claimed they made up only about 8% of the total vote. They are, however, the biggest generation in history, ever. Given that the birth rates in the US stopped climbing and started falling in 2007, it's conceivable that they may be the biggest generation ever, forever.
In any case, statistically, young people vote at far lower rates than older; 18-29 (GenZ, at the moment) vote around 50%. At around 30 it's 60%, and by 65 it's over 70%.
So, given that some 65% of Gen Z are eligible to vote, and statistically about half of them will at this age bracket, that's only about 35% of Gen Z voting. That number will grow over three next decade and become the dominant number, but right now it's fairly small... hence "just entering voting age."
You're right, my wording wasn't accurate; the meaning was.
Ancillarily, births in the US peaked at 4.3M births in 2007 and have been declining since; they haven't hit 4M again since, and are down to 3.6M in 2025, below 1994 (3.9M) levels.
Who do you suggest we vote for in order to adequately address this problem? Like fascism, I don’t see a way to vote ourselves out of this predicament.
We’ll have to remove power from capital owners (like Zuck and Altman) directly, in order to save ourselves.
I agree! I don't think we can vote out way out, not in one fell swoop.
We need to vote locally, and support voting reform efforts. If we can normalize IRV at the local level, so that people lose their fear of the unknown, we have a chance to get it into congressional elections, and that's where real change will happen. Eventually, ideally, we get rid of the electoral college and use IRV in presidential elections, and then we might see a surprise third party win. We can do most of this without constitutional changes.
But, can we survive as a country long enough to get there? It's a long road, and I don't know.
Edit: see reply. With correct numbers now I'm mad too. ~~By your own numbers that’s a tiny fraction of the world’s energy use. It seems strange to put such a disproportionate focus on such a small fraction. Where is this rage for the transportation sector?~~
Shh, we don't want to talk about that, car is comfy
On a more serious level, the type of AI that all the energy is being used for, generative AI, is not particularly necessary. Transportation often is. There are types of AI that are ridiculously useful, like the one that does protein folding, or a lot of machine learning algos that classify things for X or Y business reason... But LLMs and image generation are a fucking novelty.
My numbers were mixed in the previous post; I was mixing total global and total annual use. I'm sorry about that; the numbers looked off but I didn't catch the time scale difference.
AI companies are projected to use 1kTWh in 2025. Transportation is projected to use 1.2TWh, industry, 1.1TWh. Bitcoin, everyone's favorite whipping-boy, is estimated to use only 173TWh globally, a mere 17% of AI. Residential is only 800TWh, 4.5x Bitcoin, but 80% of AI. Commercial is less, at 600TWh.
These all come from different sources: homeinst.org and Deloitte are the main ones, but the Bitcoin stat comes from Cambridge and the EIA (eia.gov), and the AI industry number comes from an MIT and backed by a different Deloitte report.
The industrial sector is the largest energy user, but AI is a close third just below transportation.
I was surprised that cryptocurrency energy use was so relatively small, given the hysteria. Bitcoin alone is 173TWh, far smaller than all of the sectors, and a fraction of AI; but even adding all of the other cryptocurrencies, the estimated consumption rises only to 215TWh. That pushes it past the smallest user, the agriculture sector sitting at 200TWh, but still well below everything else.
AI is the third largest energy consumer, annually, globally.
Transportation is moving in the right direction atm, even if it is slow. AI is going the wrong direction.
I think they're intent wasn't to take away from any other issues we have but to say that we have another burgeoning issue which if it continued to grow at scale could be as damaging as our other major contributors.
Now we have the the education and first-hand experience to understand the impact and scope of the issue and despite this have still showed no reluctance.