Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: npub1yhj4u…h3h3t A nice idea that sounds impossible to implement. If I run a Python ...
npub1yhj4ua6580h3w0kucwwrtwl4uv9pg7m2drxzplq5x3364jczp36s4h3h3t (npub1yhj…3h3t) A nice idea that sounds impossible to implement.
If I run a Python script on one of my machines, who is supposed to check if it's a media player for my RPi, or a Bitcoin miner, or if it trains a language model? And how would you check it? And who will adjust the price of consumed energy accordingly?
Also, saying "AI needs to cost more" will have so many bad repercussions. Researchers of all kinds use all kind of AI for protein folding models, text analysis, climate predictions etc., and probably those shouldn't be taxed as much as the guy who uses Dall-E to generate memes.
I think we need to stick to "computing neutrality" just like we stick to network neutrality, because the drawbacks and implementation hurdles far outweigh the benefits.
And maybe, instead of going so granular, a tax on the overall amount of energy consumed by a data center that exceeds the expected baseline would be more effective. It taxes directly the metric that we want to optimize (wasted energy) rather than the specific application, and it puts the burden on data centers (instead of individual developers and researchers).
Bonus: data centers may just offload the costs to customers if they are renting the hardware, or try and minimize them if they're building their models in-house. That would give the right incentives (which are currently missing) to build more efficient algorithms - it'd make PoS much cheaper than PoW without further regulation needed, and it'd drive people to train AI models in more efficient ways.
If I run a Python script on one of my machines, who is supposed to check if it's a media player for my RPi, or a Bitcoin miner, or if it trains a language model? And how would you check it? And who will adjust the price of consumed energy accordingly?
Also, saying "AI needs to cost more" will have so many bad repercussions. Researchers of all kinds use all kind of AI for protein folding models, text analysis, climate predictions etc., and probably those shouldn't be taxed as much as the guy who uses Dall-E to generate memes.
I think we need to stick to "computing neutrality" just like we stick to network neutrality, because the drawbacks and implementation hurdles far outweigh the benefits.
And maybe, instead of going so granular, a tax on the overall amount of energy consumed by a data center that exceeds the expected baseline would be more effective. It taxes directly the metric that we want to optimize (wasted energy) rather than the specific application, and it puts the burden on data centers (instead of individual developers and researchers).
Bonus: data centers may just offload the costs to customers if they are renting the hardware, or try and minimize them if they're building their models in-house. That would give the right incentives (which are currently missing) to build more efficient algorithms - it'd make PoS much cheaper than PoW without further regulation needed, and it'd drive people to train AI models in more efficient ways.