• negativeyoda@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I thought this crazy energy consumption shit would cool off a bit after assholes stopped bitcoin mining.

    Glad AI stepped up so we can generate bad art and prose while buttfucking the planet

    • jarfil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ok, hear me out: crypto, based on “proof of training an AI”

      If it takes so much power, it must be secure, and this way it wouldn’t be “totally wasted”…

      • Luctia@lemmings.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure if you’re serious, but just in case: that wouldn’t work, mining is really just verifying transactions. So if you’re not doing that, you may earn crypto by “mining”, but you can’t spend it because no-one is verifying your transactions.

        • jarfil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          mining is really just verifying transactions

          Not correct.

          Mining is a “proof of work”, in the case of Bitcoin it’s competing to be the first to find a hash that meets certain parameters (difficulty), for a block referencing the previous top one. Whether the new block has transactions in it or not, you get the same reward for being the first one to find and broadcast it.

          Verifying is done by every node in the P2P network, both when deciding whether to relay candidate transactions, and when checking whether a new block’s hash meets the mining requirements.

          The Bitcoin blockchain has plenty of valid blocks with no transactions in them (part of a speculative mining strategy used by some to get the block reward faster than others).

          The whole scheme works the same with any other kind of “proof of work”, as long as the nodes relaying the new block can check whether the work happened or not (there are many ways in which that could be accomplished for AI training, the easiest of them by publishing the new model and having nodes check whether it meets some quality parameters).

          • Luctia@lemmings.world
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            1 year ago

            I mean, yeah. I knew most of that, but I just wanted to keep it short and simple.

            I don’t really understand how it would work with AI training. If your computers are working on training AI instead of finding blocks, I don’t see how you can support transactions. Just sounds like distributed computing with rewards to me, where you might be able to cash out at some central portal or smth, but you can’t send other people that money directly (at least not over a blockchain, but would be possible vis that portal maybe, although, again, that wouldn’t be a blockchain).

            • devils_advocate@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Proof of work need not be useless. E.g. https://primecoin.io/

              The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I’m not sure AI tasks fall into that category.

              The transaction verification is separate to the work.

              • jarfil@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I’m not sure AI tasks fall into that category.

                They actually do. Training an AI involves changing some values in the model in an attempt for it to better fit an optimization function. It takes many tries to find a set of values that perform better, but a single try to confirm it does.

                Both sides require much more computing power than for a single hash, but the difficulty imbalance is still there, and verifiers could change “how much better fit” the next model needs to be, just like they do by changing difficulty requirements right now.

                • devils_advocate@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  True. The next iteration doesn’t need to be optimal, just an improvement in the loss function.

                  Not sure how they would decide when to stop.

            • jarfil@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              training AI instead of finding blocks

              There is no “finding blocks” in Bitcoin, it isn’t Minecraft. Miners work on “finding a better hash”, for whatever block they want to propose. The two actions, creating a block, and working on finding a hash, are separate.

              In a “proof of training an AI” blockchain, there would still be a hash linking one block to the previous one, just the proof for accepting a new block would no longer be looking for another (useless) hash.

    • El Barto@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The planet will be alright. It will be lush green in a few million years when humans no longer exist.

      The current ecosystem, though… yeah. Buttfucked.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Cryptocoins, blockchain, NFTs, AI craze. It’s all the same people who think that the solution to the problems that capitalism has created is technology.

    • mindbleach
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      1 year ago

      With AI, at least, we know bad art can be generated on nothing but tacquitos and rum. Every big-iron exercise in training reduces power use per-boobie. Soon enough it will be trivial for even pocket computers to make up any bullshit you can describe.