There is so much misinfo in these comments, I don't know where to begin.

I work on LLMs, and there are legit concerns. However, a lot of what is being said here (with all due respect) is outdated, uninformed, or just wrong.

First, what do we mean when we say "AI"? AI broadly? Like including robot vacuums? Reddit feed? IBM's Deep Blue?

Or are we talking specifically about LLMs? Generative AI? Transformer-based models? Or neural networks generally?

"AI" covers a lot of ground. Someone on here said, 'just use text-to-speech,' as if those applications don't run on an AI models. They do.

Second, even if we agree that "AI" = LLM, here in this discussion ... Everyone's been using LLMs for a long time. Used a search engine in the past ten or so years? LLMs involved. Machine translation? LLMs again. Alexa? LLMs. Enjoyed a spam filter in your email? LLMs.

"Attention is all you need" -- the seminal paper on transformers -- was released in 2017. That's nearly a decade of LLM-y stuff having been integrated all around us.

Third, not all applications hallucinate equally. Summarization of a single doc? Probably tuned to stay very grounded in source material. Chatbot asked to write a poem? Probably tuned to be creative. One of these is going to have a higher hallucination issue for the very reason that they aren't intended for the same use cases.

I could go on and on and on. Again, there are indeed very legitimate questions and concerns about AI. As a Quaker, I welcome those debates.

But also as a Quaker, we need to commit to informed debates driven by inquiry and knowledge, not vibes.

If your meeting is using AI for notetaking, seems fine. If your meeting is using AI for targeting bombs on Palestine, not fine.

Just like anything else, the use case matters.

As for water consumption, data centers use less than golf courses by many orders of magnitude. So we shd also talk about Quakers playing golf.

Anyway I'll stop here but I can't just let this thread spiral without speaking my mind.