LLMs: Infinite hype on a finite planet

4min. . 📁 Large Language Models Nature

Instead of memento mori, how about memento finio tellus?

view of sunset from a ship looking out over an ocean

Can life on Mars be so much better than this? If humanity were to be forced to leave Earth because we made it unlivable then its nature and animals would surely be missed.

As humans we age so slowly that we might forget that our lifespans remain finite. Likewise we might also forget that our planet itself is finite. How can our finite planet support the development and usage of large language models (LLMs)?

The Earth Overshoot Day is a day that marks the point in the year when we’ve used more resources than our planet generates each year. For the remainder of the year our resource usage will be eating up more of our planet’s resources than it can support. This means less food, water, and similar resources for future generations of both flora and fauna.

From an economic perspective this is all well and dandy. If we ascribe a low or nonexistent economic value to our forests, mountains and oceans it follows that exploiting such places in the name of progress and profit is essentially free money.

It’s no wonder climate conscious people are angry.

I’m angry.

Perversely many people argue that the USA’s soaring GDP (Gross National Product) must mean that the USA is a paragon of modern society. But what does GDP even measure about life on Earth? As the nobel price winner in economics Paul Krugman noted in a recent interview, when the EU “lags behind” the USA in GDP it’s because EU countries grant more vacation days, more sick days and more days for parents to be with their newborns.

In other words maybe the GDP is an imperfect measure of how “great” a country is? Nevertheless the GDP remain the faulty weather vane by which our politicians steer our lives employing any measure or tool to boost the numbers until it’s time for the next election.

It’s within this flawed world view we find people peddling this newfangled cure-all called large language models.

I’m not a fan.

As long as there is an ongoing climate crisis I’ll be strongly against the development and usage of LLMs. Yes you might shoehorn LLMs into areas where they might excel such as medicine research, transcribing and language translations. But it still doesn’t solve how the development and usage of LLMs require vast amounts of water, energy, land area, precious metals, stolen intellectual property and underpaid labour for training set classification.

Maybe you’ve built something cool using an LLM.

Sorry but I remain unimpressed.

Tell me how developing and using LLMs with their required data center build-out and aforementioned harms justify wrecking our Earth for all coming generations. In this economic paradigm where our nature is judged to be worthless it’s equally absurd that LLMs are to be judged as of incredible promise and value.

With fascism and authoritarianism on the rise in the world and leaders of Big Tech companies so eager to support it, it can be tempting to keep your mouth shut and just accept a fat pay check all the while using LLM-based technology by Big Tech. Please don’t.

Inform yourself. Organize. Resist.

Further reading #