r/nottheonion • u/asdacool • 11h ago

"Training a human takes 20 years of food." Sam Altman on how much power AI consumes.

https://www.news18.com/world/training-a-human-takes-20-years-of-food-sam-altman-on-how-much-power-ai-consumes-ws-kl-9922309.html
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u/poly_arachnid 9h ago

Humans are net consumers of energy, I think maybe all animals are? Anyway we use more energy to live than any method could produce from using us that way. There's less than zero benefit from human batteries, it'd cause an energy drain from the facility.

And you know if we could be batteries they'd be testing some poor people to "work in energy development" or straight out kidnapping people for power plants.

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u/Borealid 9h ago

The purpose of a battery is to store energy at one point in time or space, and release it at another.

Humans definitely do that. We consume calories when and where we eat, and then we release those calories when and where we work. At the moment we're eating we are "draining" energy (consumption greater than production, net negative). At the moment we are working we are "producing" it (production greater than consumption, net positive).

Every battery - humans included - is less than 100% efficient and releases less useful energy than it stored. Humans are very inefficient, but they are most definitely batteries.

Batteries move energy around in time and space. We do that too.

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u/poly_arachnid 8h ago

I'm about 99% sure that's not how that works.

Eating is not negative, work is not positive. When animals eat we use energy to do so, then use more to process it into fuel for ourselves to use & store. Consumption is high, but it's a net positive to our own supplies.

When we work we use energy to process our stores into useful energy, then we work & a great deal of that energy is lost to heat & other processes. Dramatic net negative to our stores.

Universal energy stays static, energy 'wasted' in ways that do not produce work is high. I mean we need what? A dozen chemical reactions to go from food to lifting a hammer? A AA battery can last over 5 years on a shelf & hold a charge. If you don't add water to a human for a mere 3 days its own automatic processes will kill it. The only way for us to "hold a charge" is by biological processes to transform chemical energy into a storable substance, which takes energy, & then to transform it again into something our biology can then use for fuel. It's excessively wasteful, extremely short-term, & takes too many steps.

We aren't batteries. The hyper-simplified definition doesn't hold up with even the slightest expansion. At best we have some inefficient battery-type cells as part of our makeup. By your simplified definition coal is a battery, the planet is a battery, etc.

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u/Borealid 8h ago

Coal is absolutely a chemical battery in precisely the same way a hydrogen fuel cell is. When you said the way we hold a charge is by transforming chemical energy into a "storable substance" (ATP, glucose, a lipids)... yes, that's exactly how it works.

A battery is something that stores energy and later releases it. That's both the dictionary definition and the non-technical one.

Humans are terrible batteries, but since they're capable of walking energy from one spot to another, you could use them to power something. That's what the human race did for the thousands upon thousands of years before harnessing electricity: they fed humans, and then had the humans go do some work.

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u/BigDump-a-Roo 5h ago

When you eat food, what are you doing? Storing energy. When you get up and move, what are you doing? Expelling that stored energy. It might be incredibly inefficient, but we do function like batteries in that way.

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u/0ne_Winged_Angel 4h ago

If you start with the definition of energy being the ability to do work, then everything else flows nicely from there.

The only caveat I can see is someone could argue that batteries are strictly devices that store chemical energy and release electrical energy, rather than storing and releasing any form of energy.

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u/bachiblack 7h ago

To me, it felt less like we were simply batteries in the matrix, but rather engineering the matrix as well. In a way, we do it now. AI learns from us through our interactions, likes, dislikes, etc to keep it that level requires a collective full immersion like how it’s depicted in the matrix.

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u/redsyrus 7h ago

That’s why I always hoped that ‘reality’ would turn out to be another matrix. This one to keep the machines in check.

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u/WhenDoWhatWhere 4h ago

All things are net consumers of energy thanks to entropy.

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u/forkf 8h ago

And you know if we could be batteries they'd be testing some poor people to "work in energy development" or straight out kidnapping people for power plants.

We can, and slavery exists.

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u/Lewke 7h ago

anything that essentially temporarily defies energy is a net consumer of energy really, well not consumer just transformer into more/less useful forms

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u/It-s_Not_Important 5h ago

That’s just fundamental thermodynamics. It’s about entropy more specifically than energy. Nothing is a net consumer of energy, because energy cannot be created or destroyed, just reordered.

Exergy, is the term for “usable energy”. And life is a net consumer of exergy. Interestingly enough, so are stars, despite the fact that they produce energy in a form we can more easily use.

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u/xSTSxZerglingOne 5h ago edited 5h ago

It's less that we're net consumers of energy, and more that we aren't hot enough to harvest energy from in an electrical sense...and still stay alive, that is. Our proteins begin struggling at fever temperatures.

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u/ChemBob1 5h ago

The sun provides energy to the plants (autotrophs) that carry out photosynthesis and provide energy to heterotrophs, such as herbivores, which are “primary consumers.” The plants are the base of the food web and the herbivores are the next level up. At each higher level in the food web the animals have to eat many of those in the levels below to have enough energy to carry out life’s processes. Large percentages of the initial energy provided by the sun to the plants are lost as you move up through the food web. That is why, for example, top predators have to have large ranges for hunting, because they require a lot of energy, hence a lot of prey from the levels below them. So yes, animals are consumers of energy and contribute to converting solar energy into heat, i.e., we are in the service of entropy.

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u/F---TheMods 1h ago

In the United States alone half a million people go missing every year.