https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!diR3!,f_auto,q_auto:...

Are there 250 million AI specialists and the ones hired by Meta still come out on top?

I did not point out exceptions and the chicken example is merely an illustration of one of my points.

And who says we are talking about the west? Plenty of comments in this thread are talking about pandemics, something that is not known to originate from western agriculture.

You know what‘s a caveman take? Thinking that there is any chance to convince a meaningful number of people to reduce meat consumption globally in the required time window (20-50 years) in a way that has any bearing on climate change (as opposed to the many steps being taken that actually work). That‘s a caveman take.

But now some facts:

https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impa...

As you can see, the type of meat matters a lot. Cheese is doing worse than pork in this example (not sure I even believe this without more evidence yet). Non-meat sources of protein don‘t do very well: Tofu is just 2x better than poultry. Compare this to the giant bar for beef.

Better chart, apparently same source:

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/0477/production...

In short, yes, it would be theoretically possible to eliminate about 10% of global emissions if everyone everywhere stopped eating meat and replaced it with a balanced non-meat diet.

But such an outcome is not realistic.

This is my last comment on HN. It is sad what this corner of the internet has become.

- mass unethical treatment (assuming you do not mean the fact that animals are killed) is related to the conditions which are related to price

- health risks can be minimal depending on the amount and type of meat you eat

- the CO2 impact again depends on the meat and conditions. Surely chicken in your backyard can be kept without CO2 impacts with some effort.

- your very existence has a CO2 impact. By your own logic you have two choices …

Scarcity, wow...

- There is no scarcity in the rich world by historical standards.

- There is extreme poverty in large parts of the world, no amount of human intelligence has fixed this and therefore no amount of AI will. It is primarily not a question of intelligence.

- On top of that "ending scarcity" is impossible due to the hedonistic treadmill and the way the human mind works as well as the fact that with or without AI there will still be disease, aging and death.

> the Buddhists call this nirvana, and it's quite difficult to actually achieve.

Not really. The zen buddhists call what I described kensho and it's not very hard to achieve. I specifically said a few seconds. Probably anyone who wholeheartedly meditated for some time has experienced this.

Nirvana, on the other hand, is just the other side of practice-and-enlightenment as a drawn out process. You may call it hard to achieve, others may call it the dharma gate of ease and joy.

You can fix your car just fine - just not the electronics. And those were to a large degree added for safety reasons. It is due to the complexity that they are difficult or impossible to fix.

There are unsettled questions but that definition will hold regardless.

https://udlbook.github.io/udlbook/

That's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition.

In order to be conscious, learning may not be needed, but a perception of the passing of time may be needed which may require some short-term memory. People with severe dementia often can't even remember the start of a sentence they are reading, they can't learn, but they are certainly conscious because they have just enough short-term memory.

And learning is not sufficient either. Consciousness is about being a subject, about having a subjective experience of "being there" and just learning by itself does not create this experience. There is plenty of software that can do some form of real-time learning but it doesn't have a subjective experience.

Nope. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Hitchens's razor.

You know you have consciousness (by the very definition that you can observe it in yourself) and that's evidence. Because other humans are genetically and in every other way identical, you can infer it for them as well. Because mammals are very similar many people (but not everyone) infers it for them as well. There is zero evidence for LLMs and their _very_ construction suggests that they are like a calculator or like Excel or like any other piece of software no matter how smart they may be or how many tasks they can do in the future.

Additionally I am really surprised by how many people here confuse consciousness with intelligence. Have you never paused for a second in your life to "just be". Done any meditation? Or even just existed at least for a few seconds without a train of thought? It is very obvious that language and consciousness are completely unrelated and there is no need for language and I doubt there is even a need for intelligence to be conscious.

Consider this:

In the end an LLM could be executed (slowly) on a CPU that accepts very basic _discrete_ instructions, such as ADD and MOV. We know this for a fact. Those instructions can be executed arbitrarily slowly. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that it should feel like anything to be the CPU to say nothing of how it would subjectively feel to be a MOV instruction. It's ridiculous. It's unscientific. It's like believing that there's a spirit in the tree you see outside, just because - why not? - why wouldn't there be a spirit in the tree?

This is actually not comparable, because the brain has a much more complex structure that is _not_ learned, even at that level. The proteins and their structure are not a result of training. The fixed part for LMMs is rather trivial and is, in fact, not much for than MatMul which is very easy to understand - and we do. The fixed part of the brain, including the structure of all the proteins is enormously complex which is very difficult to understand - and we don't.

You literally enter an IBAN and the transfer will appear in the other account the next day. And if you need the money in the target account immediately (within 10 seconds) you can do it, too, by checking a checkbox for a small fee and that fee will drop to ZERO across the EU in October 2025.

My point was not that AI will necessarily be cheaper to run than $200, but that there is not much profit to be made. Of course the cost of inference will form a lower bound on the price as well.

Can anyone name one single widely-used digital product that does _not_ have to be precisely correct/compatible/identical to The Original and that everyone _does_ pay $200/month for?

Therefore, should prices that users pay get anywhere even close to that number, there will naturally be opportunities for competitors to bring prices down to a reasonable level.