Burning up an Ocean for Vanity
Way back in 2012, in the heartwrenching second season’s finale of Doctor Who (BBC), we witnessed the lengths The Doctor would go to just to say goodbye to his companion, Rose.
In the episode, The Doctor lays waste to a star for a Facetime call that had remarkable 5G reception.
He “burned up a sun,” just to say goodbye.
What a romantic notion — raw elements coallesced into clouds of dust and gas after the Big Bang over eons and eons, into massive energy factories of nuclear fusion, burning brightly for hundreds of millions of years… all put to an end for a fleeting farewell.
Today, I searched for myself on ChatGPT. And while I’m very very impressed that it knew who I was (with startling accuracy) — I can’t help but think about the monumental waste of my vanity search.
While the nominal cost to OpenAI to perform each individual search, and return a response, is somewhere in the neighborhood of ~$0.36, the long-term cost to the environment could be much higher. OpenAI requires over 30,000 GPUs to operate at its current capacity, and that capacity is sure to grow as it continues to ink partnership deals.
Join Us, Won’t You? OpenAI is out hiring up a slew of former Google and Meta employees. This is basically Microsoft snapping up talent.
Get Used To Clichés. With chatbots on the rise for all the content we consume, you can bet you’ll see more useless filler words.
More Sights & Sounds. Party's over people… 720p is for the peasants now that we found out YouTube is testing out a premium 1080p playback option. These rewritten jingles seem accurate. It seems that layoff announcements may have been worse than the actual layoffs once all was said and done.
Robot Layoffs. Alphabet’s experimental Everyday Robot department will shut down after about a year in operation. But who’s going to squeegee tables now?
Oats Can Be Milk. The FDA has decided that we, the general public, are cognizant enough to tell the difference between dairy and non-dairy milk and none of us get the two confused. Thanks for the vote of confidence, pals!
More Palate News. Arby’s is jumping on the subscription train with Arby’s +, the new subscription program they are testing out. Coca-Cola has signed a deal with DALL-E and ChatGPT.
The Armageddon Fund. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints got into some big trouble with the SEC for the funds they received after allegedly deceiving donors into giving to a fund that has not ever been used — possibly because those funds were being set back for the second coming of Christ. Now the Mormon Church will have to pay millions of dollars to the SEC out of the $100 billion they have been saving to party with Jesus.
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