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   Momo (momo@social.linux.pizza)'s status on Monday, 22-Jun-2026 07:24:33 JST Momo

   I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"

   So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.

   Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.

   And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.

   He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.

   I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.

   Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.

   • Embed this notice
     Momo (momo@social.linux.pizza)'s status on Monday, 22-Jun-2026 07:24:51 JST Momo

     in reply to

     • Oli

     @OliverNoble
     Honestly, his dad works for (checks calendar) 28 years in IT now, mostly as sysadmin. And politicians are used to not listen to their specialists if they don't like their explanation. So I guess he has an advantage here. Also, his mum worked as a project manager in IT projects, so he already knows what a business plan is (because I'm not allowed to buy any shit unless I can present a valid usecase and how the benefits outweight the cost of buying it. This household, let me tell you... 😅😭)

   • Embed this notice
     Oli (olivernoble@mastodon.world)'s status on Monday, 22-Jun-2026 07:24:52 JST Oli

     in reply to

     @momo
     I suspect your 9 year old now has a better understanding of #AI than politicians whose stated aim is to "mainline AI into the veins" of the UK
     https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai

     Steve's Place repeated this.