token body energy anxiety
Three things rattling around in my brain this morning. First, Sam Altman is living rent free in my head, comparing the energy use of a transformer to the energy use of a human. From Matteo Wong’s piece on this in The Atlantic:
Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. Altman immediately pushed back. Chatbots do require a lot of power, yes, but have you thought about all of the resources demanded by human beings across our evolutionary history?
“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told a packed pavilion. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.”
He continued: “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.”
Second, Nikunj Kothari’s piece on Token Anxiety, making overly broad statements about life in San Francisco now, but I can sort of relate to this:
Dinner conversations used to start with “what are you building?” That’s over. Now it’s “how many agents do you have running?” People drop the number the way they used to drop their follower count. Quietly competitive. The flex isn’t what you’ve accomplished anymore. It’s what’s working while you’re sitting here not working.
…
Waking up and checking what your agents produced overnight is the first thing now. Before coffee. Before texts. You open your laptop and grade homework you assigned in your sleep. Some of it is good. Most needs rework. But you start shipping a plan before you sleep just so you can wake up to more code written overnight. Saturdays became uninterrupted build windows. No meetings, no Slack, twelve hours of you and your agents. Sunday morning X is all terminal screenshots and shipping receipts. “What’d you ship this weekend?” replaced “what’d you do this weekend?”
Finally, Toby Shorin’s Body Futurism. Terrifying.
“Attention is all you need”—the name of the whitepaper that inagurated the current era of transformer models—is a perfect catchphrase for the transition to a pure attention economy where bodies matter most. AI researchers in San Francisco have all started GLP-1s and weightlifting routines, having convinced each other that physique will be the final competitive edge after AI takes all the white collar jobs. If their conclusion is excessive, the premise is correct. We have already entered an economy of charisma which grants status to various kinds of extreme physicality or virtuosity.
The combination of severely curtailed career mobility and the mainstreaming of gambling have created an economic environment characterized by grift. The biggest winners are naturally those who exude charisma and prowess. Charisma has long been the dominant mode in social media, but athleticism is now rewarded more than ever. Jake and Logan Paul pivoted into boxing; IShowSpeed does exhibition races; philosophy YouTuber Jonathan Bi lectures from exotic locations wearing open linen shirts that reveal how fit he is. Less and less, influencers are talking heads. More and more it is the bodies doing the talking. Only from this perspective can the preoccupation with testosterone levels, jaw angles, and height maximizing be understood.
Send help – in the form of books to read, music to listen to, recipes to make, art to stare at. Thanks in advance.