Sorry it took a while to reply, I wanted to respond properly. I also appreciate you taking the time to engage in this.
Unfortunately, the 40 percent figure for cropland used for animal feed isn’t propaganda; it’s consistent across FAO and peer-reviewed studies. The consumption argument you make (that we can’t consume those crops without water) also applies to animals. As you move further up the food chain you’re just multiplying inefficiencies.
When it comes to land use, you are right that some pasture land can’t grow crops. If the demand for meat limited us solely to grazing on those lands, things would be better. The issue is the demand is far greater: we are literally cutting down the Amazon rainforest to make room for grazing. Prime arable land, especially maize and soy, is also being used to feed animals rather than humans.
The price doesn’t reflect efficiency either. Meat is very heavily subsidised in the West and in Asia. It also benefits from massive economies of scale and externalises huge costs like emissions, water pollution, and antibiotic resistance. In any case, here in Europe tofu is already far cheaper than meat. See this: one euro (or dollar?) for 24 g of protein, hard to get more efficient than that: https://www.dm.de/dmbio-tofu-natur-p4067796251999.html
It’s also misleading to compare beef to cereals in isolation. Balanced plant-based diets with legumes, nuts, and vegetables are nutritionally adequate and offer a much richer microbiome diversity when supported with B12. There are reports of people feeling worse on vegan diets but normally that is because they aren’t eating a variety of fruits and vegetables but relying on processed stuff. Meat makes it easy to ‘cheat’ your way to getting all the nutrients you need in the short term. That works great until you have a coronary heart attack in your 50s.
Food systems are responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock accounting for about half of that. Many independent studies support this. Peer reviewed studies such as this one by Oxford, taking into account all the factors you mention above, also suggest vegan food emissions are 30% of those of meat eaters: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37474804
'All the arguments around vegetarianism/veganism always seems like virtue signaling and a cheap attempt at getting moral high ground' - To this I would just say, I was a meat eater for more than 30 years. I also found vegans 'annoying'. But if you really look into it the evidence is overwhelming. That's even before you take into account the fact that most vegans (such as myself) are doing it because of the massive suffering we are inflicting on living, sentient beings.
I find it ironic that we pet animals, or discuss here about AI/superintelligence ethics, when we literally torture animals in slaughterhouses. I doubt anyone here could tour a slaughterhouse and come out a meat eater.
So where is the real propaganda? From vegans? Or from the meat industry who force policymakers to rename 'Oat Milk' to 'Oat Drink'? Who subsidise the meat industry with vast sums? Who do everything in their power to hide the horrors of slaughterhouses from the public (even prosecuting people filming inside these facilities for 'defamation' here in Germany, and winning - even though they are literally just showing what happens inside). The so-called “free-range” or “happy cows” marketing is also propaganda: animals spend a few days outside a year, have their young taken from them, and are then transported long distances to be killed, often in extreme distress.
Anyway, I got a bit carried away. It's good to discuss this stuff. I can recommend the book 'How to Love Animals' by the FT journalist Henry Mance, it was quite an important read for me. On general dietary topics (vegan or not), and eating well on a plant based diet, I can suggest anything by Tim Spector and his recommendation to get 30 types of plants a week in one's diet.
But the spend on AI is globally is still measured in the tens of billions? Tiny in the grand scheme of things. So what 'money' is moving up? Not revenue, and in the case of a bubble bursting, not speculative capital.
I have no problem with the concept of lab grown meat, or 'cruelty free' meat as it's sometimes known. However, unfortunately it isn't yet completely cruelty free as it uses fetal bovine serum (FBS) to kick start the process.
Honestly perhaps you should have tried going fully plant-based. I truly think dairy is the worst of both worlds. It's too easy to lean on cheese which is not nutritionally balanced. Dairy can also inhibit iron intake which might be why you felt tired.
The good thing about a plant based diet is that it forces you to eat a ton of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds etc. I try and follow the Tim Spector recommendation to get 30 different plants and vegetables per week and easily exceed that these days. I never felt better, and my blood vitals are fine.
(yes I take a B12 supplment as all vegans must, but B12 is artificially added to cattle feed anyway as most modern cows don't make enough)
All that said, I also just don't think it's natural to consume breast milk from another animal. There are literally legal limits to how much pus (somatic cell count) can be in each liter/gallon of milk. No thanks.
If we are all apex predators, then why do we have laws? Why can't the strongest person attack someone and take their money? Why can't someone kill a dog and eat it?
Why don't we just poop wherever we want, for that matter?
Because we are more than animals. We can be better. We must be better.
Ironic to use 'live and let live' in that context.
Speed is not a problem for me. I feel they are at the right speed now where I am able to see what it is doing in real time and check it's on the right track.
Honestly if it were any faster I would want a feature to slow it down, as I often intervene if it's going in the wrong direction.
The point is that you're not relegating another sentient being's life to lower than that of your own. You refuse to accept the torture and murder of another species.
In doing so, you dramatically expand your empathy and understanding of what it is to be a living thing, and hence you gain an inner connection to nature and animals that is hard to describe. At least that's my personal experience.
Well, the animal died in an intensely stressful situation that you would probably struggle to even watch, let alone do yourself. I guess all that cortisol and stress is now also part of you.
"You're still fully participating in the daily destruction of nature, animals and living things just about as much as anyone who eats meat" - I mean, that's categorically not true. All else equal the meat eater has a far more destructive daily impact on nature.
I can also pet a dog with a good conscience, because I don’t turn around and eat an animal just like it. I don’t see one as a friend and the other as food just because society dictates that
One of the biggest factors for me personally was going vegetarian, and then vegan. I didn't realize it for 30 years, but it's hard to feel connected to nature, animals, and the environment when you are eating something you didn't kill yourself. Once I made that move, it's a beautiful feeling and a kind of connection to animals and the planet I never knew before. I wasn't even much of a pet person before that.
Sure but the money people are paying right now isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. OpenAI is expecting 13bn in revenue this year. AWS made over 100bn last year. So unless they pay a lot more, or they find customers outside of programmers, designers, etc who are willing to pay for the best quality, I don't see how it grows as fast as it needs to (I'm not saying it won't increase, just not at the rate expected by the data center providers)
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Still - why isn't there a super expensive OpenAI model that uses 1,000 experts and comes up with way better answers? Technically that would be possible to build today. I imagine it just doesn't deliver dramatically better results.
Fair point - although there are already so many customer facing chatbots using LLMs rolled out already. Zendesk, Intercom, Hubspot, Salesforce service cloud all have AI features built into their workflows. I wouldn't say penetration is near the peak but it's also not early stage at this point.
In any case, AI is not capable of fully replacing customer care. It will make it more efficient but the non-deterministic nature of LLMs mean that they need to be supervised for complex cases.
Besides, I still think even the inference demand for customer care or programming will be small in the grand scheme of things. EVERY Google search (and probably every gmail email) is already passed through an LLM - the demand for that alone is immense.
I'm not saying demand won't increase, I just don't see how demand increases so much that it offsets the efficiency gains to such an extent that Oracle etc are planning tens or hundreds of times the need for compute in the next couple of years. Or at least I am skeptical of it to say the least.
Isn't that essentially how the MoE models already work? Besides, if that were infinitely scalable, wouldn't we have a subset of super-smart models already at very high cost?
Besides, this would only apply for very few use cases. For a lot of basic customer care work, programming, quick research, I would say LLMs are already quite good without running it 100X.
Sure but where is the demand going to come from? LLMs are already in every google search, in Whatsapp/Messenger, throughout Google workspace, Notion, Slack, etc. ChatGPT already has a billion users.
Plus penetration is already very high in the areas where they are objectively useful: programming, customer care etc. I just don't see where the 100-1000x demand comes from to offset this. Would be happy to hear other views.