Monsters and ‘Merica, LLMs and Luddites, with Ichiro Lambe

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 164.

Ichiro Lambe has been making games since the days of MUDs and Palm Pilots, and here he talks to Drew about what’s new—from the possibilities of so-called AI (as exciting as they are fraught) to his strategic deck-builder of ramshackle autobattles, Million Monster Militia.

You can wishlist Million Monster Militia, along with Monster Loves You Too! and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, on Steam.
You can find Ichiro on Twitter, and see his work on his website and Dejobaan’s.
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• It’s real, real hard to find reliable numbers on power consumption in LLMs other other “AI.” Most existing research focuses on BLOOM, simply because its operations are so much less opaque than what’s going on at OpenAI or Google. Mél Hogan, whose past work has focused on the environmental impact of data centers more generally, recently discussed the specifics of “AI” energy consumption with Sasha Luccioni, one of the authors of the paper linked above. (We should note, as they both do, that we’re not just talking about energy here, but also water, “AI” being a driving factor behind the escalating demand for industrial-scale liquid cooling).

• As Ichiro points out, these issues are specific to enormous, corporate run “AIs” such as GPT-4, Bard, DALL·E 2, and Midjourney—as distinct from models you can run on your own (beefy) PC.

• Drew once again mentions Emily Short’s Five Strategies for Collaborating with a Machine and Lily Alexandre’s video essay on “post-human” content.

• And here’s Ichiro’s Totally Human Rapper.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
Some music from the Million Monster Militia OST by Job Bellini.

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