The elements that are 1/3 the height of a brick is a plate if it has studs, and a tile if it does not.
Lego did not have Star Wars sets until 1998. The original Lego Millenium Falcon set 4504 would have retailed for right around $100. Which was high, but just as high as the bigger Castle sets at the time.
They definitely had lunar/space themed sets in the '80s, but they were generic (at least the ones I had). I don't recall when the Star Wars sets came out, they might have been one of the first cross-promotional tie-ins that Lego did?
Star Wars sets started coming out in 1998. They weren't the first licensed sets, but the first fictional license.
Prior to Star Wars, they had Shell, Exxon, and Esso branded sets. I think sometimes they licensed the Ferrari brand as well.
And yes, Lego has had a Space theme since the late 70s. But it was a general "Space" theme. They would later make Space Police, Blacktron, Magnetron, etc.
But actual Star Wars was 1998. I have some of those sets. It was a big deal to get an actual lightsaber hilt and blade.
Very interesting. Googling shows some generic space themed things from the 80s like you say, but no Star Wars. I guess my old age is finally catching up on me and my memories have all blurred into one. I did find a Millennium Falcon from 1983, but it's definitely not Lego.
It’s basically a royalty model. That’s common in some industries and with some products. I haven’t looked lately but both Unity and Unreal Engine had royalty models; game devs would pay either a fixed per-unit fee or a percentage of revenue after a certain volume of sales.
To be viable as a business plan, this requires that a certain percentage of your customers have viable products.
Here’s the thing though: anyone who has a high volume of sales will want to shed the royalty. This could be by negotiating different terms or just rewriting to avoid the component or service that wants the royalty.
For Unity and Unreal, it’s pretty common knowledge that AAA studios have separately negotiated licenses, presumably to reduce or eliminate the per-unit royalty. Some studios write their own engine, though that has its own costs.
For vibe coding I have real doubts about this model. There’s effectively no moat and no defensive IP (ie: patents), so anyone making enough revenue to pay $$$ on royalties will probably end hiring SWEs to rewrite their software to avoid royalties.
The difference is obvious: it doesn't cost Epic anything if you download their engine flail around for 5 years and release a buggy bomb. 5 years of tokens would cost a lot.
Any large company puts all their records in an accounting system so they can figure this out. It make take some time to run the right query, but they have the records. Of course this assumes they put the full breakdown in the system, if it is just the total cost of goods including shipping as a single line item they can't do this - but commonly they will have the break down in some system. (at the very least the shippers/importer will - and they have incentive to run this for you and give you the results - it is fairly cheap and generates goodwill)
Eventually you will have to tell people what the idea is, even if it is at product launch. And then, if execution is as cheap and easy as they claim, then anyone can replicate the idea without having to engage with the person in the first place.
My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"
And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.
Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.
You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
Hannah Ritchie is a quite well reputed writer and data scientist squarely in the climate field. She's written two books on climate and I found the one I read (Not The End of the World) was quite good and data-driven.
I'm not sure I understand where the issue is here - something can use a small amount of energy per use but a large amount in aggregate because of lots of use.
You have set up a false conflict. The data centers are "huge" and they also consume about the same power as 1 airplane. These things are both true.
It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.
> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?
A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.
If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
Useful work is debatable here, a lot of people just talk to the thing or use it instead of searching the internet.
The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.
I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.
They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”
It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small, grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more efficient cloud services.
Edited to answer:
The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector.
LLMs don't use a lot of electricity per user. Why should the fact that the energy usage happens in data centers instead of each user's house be an important moral factor?
Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:
- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution
- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
1. Your prediction is that soon browing the web for a few hours is going use >30,000+ Wh (based on the "equivalent" you mentioned)? (For comparison to that 30,000+ figure, the energy use from using a laptop for a few hours is 75 Wh, all per OP source.)
2. > most of this will be done just to sell more ads
Are you predicting that the value of ads is going to increase by a number of magnitudes? Because 30,000+ Wh of electricity has a quite significant cost, and even a video ad currently only earns pennies, so I'm trying to imagine how the math would work in this scenario?
Most of the noise around him is who is hiring him and who is firing him. I can't think of anything that has been attributed to him in ages.
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