- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.
Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.
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The forefront of technology overutilizes resources?
Always has been.
The difference is that supercomputers by and large actually help humanity. They do things like help predict severe weather, help us understand mathematical problems, understand physics, develop new drug treatments, etc.
They are also primarily owned and funded by universities, scientific institutions, and public funding.
The modern push for ubiquitous corpo cloud platforms, SaaS, and AI training has resulted in massive pollution and environmental damage. For what? Mostly to generate massive profits for a small number of mega-corps, high level shareholders and ultra wealthy individuals, devalue and layoff workers, collect insane amounts of data to aid in mass surveillance and targeted advertising, and enshitify as much of the modern web as possible.
All AI research should be open source, federated, and accountable to the public. It should also be handled mostly by educational institutions, not for-profit companies. There should be no part of it that is allowed to be closed source or proprietary. No government should honor any copyright claims or cyber law protecting companies’ rights to not have their software hacked, decompiled, and code spread across the web for all to see and use as they see fit.
While I absolutely agree with everything you’ve stated, I’m not taking a moral position here. I’m just positing that the same arguments of concern have been on the table since the establishment of massive computational power regardless of how, or by whom, it was to be utilized.
AI is on another completely different level of energy consumption. Consider that Sam Altman, of OpenAI, is investing on Nuclear power plants to feed directly their next iterations of AI models. That’s a whole ass nuclear reactor to feed one AI model. Because the amount of energy we currently create is several magnitudes not enough for what they want. We are struggling to feed these monsters, it is nothing like how supercomputers tax the grid.
Supercomputers were feared to be untenable resource consumers then, too.
Utilizing nuclear to feed AI may be the responsible and sustainable option, but there’s a lot of FUD surrounding all of these things.
One thing is certain: Humans (and now AI) will continue to advance technology, regardless of consequence.
Would you kindly find a source for that? Supercomputers run discrete analyses or processes then halt. The big problem with these LLMs is that they run as on line services that have to be on all the time to chat with millions of users online. The fact they’re never turned off is the marked difference. As far as I recall, supercomputers have always been about power efficiency and don’t ever recall anyone suggesting to plug one to a nuclear reactor just to run it. Power consumption has never been the most important concern about even exaflops supercomputers.
Another factor is that there aren’t that many supercomputers in the world, a handful of thousand of them. While it takes that same number of servers, which are less energy efficient and run 24/7 all year, to keep an LLM service up and available to the public with 5 nines. That alone overruns even the most power hungry supercomputers in the world.
Would you kindly find a source for that?
I can personally speak from the 80s, so that’s not exactly a golden age of reliable information. There was concern about scale of infinite growth and power requirements in a perpetual 24/7 full-load timeshare by people that were almost certainly not qualified to talk about the subject.
I was never concerned enough to look into it, but I sure remember the FUD: “They are going to grow to the size of countries!” - “They are going to drink our oceans dry!” … Like I said, unqualified people.
Another factor is that there aren’t that many supercomputers in the world, a handful of thousand of them.
They never took off like the concerned feared. We don’t even concern ourselves with their existence.
Edit: grammar
For what is worth, this time around it isn’t unqualified people. There are strong scientifically studied concerns, not that infinite growth of LLMs, but their current numbers are already too power hungry. And what actual plans are currently in the engineering pipes are too much as well, not wild speculation, but actually funded and on the way development.
I am concerned about the energy abuse of LLMs, but it gets worse. AGI is right around the corner, and I fear that law of diminishing return may not apply due to advantages it will bring. We’re in need of new, sustainable energy like nuclear now because it will not stop.
But think about all of the good it’s done. Crappy article mills would be set back months if we turned it off!
Just because that is what you see of AI does not mean that’s all it does. Dunning-kruger goddamn
My kids can also make poop dragon pictures. Has entertained them for hours.
This is what pisses me off so much about the climate crisis. People tell me not to use my car, but then microsoft just randomly blow out 30% more co2 for AI
We need better carbon (and equivalents) accounting, and knowledge of equivalents.
E.g. Turning 60 people vegetarian = having 1 baby.
1 vegetarian baby or?
I think this implies that a vegetarian baby is only 1/60 less polluting than an omnivore baby.
The current metric is equivalent tons of CO2, and I think we actually do have numbers for that on vegetarian vs omnivorous vs heavy meat diets.
A bit harder to quantify for a human life though, certainly. We are able to at least convert methane emissions to a CO2 equivalent
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
Cars collectively emit far more carbon than ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is only going to get more optimized from here.
Ultimately the answer should be in a heavy carbon tax, rather than having a divine ruler try and pick and choose where it’s worth it to spend carbon.
Part of why right wing politics are becoming so popular again is that so many politicians shove the financial responsibility of cutting carbon onto the normal population. My point is that it feels useless to cut my own emission as long as massive corporations can just randomly emitt way more without consequence. Also, microsoft use electricity for more that just chatgpt.
Look up how much pollution is made from the massive shipping boats when they get into international waters and start burning bilge oil.
I have no doubt about that
You know that Microsoft doesn’t just sit there and burn electricity for fun right?
Microsoft data centers are doing what consumers ask them to do. They are burning data at the request of users, no different than your personal PC.
Actually the main difference is that he computers in their data centers are far more energy efficient than your PC.
I am SHOCKED
So then you realize that it’s not Microsoft burning that electricity, but individual consumers?
I’d still blame microsoft for shoving AI down peoples throats. Search something on bing (or google for that matter) and you get an AI response, even if you don’t want it. It’s the choice of these corporations.
You’re really trying yourself in knots to try and blame the big bad corpos and no one else.
Yes they are shoving it in people’s faces, and when the average person uses their default browser with a default search engine and searches on Bing and it uses AI in addition to a search index they are to blame, but every single user who intentionally seeks out ChatGPT or Copilot is also to blame.
It’s a new technology, people are going to use it and burn energy with it and then eventually we will make a more efficient version of it as it matures, similar to everything else, including traditional search.
Dunno about Microsoft and AWS but AFAIK Google has been powering all their data centers with “renewables” for a very long time.
I’m pretty sure many of these data centers have dedicated power sources due to the high consumption, and opt for things like hydroelectric due to cost per watt.
And at least there’s a serious end product delivered, unlike crypto mining which wastes trillions of hashes to make a secure transactional network.
The whole article is blaming t"the cloud" as if it didn’t serve services consumed by users. What do they want? To shut down the internet?
Energy transition is something these companies are working on.
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/climate-solutions/carbon-free-energy
Reaching these goals isn’t easy.
Yeah, cuz consumers really like getting useless ai results mixed in with their searches and shit. I don’t know how I lived before having clippy 2.0 added to fucking everything, including my desktop.
It’s entirely relevant to blame producers for creating and shoving this shit down our throats.
And the new material science discoceries etc should really help. Given that DeepMind used GNoME to find 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials. That’s kinda a big deal. That was November of last year. Haha people have no idea how much this could help us. We fucked up but the light is shining and we need to run fast. I’m pretty sure, short this miraculous pace of discovery and compound returns, we will/would end up in a runaway climate feedback loop. IPCC has been throwing out their best models because they don’t like the implications that it is going faster than expected and the climate sensitivity may be worse than expected.
People think AI is gonna cook us? The sun would like to make a bet.
The only way to beat time is via simulation. We do it all the time. Otherwise you couldn’t drive a car! You maybe “imagine” / “model” the environment / drivers, the physics, etc.
Without intelligence we are doomed because inaction. We had the technology but apathy and dental won, and now it’s a race against entropy/time.
Basically moonshot or die trying
Microsoft pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030. Remains to be seen how much greenwashing that is versus actually doing things.
I, too, pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030.
If I cannot meet the criteria, I’ll just move the deadline. Easy peasy, squeeze the world out of resources lemon squeezy.
That’s mainly just bitcoin at this point. Other top network use proof of stake. Dont throw the baby out with the bath water.
Also, I’d reckon a secure transactional network is a serious end product. But I understand most here don’t share the same freedom of money philosophical views as the cypherpunks.
But it’s not secure. At least not in any way more secure than your password is, or that coin that’s in your jacket pocket. The whole security aspect is just another strawman.
Huh? Why would you think this?! I’d love to explore this line of thought with you.
Crypo is as secure as an online bank. Moreso because there isn’t any employee fraud.
FAR more secure. Not just employee fraud but bank failure, theft, wire fraud, govt seizure, etc. so many ways for fiat in a bank to go poof.
At least here in the Netherlands, there was a lot of commotion because a data centre tried to buy a windmill park meant to power households as their dedicated power source
New data centers should be forced to also build additional new renewable power.
This would be a decent policy, probably+10% max expected capacity or something and contribute back to the grid.
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
This is the same excuse crypto bros make. Though that makes sense because the venn diagram between AI evangelists that blow up like the Hindenburg the moment you levy any critique against AI and its usage is basically a circle with crypto bros who assure us that any day now it will stop being treated like penny stocks and actually be useful “because they just like the tech.”
To be fair, crypto will never stand a chance against fiat as a means for payments because governments ensure that it’s complicated to tax. However, the underlying blockchain technology remains very interesting to me as a means of getting around middlemen companies.
Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
As far as I know there would be, it’s just that nobody is using them that way
Yeah! Accelerating societal collapse!
Such as?
I’ve used it to improve selected paragraphs of my writing, provide code snippets and find an old comic based on a crude description of a friend.
I feel like these interactions were valuable to me and only one (code snippets) could have been easily replaced with existing tools.
What about this?
As a professional editor (video/audio) AI has drastically altered my work in amazing, productive ways.
I’m still a critic of course. For some industries it’s clearly a solution in search of a problem so they can hype investment. A tool being useful doesn’t mean I’m unable to critique it!
I agree it does. But that has nothing to do with how energy intensive it currently is. You can see in my other comment that I am an advocate for it in my own work - it has great uses in some industries.
We have to be critical of the resources it takes and the ways it is deployed. It’s the only way to improve it. Yet AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.
AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.
I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.
Most people just either find it useful for some use cases or just hate it.
You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.
You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.
It seems like you missed the memo on reading comprehension. I literally quoted the exact part I’m criticizing, which clearly isn’t what you claimed.
And being overly emotional and telling people to STFU online? That’s a masterclass in civility right there.
Ohmahgosh you’re so right, I see it now, you telling them they were wrong to criticize AI was in fact the correct take all along. You’ve shown me the way, All Hail AI. ALL HAIL AI.
What a fucking shill.
That’s wrong, I buy drugs online with cryptocurrencies all the time to this day and have done it long before the normies showed up and turned it into a mostly financial scam.
Evading the man and LEOs when the law ain’t right is my god-given right and I’m thankful to be born in the age of onions and crypto.
Crypto bros hate you lol I think you use it the only way it’s actually useful. Drugs and tax evasion/hiding money.
If you could hold your breath long enough to get out of your first world bubble, you would be able to see that bitcoin is massively popular amongst people who need ways to escape their collapsing fiat currencies. It is hilarious how spoiled people who happen to be born in countries where everything is taken care of them are too thick and compationless to even consider that other people have actual problems.
Is that why you use it? Because of your collapsing fiat currency?
I’m lucky enough to be from a country with a relatively stable fiat currency, although it is unclear how much longer that will be the case. In order to protect the value I’ve gained from my work, I do hold some of it in Bitcoin. I also use it to support charitable efforts in less fortunate countries. It is an excellent way to transfer value to exactly who I want to transfer it to without giving massive fees to banks and other companies that facilitate the transfer of funds.
A big thing to remember is that whenever you hold any countries currency, you are basically giving them a blank check to your energy. You are telling them that they can have as much of the value that you have saved that they want. When they print more money, they are taking that value directly from you. It is one thing to pay taxes on income, property, and goods purchased and sold, but on top of that, they have the ability to extract extra value from you just by running their printers. The more you believe that a government represents you and has your best wishes at heart, the more you should be holding their currency.
Good, I hate cryptobros and aibros and artbros and luddites and industrialists and environmentalists, but I love communal living, hate cities, love AI (and AI art), love art (and craft of said art), love nature & the environment and animals, hate vegans, and love science and industry etc.
At this point I have such an ultra-niche hyper-specific take on this (and almost everything) that I feel completely out of touch with most people which seem at first glance to navigate mostly by vibes and emotions of how they feel about a vague aesthetic sense of modernity that day.
Crypto is basically cash for online transactions. Pretty niche, but cool and definitely in demand for some situations.
Just how in the real world you’re shit outta luck if you lose your wallet. Or if you give someone money, but they laugh you in the face you can either cut your losses or try your luck in a fist fight. It’s the same with crypto.
With banks you have a separate authority that can handle all these cases, which is desirable in 99% of all transactions.
Unfortunately it’s volatile af, and the most popular crypto currency (Bitcoin)has untenable transaction costs and transaction limitations (10 transactions per second, globally - what a stupid design decision)
“aI AnD cRyPtO aRe ThE sAmE bRo”
You know that your take that they both must suck in the exact same ways just because tech bros get hyped about them, is literally just as shallow, surface level, and uninformed as most tech bros?
Like yeah man, tech hype cycles suck. But you know what else was once a tech hype cycle? Computers, the internet, smartphones. Sometimes they are legitimate, sometimes not.
AI is solving an entirely new class of problem that computers have been literally unable to solve for their entire existence. Crypto was solving the problem of making a database without a single admin. One of those is a lot more important and foundational than the other.
On top of that, crypto algorithms are fundamentally based on “proof of work”, i.e. literally wasting more energy than other miners in the network is a fundamental part of how their algorithm functions. Meaning that with crypto there is basically no value prop to society and it inherently tries to waste energy, neither is the case for AI.
Plus guess how much energy everyone streaming 4K video would take if we were all doing it on CPUs and unoptimized GPUs?
Orders of magnitude more power than every AI model put together.
But guess what? Instead we invented 4k decoding chips that are optimized to redner 4k signals at the hardware level so that they don’t use much power, and now every $30 fire stick can decode a 4k signal on a 5V usb power supply.
That’s also where we’re at with the first Neural Processing Units only just hitting the market now.
I did not say AI and crypto are the same. I said the advocates are the same.
I mined from 2012 to 2015. Then I wisened up. Currently I use AI almost every day in my work. I was using it in my production tools before anyone knew with an LLM was outside of academic circles. Hell i barely understood what I was using at first. I am squarely in favor of AI tools. The inability of tech bros to handle the slightest critique is incredibly familiar and frustrating. They spike the conversation at every turn and immediately attack people’s intelligence.
Sure, uninformed tech hypebois suck in the same way, but the arguments around crypto and AI, especially around energy usage, are fundamentally not the same.
You keep responding to a thing I didn’t say.
But I will say now that both are very energy intensive/resource draining and the refusal to have a serious conversation about it - as spearheaded by tech bros/AI evangelists like I’ve described - is incredibly frustrating and makes people like me look down on the entire endeavor as a result.
Intellectually I know there are “responsible” developers and tools being made. But the loudest and most funded are not those people. And we need to consider the impact they have. This includes resource usage.
Edit: this just appeared on my feed https://www.ft.com/content/ddaac44b-e245-4c8a-bf68-c773cc8f4e63
Someone posted a shitty article about AI and power usage, someone pointed out that literally every industry uses a ton of power but AI gets clicks, you said AI and Crypto bros are the same.
If you don’t mean to imply that the counter arguments around AI and Crypto in terms of energy use are the same then write better given the context of the conversation.
And posting another shitty article that just talks about power usage going up across literally all types of industry, including just normal data centers and manufacturing plants, and then vaguely talking about chatGPT’s power usage compared to Google search to try and make it sound like those things are connected, is not having a serious discussion about it.
It’s skimming a clickbait headline of a clickbait article and regurgitating the implication in it like it’s a fact.
👍
That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).
Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always
- oversimplifying complex matters
- showing blatant lack of reading comprehension, and distorting/lying what others say
- vomiting certainty on things that they assumed, and re-eating their own vomit
- showing complete inability to take context into account when interpreting what others say
- chain-gunning fallacies
- “I’m not religious, but…”
always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.
Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.
(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)
I know what a whataboutism is haha but yes it’s good to see someone else recognize it for what it is.
You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
Cryptos have drastically reduced their energy consumption through technological improvements.
That’s why nobody complains about crypto energy consumption anymore. It’s just bitcoin.
But these LLMs just need more and more with no end in sight.
Yeah “just” Bitcoin which comprises ~50% of the market cap for all of crypto.
Funny how 99.99% of cryptos shrivel up and die while bitcoin continues to serve people all over the world and is constantly becoming more and more popular. Maybe if you lived with, or even gave a shit about, people in below average wealth countries you would understand why Bitcoin is so useful to them.
Go on benefiting from the people who actually do stuff while simultaneously whining about it. You’ve been using AI for 20 years, you’re just too thick to know about it. There are millions of people in 2nd and 3rd world countries who have had their lives massively improved thanks to bitcoin, you’re just too spoiled and naive and to give a shit about them. Climb down off your soap box and go read something beyond the headline.
I mined crypto for 4 years and have used AI professionally on a daily basis for years but you seem to have a knack for making a lot of assumptions about me so I don’t know why you would stop now.
I am allowed to critique things I use/participate in.
Difference is that AI is absolutely pointless lmao
Guys guys! There’s room for all of us to eat our fair share of natural resources and doom the planet together!
But no, AI bad AI bad AI bad AI bad lalalaa I can’t hear you AI bad /s
Seems like you’re hearing it perfectly, but not listening.
“The world is complicated and scary! I don’t understand it so it must be bad! M-muh planet farting cows evil industry fuck the disabled/sick/queer!” - What luddites actually believe.
Anprims/eco-fashes begone. If the planet was destroyed for the betterment of conditions for the proletariat today and future alike there’d be literally no issue, it’s just some rock lol, AI is far more important. Also brutalism and soviet blocs are the best architectural styles, everything else is bourgeois cringe.
Dumb.
So… Absolutely need to be aware of the impact of what we do in the tech sphere, but there’s a few things in the article that give me pause:
Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
- “Could”. More likely it was closed loop.
- Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
Can you say non sequitur ?
The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn’t go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there’s no power left. To use a simily, there’s plenty of water but the pipes aren’t in place.
This article is well intentioned FUD, but FUD none the less.
“Could”. More likely it was closed loop.
Nope. Here’s how data centres use water.
It boils down to two things - cooling and humidification. Humidification is clearly not a closed loop, so I’ll focus on the cooling:
- cold water runs through tubes, chilling the air inside the data centre
- the water is now hot
- hot water is exposed to outside air, some evaporates, the leftover is colder and reused.
Since some evaporates you’ll need to put more water into the system. And there’s an additional problem: salts don’t evaporate, they concentrate over time, precipitate, and clog your pipes. Since you don’t want this you’ll eventually need to flush it all out. And it also means that you can’t simply use seawater for that, it needs to be freshwater.
Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
Freshwater renews at a limited rate.
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
Mostly to the air, as promoting the evaporation of the water.
Can you say non sequitur ?
More like non sequere than non sequitur. Read the whole paragraph:
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects. This will only get worse as households move away from using fossil fuels and rely more on electricity, putting even more pressure on the National Grid. In Bicester, for instance, plans to build 7,000 new homes were paused because the electricity network didn’t have enough capacity.
The author is highlighting that electrical security is already bad for you Brits, for structural reasons; it’ll probably get worse due to increased household consumption; and with big tech consuming it, it’ll get even worse.
Data center cooling towers can be closed- or open-loop, and even operate in a hybrid mode depending on demand and air temps/humidity. Problem is, the places where open-loop evaporative cooling works best are arid, low-humidity regions where water is a scarce resource to start.
On the other hand, several of the FAANGS are building datacenters right now in my area, where we’re in the watershed of the largest river in the country, it’s regularly humid and rainy, any water used in a given process is either treated and released back into the river, or fairly quickly condenses back out of the atmosphere in the form of rain somewhere a few hundred miles further east (where it will eventually collect back into the same river). The only way that water is “wasted” in this environment has to do with the resources used to treat and distribute it. However, because it’s often hot and humid around here, open loop cooling isn’t as effective, and it’s more common to see closed-loop systems.
Bottom line, though, I think the siting of water-intensive industries in water-poor parts of the country is a governmental failure, first and foremost. States like Arizona in particular have a long history of planning as though they aren’t in a dry desert that has to share its only renewable water resource with two other states, and offering utility incentives to potential employers that treat that resource as if it’s infinite. A government that was focused on the long-term viability of the state as a place to live rather than on short-term wins that politicians can campaign on wouldn’t be making those concessions.
They can be closed-loop as in your region but they usually aren’t - besides the problem that you mentioned, a closed loop increases electricity consumption (as you’ll need a heat pump instead), and electricity consumption is also a concern. Not for the environmental impact (corporations DGAF), but price.
700.000 litres also sounds like much more than 700 m³. The average German citizen consumed 129 litres per day or roughly 47 m³ annually. The water consumption of 15 people is less than most blocks.
Energy consumption might be a real problem, but I don’t see how water consumption is that big of a problem or priority here.
The average German citizen consumed 129 litres per day
That seems like a lot. Where are you getting that number?
A quick search says 3.7L is the recommended intake for men, and 2.7L for women. Forget AI, Germans appear to be the real resource guzzlers!
Here “consume” means far more than just “drank”. If you take a shower at home, you are consuming water. Wash your car? Consume water. Water your garden? Consume water.
Aha! That makes a lot more sense with that framing.
EDIT: In 2019 in Canada the daily residential average was 215L per day. 129L seems like a dream in contrast.
I imagine the number goes up considerably when you account for showering, washing clothes and dishes, and water used while cooking. It would go up even more if you account for the water used to produce the food consumed by the individual.
I would assume that includes stuff like toilets,baths,showers,dishes and hand washing etc as fresh water uses. Either that or Germans are the ultimate hydrohommie.
The EPA states that each American uses an average of 82 gallons or 310.4 litres a day (study from 2015). Source: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts
It’s usually not the water itself but the energy used to “systemize” water from out-of-system sources
Pumping, pressurization, filtering, purifying all take additional energy.
Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.
Water “consumption” is also a pretty easy to abuse term since water isn’t really consumed, it can be recycled endlessly. Whether some particular water use is problematic depends very much on the local demands on the water system, and that can be accounted for quite simply by market means - charge data centers money for their water usage and they’ll naturally move to where there’s plenty of cheap water.
Oil is different because 1 ppm can ruin a whole litre or something in that direction.
Assuming that’s true, most of the oil tends to clump together. 2000L doesn’t just perfectly disperse out across billions of litres of water.
Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.
That just means you have no intuitive sense of how large a litre is. If they’d written it as “2000 quarts” (which is close enough to being the same volume at that level of rounding) would it have painted a clearer picture in your head?
“Could”. More likely it was closed loop. As I understand it this is an estimate, thus the word “could”. This has nothing to do with using closed or open look water cooling. Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
The point they are trying to make is that fresh water is not a limitless resource and increasing usage has various impacts, for example on market prices.
The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn’t go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there’s no power left. To use a simily, there’s plenty of water but the pipes aren’t in place.
The point being made is that resources are allocated to increase network capacity for hyped tech and not for current, more pressing needs.
Is there a reason it needs to be fresh water? Is sea water less effective?
corrosion
Oh makes sense.
A lot of industry does use grey water or untreated water for cooling as it’s substantially cheaper to filter it and add chemicals to it yourself. What’s even cheaper is to have a cooling tower and reuse your water, in the volumes it’s used at industrial scales it’s really expensive to just dump down the drain (which you also get charged for), when I worked as a maintenance engineer I recall saving something like 1m cad minimum a year by changing the fill level in our cooling tower as it would drop to a level where it’d trigger city water backups to top up the levels to avoid running dry, and that was a single processing line.
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Mixing and matching abstract measurements doesn’t work when comparing two things.
it actually is an enlightening comparison when you dig into it. It’s saying that the energy required to power one play of a song is 4e5*365/5e9 of the energy to heat a home for one day. That comes out to about 0.3%, i.e. if you watch a three minute youtube video three times and do absolutely nothing else that day but heat your house (dont use any other electricity, dont eat anything, dont travel anywhere) you increase your energy usage by a total of 1%
4e4 not 4e5, 4e5 is 400,000.
It does not work like that.
The problem with such statements is the energy costs are nowhere near fixed. The amount of energy needed to play a song on my iPod shuffle through a wired headset is wildly different from the power needed to play that same song on my TV through my home theater equipment.
The same is true on the backend. The amount of power Google spends serving up a wildly popular band is way less than what they burn serving up an unknown Indy band’s video. That’s because the popular band’s music will have been pre-optimized by Google to save on bandwidth and computing resources. When something is popular, it’s in their best interests to reduce the computational costs (ie power consumption) associated with serving that content.
I was just using the numbers given in the article, presumably its an average including any sort of caching.
Yeah thats bullshit. Unless you have a hyper efficient heating system and power your internet with a badly tuned 1950s generator, theres no way youre getting 1%.
Yeah thats bullshit. Unless you have a hyper efficient heating system and power your internet with a badly tuned 1950s generator, theres no way youre getting 1%.
I can’t tell if this is serious since most homes don’t need heated every day…
They definitely do for most of the year, though?
Depends on location and personal preferences. Most of the US, which the article appears to be usung for home heating numbers, only needs to heat homes for a few months during the year. Sure, New York and Denver might be over half the year but Florida and southern California don’t need much heating at all.
Oh yeah, in extreme hot temperature AC-year-round no snow countries like the US maybe
Yes, averages are a thing.
Why have an average for something that is seasonal?
Because its a comparison, no one cares how much energy playing a video uses compared to heating your house on may the 5th as opposed to december the 12.
It’s a new blockchain. It’ll fizzle out but we’ll come up with a new buzzword by then.
It won’t fizzle out; it already has legitimate business use cases. (A lot fewer than the marketing bros want you to believe, but real use cases nonetheless.) Blockchain and Augmented Reality never reached this point, so they fizzled. We’ll see a huge AI winter soon just like we did in the dot com bust in 2000.
Arguably that is related - cryptocurrency people needed a new thing to prop up their Nvidia shares, hence the enthusiasm for “AI”.
Ding ding ding
thing is that few if any use cases for blockchain were found and any actual useful things would not require much energy. The high energy crypto itself does nothing useful over more efficient alternatives and I don’t know what you mean by fizzle out but it still uses massive amounts of energy. the language models unfortunately do things that are useful and is much more likely to keep drawing power.
And the really perverted incentive of crypto is that due to the way difficulty is done, in particular with PoW systems, the more adoption there is the more energy intensive it becomes. Scaling actually leads to more inefficiency by design. I mean it’s totally asinine.
oh yeah. in the end you have a system that creates artificial value by requiring the sacrifice of real value. heres one credit for burning a barrel of oil. oh now you have to burn 2 to get a credit, now its 4, now its 8.
And crypto bros somehow think that this means they are buying energy… But you can’t get it back after it’s burned.
yeah. funny thing is there is like gridcoin which is perfectly fine because it uses the energy for useful work but they don’t like it because it does not have the pyramid scheme artifical value increase. Its value by and large stays in line with energy prices (although if you look historically there is this hilarious spike when idiots were grabbing at everything crypto. it pretty much shows the point in time where cypto became a buzzword thing)
AI tools have radically altered all of my video and audio editing over the last three or four years. Audio in particular. The stuff I can not just salvage but actually basically trick you into thinking was recorded in a studio is unbelievable - this audio I used to declare unusable and would suggest reshoots over lol. I can assure you it’s not going anywhere for us in the production world. It’s too awesome and useful. Jobs that took days can take hours even minutes now. It’s kind of wild to me still tbh.
It will certainly die in some industries though as they realize they’re just adding a shiny feature that doesn’t actually improve their product or processes. But for some of us? AI is a standard tool now.
It will not be economically viable once AI companies have to pay for their training data. So far they made some deals with press/media but multimedia is a can of worms that’s waiting to explode in our faces. So far they’re getting away with this because doing things and then asking for permission / forgiveness is a very Sillicon Valley thing to do.
Technology itself seems to be in a plateau. The whole AI computer thing is just moving computation offline because amounts of energy needed are unsustainable and have to be dumped on consumers. We haven’t seen that much progress since ChatGPT took the world by storm.
I’m not saying AI is a fad. It’s revolutionizing medical research for example, and those industries actually own the data they’re training AI on. EU sees this and is currently working on streamlining exchanging this data across member states too.
The ugly truth behind journalist: broke English majors are guzzling resources at planet-eating rates
By age of 21 most journalist have produced 336 metric tons of Co2 and and 20 000 lbs of waste
All that for glorified autocomplete
That is an absurd reduction of reality, blatant illustration of dunning-kruger in relation to LLMs
Or is it? Dun-dun-DUNNN!
LLMs are just predictive text but bigger
But now I know that I can jump off the Golden Gate bridge to cure my depression.
The golden gate bridge is so far away from me. I don’t know what to do to cure depression. :(
I plan on building my own Golden Gate Bridge (to scale) and then jump off!
I mean, that’s also all you or I am.
Speak for yourself, loser. Repeating shit you heard an influencer say on Twitch is cringe.
Explain to me how we’re not or kindly go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself.
I’m calling it now: you’ll end up poor and unhappy
That’s cool, free will doesn’t exist, whats going to happen is going to happen. I’ve accepted that, so I might die poor, but you’re the only one here with a chance of dying truly unhappy.
You know what’s funny? What negative prompts you’d have to give an LLM to get it to respond the way you do.
You were more entertaining when you just repeated dumb lines from your favourite influencers
You are insulting someone simply because they didn’t go along with your strawman? Intelligence is in short supply these days.
the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights
This comparison is bad. Commercial flights don’t use electricity, they use jet fuel, pumping fumes directly into the atmosphere. I don’t see a single complaint about HOW electricity is produced. I just read about how there’s too much solar power in California. A serious disconnect in the logic blaming AI for pollution when we should be blaming the way we produce electricity.
They’re taking about emissions, not energy use. You have a reading comprehension issue. The emissions are from the energy production. It’s logical to say that a, largely pointless, technology using high amounts of electricity cause emissions through the generation of electricity to power the pointless AI tech.
Yeah, seriously. Did the person you were replying to think the energy that’s powering datacenters was all clean?
AI tech isn’t pointless though. It’s not just about trying to replace artists or whatever. It significantly speeds up things like programming. It’s also used by scientists to mine data to find patterns and make predictions. For Pete’s sake I am pretty sure climate modeling relies on AI and other forms of HPC.
Scientists analyze data using statistics. I don’t see how and LLM helps with that. And it barely helps with programming, not to the extent that it is worth the impact.
I wasn’t just talking about LLMs. Lots of modern data analysis techniques rely on machine learning.
Although LLMs are also used by scientists to help with things like programming that not all scientists are necessarily good at or properly trained in.
we should be blaming the way we produce electricity
I’m also referring to emissions, just redirecting focus about HOW electricity is produced. Also, AI is not pointless, that’s a bad claim. You have a comprehension issue.
I didn’t miscomprehend, you just disagree with my reasonable assertion that AI is pointless and sucks. Hope this helps!
I didn’t miscomprehend, you just disagree with my reasonable assertion that AI isn’t pointless and sucks. Hope this helps!
That is not a reasonable assertion at all. AI is being used in more ways than what is being described in your rage-bait media diet. “AI is pointless and it sucks” is a blatantly ignorant statement.
It’s marginal utility is not worth the energy expenditures.
You just don’t know what it is beyond memes.
No reason for this to have been removed
source: your rank asshole
Me: ChatGPT, can you create a system that’s capable of powering your systems in a environmentally sustainable way?
ChatGPT: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
I mean ChatGPT can’t do it but humans can and are… Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
The new ARM powered surface laptops that consume like 30W of power are more capable of running an AI model than my gaming PC from 2 years ago that consumes ~300W of power.
I’m referencing the short story, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
Because they’re all part of a technocult trying to make a digital god.
AI -and cryptocurrencies- use massive amounts of energy and the only value they produce is wealth. We don’t get correct, reliable and efficient results with AI, and we don’t get a really useful currency but a speculatory asset with cryptocurrencies. We are speeding into a climate disaster out of pure greed.
This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it’s competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world, and highly structured coding languages are just the easiest lowest hanging fruit.
Yes we are heading to a climate disaster because of greed, but that has nothing to do with AI.
I don’t want to doxx myself or blow my own horn. The programming I do, and many developers do, is not something ChatGPT or Bing AI or whatever it is called can do.
At best, it is a glorified search engine that can find code snippets and read -but not understand- documentation. Saves you some time but it can’t think and it can’t solve a problem it hasn’t seen before, something programmers often have to do a lot.
Dude, if you’ve never used copilot then shut up and don’t say anything.
Don’t pretend like you write code that doesn’t benefit from AI assisted autocomplete. Literally all code does. Just capitalization and autocompleting variable names with correct grammar is handy, let alone literally any time there’s boiler plate or repetition.
Lmao, the idea that you having an NDA makes you work on super elite code that doesn’t benefit from copilot if hilarious. Ive worked on an apps used by hundreds of millions of people and backend systems powering fortune 10 manufacturers, my roommate is doing his PhD on advanced biological modelling and data analysis, copilot is useful when working on all of them.
Just capitalization and autocompleting variable names with correct grammar is handy
We have had IDEs for decades
Oh do tell us again how you haven’t used copilot without saying the words ‘i haven’t used copilot’. Stackoverflow’s professional developer survey found that 70% of devs are using AI assistants, you think none of them have heard of an IDE or Intellisense before?
But after you’ve written the code, don’t you find that the LLM is great at documentation?
I love all the people telling you you’re wrong, few if any are actually developers themselves.
For those that aren’t: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
what are the competitors to github’s copilot? I tried it for personal and really like it but can’t use it for work due to IP leak risks.
I’m hoping there is a self hosted option for it.
there are lots actually: https://bito.ai/blog/free-github-copilot-alternatives-for-vs-code/
that article is clearly biased towards bito but it’s a decent list none-the-less
here is a better one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
Nothing at all?
I think you are vastly over estimating how many developers are using GitHub Copilot.
That’s bs now and will only become more so with time.
This was posted two days ago: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
We found that most of those using code assistant tools report that these assistants are satisfying and easy to use and a majority (but not all) are on teams where half or more of their coworkers are using them, too. These tools may not always be answering queries accurately or solving contextual or overly specific problems, but for those that are adopting these tools into their workflow, code assistants offer a way to increase the quality of time spent working.
The majority of respondents (76%) let us know they are using or are planning to use AI code assistants. Some roles use these tools more than others amongst professional developers: Academic researchers (87%), AI developers (76%), frontend developers (75%), mobile developers (60%), and data scientists (67%) currently use code assistants the most. Other roles indicated they are using code assistants (or planning to) much less than average: data/business analysts (29%), desktop developers (39%), data engineers (39%), and embedded developers (42%). The nature of these tools lend themselves to work well when trained well; a tool such as GitHub Copilot that is trained on publicly available code most likely will be good at JavaScript for frontend developers and not so good with enterprise and proprietary code scenarios that business analysts and desktop developers face regularly.
But go ahead, speak for the whole goddamn industry, we’re totally not using AI or AI code-assist!!!
Sorry, I’m not seeing how your source is helping your argument.
The line I’m responding to is
“This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it’s competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world.”
While your source says: "The majority of respondents (76%) let us know they are using or are planning to use AI code assistants. "
An un scientific survey (aka not random) which it’s self claims the 75% of people who respond used OR ARE PLANNING ON USING (aka, not use it yet), does not equal virtually every developer.
Also wasn’t stack overflow recently getting bad press for selling content to AI companies? Something that pissed large parts of the developer community? Something that would make developers not happy with AI not take the survey?
Anyway, have a great day, and enjoy your AI assistant.
It’s also a laundering scheme to make free software proprietary.
We get it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
God, I love it when laypeople feel they understand the entire field they have never studied and are oh-so-confident to preach to others who also know nothing about the subject.
This is horrible article. The only number given related to LLM is 700,000 liters of water used, which is honestly minuscule in impact on environment. And then there are speculations of “what if water used in aria where there is no water”. It is on the level of “if cats had wings, why don’t they fly”.
Everything we do in modern would consumes energy. Air conditioners, public transport, watching TV, getting food, making elections… exactly the same article (without numbers and with lots of hand waving) could have written. “What if we start having elections in Sahara? Think about all the scorpions we disturb!”
It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned
I have an overall good opinion of the guardian as a news source, but almost every time I see an opinion piece on their site, it’s utter dogshit. It’s as if they go out of their way to find the absolute worst articles.
But they do get shared a lot, which I guess is what they were going for?
They are really left leaning, not balanced, and it shows in their opinions, but also in news selection. Since fediverse is also left or even significantly left leaning, it gets shared a lot here.
Yeah is sounds like some anti-AI person looked for a reason to be mad
Yeah was gonna say this, seems like someone stopped a couple of steps away from discovering that basically the entire modern world is built on top of unsustainable consumption.
deleted by creator
More likely someone who knows how to properly use ChatGPT took their previous job
Straight up misleading. Mentioning AI in the headline and then sneakily switching to “the cloud” (i.e. most of the internet) when discussing figures. They say it uses a similar amount to commercial flights? Fine. Ground the flights, I’d rather have the internet a million times over.
This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.
Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.
If I get you right, you talk of carbon offsets. And investigation after investigation finds that the field is permeated with shady practices that end up with much less emissions actually offset.
So we absolutely should pay special attention to industries that are hogging a lot of energy. Xboxes and especially vibrators spend way less energy than data centers - though again, moving gaming on PCs and developing better dumb gaming terminals to use this computing power while playing with controllers in a living room is an absolute win for the environment.
So we absolutely should pay special attention to industries that are hogging a lot of energy. Xboxes and especially vibrators spend way less energy than data centers - though again, moving gaming on PCs and developing better dumb gaming terminals to use this computing power while playing with controllers in a living room is an absolute win for the environment.
Bruh, this is flat out a lie.
No, xboxes do not use less power when they are in your house then when they are in a data center. Servers and data center computers (including the xboxs powering xcloud), are typically more power efficient when running in optimized and monitored data centers, where they are liquid cooled with heat pumps, than when running in your dusty ass house running a fan and your houses’ AC to cool them.
The power consumption of video games, if you add up every console while playing them, every server running the multiplayer and updates, and every dev machine crunching away, is a massive waste of economically unproductive energy.
The person above is right. If you want to address the climate crisis, slap a carbon tax on the cost of pollution, don’t artificially pick and choose what you think is worthwhile based on your gut.
Environment doesn’t stop at electricity costs, it’s also about manufacturing.
A simple terminal is more efficient to produce and has way longer lifespan, removing the need to update it for many, many years.
And then you can tie it either to your existing PC (which you need anyway) or cloud (which is used by other players when you’re not playing, again reducing the need for components).
That’s what I meant there. Generally, from an energy standpoint, gaming can absolutely be made more energy-efficient if hardware would put it as a priority. You can make a gaming machine that needs 15W or 1500W, depending on how you set it up.
Yes and manufacturing an Xbox for every single household, boxing it and shipping it to them, and then having it sit unused for 90% of the time, has a much bigger carbon cost than manufacturing a fraction of the number of Xboxes, shipping them all in bulk to the same data center, and then having them run almost 24/7 and be shared amongst everyone.
And the same thing about optimizing gaming hardware is true for AI. The new NPUs in the surface laptops can run AI models on 30W of power that my 300W GPU from 2 years ago cannot.
I feel like we went onto two very different planes here.
Sure, data centers are more efficient than a decentralized system, but the question is, to what point the limitless hogging of power and resources makes sense?
Sure, a lot of computing power goes into, say, console gaming, but that’s not what I originally talked about. I talked about data centers training AI models and requiring ever more power and hardware as compared to what we expend on gaming, first of all.
And while in gaming the requirements are more or less shaped by the improvements to the hardware, for AI training this isn’t enough, so the growth is horizontal, with more and more computing power and electricity spent.
And besides, we should ideally curb the consumption of both industries anyway.
Sure, a lot of computing power goes into, say, console gaming, but that’s not what I originally talked about. I talked about data centers training AI models and requiring ever more power and hardware as compared to what we expend on gaming, first of all.
But they don’t. Right now the GPU powering every console, gaming PC, developer PC, graphic artist, twitch streamer, YouTube recap, etc. consumer far far more power than LLM training.
And LLM training is still largely being done on GPUs which aren’t designed for it, as opposed to NPUs that can do so more efficiently at the chip level.
I understand the idea that AI training will always inherently consumer power because you can always train a model on bigger or more data, or train more parameters, but most uses of AI are not training, they’re just users using an existing trained model. Google’s base search infrastructure also took a lot more carbon to build initially than is accounted for when they calculate the carbon cost of an individual search.
Nope, carbon tax is different to carbon offsets. A carbon tax is intended to put an immediate financial burden onto energy producers and/or consumers commensurate to the environmental impact of the power production and/or consumption.
From a corporations perspective, it makes no sense to worry about the potential economic impact of pollution which may not have an impact for decades. By adding a carbon tax, those potential impacts are realised immediately. Generally, the cost of these taxes will be passed to the consumer, affecting usage patterns as a potential direct benefit but making it a politically unattractive solution due to the immediate cost of living impact. This killed the idea in Australia, where we still argue to this day whether it should be reinstated. It also, theoretically, has a kind of anti-subsidy effect. By making it more expensive to “do the wrong thing” you should make it more financially viable to build a business around “doing the right thing”.
All in theory. I don’t know what studies are out there as to the efficacy of carbon tax as a strategy. In the Australian context, I think we should bring it back. But while I understand why the idea exists and the logic behind why it should work, I don’t know how that plays out in practice.
If someone wants to use a vibrator that consumes an entire city’s worth of yearly energy consumption each day then I’d say that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Making a excessive energy consumption prohibitively expensive goes some way towards discouraging this at least.
