Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel.
(archive.is)
from Reygle@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 15 Sep 21:22
https://lemmy.world/post/35972809
from Reygle@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 15 Sep 21:22
https://lemmy.world/post/35972809
archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at www.allaboutai.com/resources/…/ai-environment/
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Which is why I threw up in my mouth a little when my boss said we all need to be more bullish on AI this morning.
My boss is also a fuckwit
Same. And they basically jizz their pants when they see a practical use for AI, but 9 out of 10 times there’s already a cheaper and more reliable solution they won’t even entertain.
There's practical use for AI?
I’ve mentioned it before but my boss’s boss said only 86% of employees in his department use AI daily and it’s one of his annual goals to get that to 100%. He is obsessed.
They’re salivating at the chance to reduce head count and still make money. Employees are by far the largest cost for any company. They hate paying it out when it could be for them.
You should correct their spelling of “bullshit”
Replace your boss with it.
What does it mean to consume water? Like it’s used to cool something and then put back in a river? Or it evaporates? It’s not like it can be used in some irrecoverable way right?
I think the point is that it evaporates and may return as rain, which is overwhelmingly acid rain or filled with microplastics or otherwise just gets dirty and needs to be cleaned or purified again.
“using” water tends to mean that it needs to be processed to be usable again. you “use” water by drinking it, or showering, or boiling pasta too.
They need to use very pure water, and it evaporates completely, so it must be continually replenished.
Need is a strong word. There are much more efficient ways to cool data centers. They’ve just chosen the most wasteful way because it’s the cheapest (for them).
To be clear: I’m saying that an ongoing supply of pure water is a requirement of the cooling method they chose, not that they were required to choose that method. The poster I was replying to asked how water could actually be consumed and not just reused.
if they take the water and don't return to the source, there will be less available water in the water body, and it can lead to scarcity. If they take it and return, but at a higher temperature, or along with pollutants, it can impact the life in the water body. If they treat the water before returning, to be closest to the original properties, there will be little impact, but it means using more energy and resources for the treatment
I kind of wondered the same thing in the past, but the other day I read an LA Times article that illustrated the extent of the problem of water loss (not particularly related to data centers although we know they contribute to it). The main problem with evaporating water seems to be that it was water that we could have used which ended up in the ocean instead.
latimes.com/…/global-drying-groundwater-depletion
I infer that evaporation is worse than flushing it down the drain, so to speak, because if it were flushed you would at least be able to treat and recover much of it using much less energy than recovering it from the ocean. So it sounds like evaporation is largely (but obviously not completely) a one-way street, especially in arid regions, since only a tiny portion of the evaporated water would come back there as rain.
Makes me wonder what they are doing to reach these figures.
Because I can run many models at home and it wouldn't require me to be pouring bottles of water on my PC, nor it would show on my electricity bill.
Basically every tech company is using it… It’s millions of people, not just us…
Billions. Practically every Google search runs through Gemini now, and Google handles more search queries per day than there are humans on Earth.
Ew, who still uses Google Search?
Well, most of the carbon footprint for models is in training, which you probably don’t need to do at home.
That said, even with training they are not nearly our leading cause of pollution.
Article says that training o4 required equalivent amount of energy compared to powering san francisco for 3 days
Most of these figures are guesses along a spectrum of “educated” since many models, like ChatGPT, are effectively opaque to everyone and we have no idea what the current iteration architecture actually looks like. But MIT did do a very solid study not too long ago that looked at the energy cost for various queries for various architectures. Text queries for very large GPT models actually had a higher energy cost than image gen using a normal number of iterations for Stable Diffusion models actually, which is pretty crazy. Anyhow, you’re looking at per-query energy usage of like 15 seconds microwaving at full power to riding a bike a few blocks. When tallied over the immense number of queries being serviced, it does add up.
That all said, I think energy consumption is a silly thing to attack AI over. Modernize, modularize, and decentralize the grids and convert to non-GHG sources and it doesn’t matter–there are other concerns with AI that are far more pressing (like deskilling effects and inability to control mis- and disinformation).
idk if that’s the intended takeaway from those numbers.
according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn’t find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.
260 tons is still massive, but let’s not kid ourselves. it’s about equivalent to producing 12 new american-size cars.
Yes, but there’s zero fucking actual benefit.
Seeing memes posted here that use AI while sitting on it is the most confusing thing to me.
Just… don’t use it, people. The hole burning in AI bros’ pockets will close up if you just stop making it profitable. Even the free ones are making money with ads. Don’t use it, even for a joke.
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People like you wouldn’t have seen the benefit in cars vs horse and carriages, computers vs typewriters and books, or watches vs sundials.
I bet you think that the only thing AI is used for is ChatGPT style conversations too.
Theoretically, sure there’s potential. But it shouldn’t be getting used as a commercial product in the meantime.
Especially generative. Letting it write, compose, create… All of that is 1,000% a mistake. The kind accessible to the public can’t currently create at scale without unethical access to source material.
It shouldn’t be getting shoehorned into every job possible while it’s still in this pre-alpha kind of state.
Although I don’t actually know the ratio of research use vs casual use, tbf. But this shit gotta be litigated and used properly with proper guidelines, not just thrown out like this.
It’s still way too early for this shit. Our willingness as a species to just jump into new tech should have been tempered to be smarter by now.
Maybe I would’ve been reluctant about those technologies. But I am convinced with data. And so far I’ve only seen problems with it, no actual benefits.
Yeah, because the widespread adoption of cars turned out to be such a great idea with no negative consequences… But even if you ignore the glaringly obvious negatives, AI still doesn’t come anywhere close to having the practical utility as the modern car. At least a car can carry out its advertised function without issues.
I’ve been using AI almost daily for several years now, as a function of my job. It’s garbage tech. Most of the things it’s supposed to be good for it downright sucks at, and the stuff it is good at has already been possible using simpler, more reliable systems for years — sometimes even decades. The situation isn’t really improving, either. Models are using more energy, consuming more data, and doing more computation than ever before… but the results are still embarrassingly underwhelming. Anyone who’s bothered to educate themselves on the math and method behind the models knows by now that the current generation of AI is dead-end technology, and anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant of the technical details, has a vested financial interest in AI, or both.
It also really fucking irritates me to be constantly called a Luddite by people who don’t even know how this technology fucking works… No, I don’t hate AI because I’m scared of technology, or “progress” or whatever the fuck. I’ve made a career working in technology. I love tech… or I used to, before everyone lost their god damn minds praying to Sam Altman and his horrifyingly expensive golden idol. No, I hate AI because it’s demonstrably bad technology.
I personally enjoy using it to the point I’m ready to pay for it. It helps me figuring out rather complex things where I wouldn’t even know what to type into a normal search engine to start tackling the problem. Imo, both forcing people to use it and forbidding people to use it, is making people unhappy. Just let people work the way they want to.
Yesterday I got just a regular ChatGPT explaining me how to convert some geometry into screen space using inverted transform matrix of the camera and dividing x,y by z in camera space to get the projection and then normalizing using min/max x,y, then after I got some bad results trying to get those numbers into the place where I need them, writing me a script that transforms my node-based Blender geonodes setup into JSON (just for the sake of giving this JSON to ChatGPT for analysis), then after reading this JSON explained to me some advanced control and data flow intricacies of geonodes and recommended a setup I could use to reshape control and data flow the way I need. This is all rather useful and would take more time and effort to gather all this information by myself. And it’s not like I’m not learning anything, it just makes learning faster.
spoiler
<img alt="" src="https://ani.social/pictrs/image/401c8af8-63ab-4832-b2c8-093c97a460ce.webp">
Sounds like a PICNIC issue to me.
Frankly focusing on the carbon output of AI models is a red herring. It’s not a significant part of the problem and just makes people complacent in the form of feeling like we’ve achieved something if it succeeds. It’s not worse than stuff like video games
Focus on the actual negative effects of AI, but carbon intensity isn’t a major one
I’m much more concerned about AI datacenters’ use of evaporative cooling draining freshwater reserves than the carbon footprint atm
we do a lot of things for no benefit. video games, golf, horse racing, grilling… all those have far larger carbon footprints. as someone else said, focus on the actual negatives of generative ai, like the proven cognitive decline and loneliness.
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in the comment i replied to you only mention that there’s no benefit, and you replied to me talking about carbon footprint.
“AI” and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can’t.
Just goes to show that you don’t even need AI to spread misinformation! Haha
ChatGPT has the most marketing, but it’s only part of the AI ecosystem… and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if other AI products are bigger now. Practically every time someone does a Google search, Gemini AI spits out a summary whether you wanted it or not — and Google processes more than 8 billion search queries per day. That’s a lot of slop.
There are also more bespoke tools that are being pushed aggressively in enterprise. Microsoft’s Copilot is used extensively in tech for code generation and code reviews. Ditto for Claude Code. And believe me, tech companies are pushing this shit hard. I write code for a living, and the company I work for is so bullish on AI that they’ve mandated that us devs have to use it every day if we want to stay employed. They’re even tracking our usage to make sure we comply… and I know I’m not alone in my experience.
All of that combined probably still doesn’t reach the same level of CO² emissions as global air travel, but there are a lot more fish in this proverbial pond than just OpenAI, and when you add them all up, the numbers get big. AI usage is also rising much, much faster than air travel, so it’s really only a matter of time before it does cross that threshold.
they list the others in the article.
It’s using energy, we need more renewables. That’s not a problem with AI. Direct your opprobrium where it belongs
The emoji usage, heading & bold text pattern makes me certain the article was written using AI.
Generating bullshit that isn’t really that useful.
Remember when the Apple Newton “revolutionized” computing with handwriting recognition?
No, of course not, because the whole thing sucked and vanished outside of old Doonesbury cartoons. LOL
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My peer used the newton for comp sci class notes. Daily. Exclusively.
Then she went on to mastermind the behaviour and tactics of Myth: The Fallen Lords.
It’s tenuous, but I say that’s causal.
This is my main issue with it. I think its useful enough but only if it uses about the same energy as you would use doing whatever without it. Most conversations I had with someone trying to convince me it does not use to much power end up being very much like crypto ones were it keeps on being apples to oranges and the energy consumption seems to much. Im hoping hardware can be made to get the power use lower the way graphics cards did. I want to see querying an llm using about the same as searching for the answer or lower.
As soon as you see water consumption being called an issue you know it’s not to be taken seriously. Water doesn’t just disappear.
Water has to be cleaned. It is renewable, not free. My city has many sources, but most places where they build datacenters do not. It is a real problem
Either way the biggest proble, IMO, is the pressure on the electric grid. If the asshats building the centers would cooperate with others, there would be much less problems.
As for power usage, yea its a lot but still not an insane amount. The image and video generation uses a LOT more then text.
“Renewable” also doesn’t mean shit if the resource is being consumed faster than it’s being renewed. Ask the people who used to live on the shores of the Aral Sea how “renewable” their water was.
image gen isn't so heavy either, but even i who arguments against this "AI is killing the environment"-bullshit agree on the video gen - there is a lot of power usage behind that one. might still not be an issue if using renewables, but if you use elon's illegally gas turbine powered AI, then it's fucking bad.
Surely you understand clean FRESH water is a limited resource. Renewable sure, but LIMITED.
They don’t need fresh water, nor do they dirty it.
Are you suggesting they’re cooling data centers with seawater
Shame to see this clickbait blog misinfo here, but the anti-ai sloppers wont let that stop them.
Wth?
It’s a shitty biased site with incorrect data, ironically what looks to have been written by an AI.
Have anything to back that up or are you just saying it’s FUD?
here you go, since the commenter didn't reply: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
So I’m a little confused, genuinely- this is in good faith. The link you provided was saying “the chat bot” features you shouldn’t worry about. It in itself has a disclaimer that image/video/generation is NOT covered here.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9302c8d0-bce4-4154-9264-c9f4b5f831c0.png">
To be sure, the wimpy little chat bot that hallucinates that people should add glue to their pizza to stop the cheese sliding off or that people should eat rocks-part of it isn’t burning the BIG watt-hours. There’s more to AI than unhinged crappy chat sessions.
This is correct, but not all Data Center Usage is GenAI too. I agree that video generation is pretty energy intensive and not something that should be done on the regular, but image generation runs here on my graphics card pretty fast, so it's not a big deal and comparable to chatbot responses.
Watching an hour of Netflix uses about 0,8kWh, which is a lot more but noone tries to make people have a bad conscience for binge watching a series. That's Datacenter usage too, and a lot more than GenAI.
AI is also used a lot in Science, and even if i know that scientists aren't that popular in the US, we probably agree that this activity is summa summarum positive for humanity, so lets keep it.
So where is the AI usage you propose is worse than global air travel? Lets look at total numbers here:
Electricity usage is 30% of the total CO2 emitted in the USA. Data centers in total used 4.4% in 2023, estimates say this will reach between 6.7 and 12% in 2028. If we take the worst case, Data Centers will be responsible for a bit more than 3% of all CO2 emissions in the USA, best case about 1.7%.
That's not nothing, but it's still a lot less then global flight, which was responsible for 9% of CO2 emissions in the US transport sector, which amounts to about 4% of Total US emissions 2022. Please note we are talking US flight emissions here, NOT GLOBAL. Since most datacenters worldwide reside in the US by far, your statement is bullshit.
ETA: People, the real climate killers have not changed: Cars, Industry, Flight. Trying to create a bad conscience for peanuts in relation is not worth it AND WILL NEITHER MAKE PEOPLE JOIN YOU NOR RESCUE THE PLANET, because these lies are easily disproven and make the green movement look untrustworthy.
It also pollutes the mind of ignorant people with misinformation. Not that that is anything new. But I do think objective truth is very important in a democratic society. It reminds me of that video that used to go around that showed Sinclair Broadcasting in like 20 some different ‘local’ broadcast news all repeating the same words verbatim. It ended with ‘This is extremely dangerous to our democracy’. With AI being added to all the search engines, it is really easy to look something and unknowingly get bombarded with false info pulled out of the dregs of internet. 90% of people don’t verify the answer to see if it is based in reality.
Bitcoin or crypto?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d8027d66-82b0-424f-bea9-f5df49304f87.jpeg">
What is this masterpiece ? Pro-pornography subliminal propaganda ?
Your article doesn’t even claim that. Do you have any idea just how carbon intensive a flight is?
I imagine people making that claim accept air travel as useful and “AI”, really, all datacenters as not useful. I’ve had people tell me oh, air travel is more efficient per mile that road travel. But this ignores that people wouldn’t drive thousands of miles if it was not as easy as booking a flight.
Or a LLM query?
300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.
For modern planes 70 - 90k liter… it’s bad enough, no need to exaggerate
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OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.
i'm gonna quote my old post:
If you only include chat bots, your numbers look good. Sadly reality isn’t in “chat bots”.
I’m not sure what you’re referencing. Imagegen models are not much different, especially now that they’re going transformers/MoE. Video gen models are chunky indeed, but more rarely used, and they’re usually much smaller parameter counts.
Basically anything else machine learning is an order of magnitude less energy, at least.
please elaborate?
Could you explain further?
Image/Video generation, analysis (them scrubbing the entire public internet) consumes far, far more than someone asking an AT “grok is this true”
Do you have a source for this claim? I see this report by Google and MIT Tech Review that says image/video generation does use a lot of energy compared to text generation.
Taking the data from those articles, we get this table:
Another way of looking at this: A “Daily AI Habit” on your table is about the same as driving a Tesla 10 miles, or a standard gas car about 3 miles.
Edit 4 AI videos, or detour and take the scenic route home from work… about the same impact.
I like that as well, thank you! Yeah, the “Daily AI Habit” in the MIT article was described as…
As a daily AI user, I almost never use image or video generation and it is basically all text (mostly in the form of code), so I think this daily habit likely wouldn’t fit for most people that use it on a daily basis, but that was their metric.
The MIT article also mentions that we shouldn’t try and reverse engineer energy usage numbers and that we should encourage companies to release data because the numbers are invariably going to be off. And Google’s technical report affirms this. It shows that non-production estimates for energy usage by AI are over-estimating because of the economies of scale that a production system is able to achieve.
Edit: more context: my daily AI usage, on the extremely, extremely high end, let’s say is 1,000 median text prompts from a production-level AI provider (code editor, chat window, document editing). That’s equivalent to watching TV for 36 minutes. The average daily consumption of TV in the US is around 3 hours per day.
If you want to look at it another way, if you assume every single square inch of silicon from TSMC is Nvidia server accelerators/AMD EPYCs, every single one running AI at full tilt 24/7/365…
Added up, it’s not that much power, or water.
That’s unrealistic, of course, but that’s literally the physical cap of what humanity can produce at the moment.
I have started using Copilot more lately, but I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper, so I’m good, right?
You can drink one less coffee per week and so save more carbon emission and water usage than not using LLMs.
Sauce?
Would love to have a read on that :)
Why did you start using straws at all?
The baby turtles thank you.
I just fashion a straw from the microplastics already in my brain when I need one!
I did some research and according to some AI’s this is true. According to some other AI’s this is false.
“Dear expensive thing: Are you wasteful?”
“Uh…yes? Wait! No…”
The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.
I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I’ll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.
By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So… my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway…
In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit… that’s a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.
9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.
I hope you recycle as well!
I hope your recycling is net carbon neutral as well. Example: how much CO2 is released by a recycling program which sends big diesel trucks all over the city to collect recyclables including cardboard, sorting that cardboard at a facility, shipping a small fraction of that to a pulp recycling facility and making recycled cardboard from the post-consumer captured pulp? Consider the alternative to be: torching the cardboard at the endpoint of use - direct conversion to CO2 without the additional steps.
Don’t forget: new from pulpwood cardboard also is contributing to (temporary) carbon capture by growing the pulpwood trees which also provides groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat on the pulpwood tree farms - instead of the pavement, concrete, steel, electricity and fuel consumption of the recycling process.
A lot of these studies they list are already years outdated and irrelevant. The models are much more efficient now, and it’s mainly the Musk owned AI data centers that are high pollution. Most of the pollution from the majority of data centers is not from AI, but other use.
The old room-sized ENIAC computers used 150-200 kW of power, and couldn’t do even a fraction of what your smart phone can do. The anti-AI people are taking advantage of most people’s ignorance, intentionally using outdated studies, and implying that the power usage will continue to grow- when in fact it has already shrunk dramatically.
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A Phone can’t do anything. It can send/receive and the datacenter does the work. Surely everyone understands this.
A modern AI data center have already shot right past 200 Terrawatt hours and are on track to double again in the next two years.
People can’t be this blind.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/340cf2ef-bc79-43b5-b5c9-685d4c19ab34.png">
LoL. Guess I can just get rid of phone’s processor then, huh?
And again, you link an image from an outdated study. Because the new data shows the use declining, so it wouldn’t help your fear mongering.
Reality is “fear mongering” is it? I agree.
If it were reality, you’d have some recent data. Might as well make projections on computer power use by starting with the ENIAC, and then you can claim computers are consuming more than our current energy output.
A phone can do a lot. Much much more than ENIAC era supercomputer (I think you’ll have to get pretty close to the end of the previous century to find a supercomputer more powerful than a modern smartphone)
What a phone can’t do is run an LLM. Even powerful gaming PCs are struggling with that - they can only run the less powerful models and queries that’d feel instant on service-based LLMs would take minutes - or at least tens of seconds - on a single consumer GPU. Phones certainly can’t handle that, but that doesn’t mean that “cant’ do anything”.
I’ve run small models (a few Gb in size) on my steam deck. It gives reasonably fast responses (faster than a person would type).
I know that they’re far from state-of-the art, but they do work and I know that the Steam Deck is not going to be using much power.
I stopped l, not that I used it that much, about 5 months ago.
Barely ever used it just for that reason and the fact that the algorithms are getting worse by the day. But now my work is forcing us to use it. To increase productivity you see…
I wonder how one gets banned from using these tools without just spraying non stop paste’s of expletives in to the chat box
Well what you said is not true, but since you are so interested in this, why limit it to AI? Just quit using computers all together.
Very well thought out response. Will respond in kind.
HurrDeeeDurrr K
Thanks for clarifying. You made up statistics, your post is nonsense.
And you responded without any consideration that the consistent reliance on computers, in general, is using a HUGE amount of energy, AI or not, indicate that you simply want to chase windmills and not have a conversation. Well played.
HurrDeeeDurrrr indeed. Next time let the grown ups talk.
Gaslighting schmuck. I “made up” nothing. Good day.
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Arrg! I didnt mean to delete what I wrote I was just trying to update it.
You confused energy use with pollution.
And what I wrote before was:
I basically said that I was serious, people if they cared would stop using computers. But I am not going to stop, you are not going to stop, so data centers are going to grow no matter what we do, and computing use is going to increase energy consumption. We need to (even says in the article you posted in the links) improve efficiency, get better hardware, use lower cost training models, use energy recovery and not use lossy evaporator cooling.
What is not true?
They said that AI is polluting worse than global air travel. They are mixing up pollution vs energy used. If it was pollution global air travel creates 80 Million Tons of CO a month. All AI in use is 15 million tons a month. Global air travel is far more polluting.
As an aside, and this is crazy: there is a reference, in the article OP posted to a paper, that suggests that humans are far worse than AI for CO2 creation depending on the task. Which I found surprising.
So I read the published paper in the journal Nature and:
Ok I honestly did not see that coming.
lmao time for a new wave of doomerism and anti-humanity
Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it’s NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
Friend, did you actually follow the link? Maybe just read the pictures?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f16202cf-281e-4c2f-a68e-182a47eb5304.png">
Just because something has a pretty infographic doesn’t make it true.
Picked at random, It also claims this:
This is complete bullshit in the UK, where energy is greenest in the small hours of the night when demand is low and the wind turbines are still turning. Least green and most expensive is late afternoon and evening, when energy usage spikes.
Let me reiterate. AI is crap. AI is a massive waste of energy, but your website has its calculations off in terms of order of magnitude when it comes to comparing the airline industry pushing tons of metal fast and hard into and through the sky with AI pushing a bunch of electrons through a bunch of transistors. Seriously, way off.
I checked. The IEA says airlines generate about a gigaton of CO2, and it’s still growing since the dip of covid, which is perhaps where your infographic authors got their screwy figures, which are, like I suggested, the wrong order of magnitude.
Cite your source and compare also using your source?
https://lmgtfy2.com/query/?q=IEA
Like I said, the IEA. The International Energy Agency. I wonder if you’ve heard of them.
You can throw scepticism as much as you like, dude, but
(1) I did not lie and
(2) your website is unreliable. Give it up.
Again. LLMs are crap, they spout falsehoods all the time, they use unreasonably large amounts of data, but the airline industry pollutes a LOT more.
I begin to wonder whether your website was itself written by an LLM.
www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation#trac…
That says national not global
both those numbers are insignificant.
But remember, one almond uses at least as much water as two requests to ChatGPT (sources: almonds, queries, data centers), so if you’re eating almonds at all then you’re being inconsistent.
I appreciate you sharing sources for that. I know almond use a lot of water. But one of the things you mentioned is food, and the other is a liar.
that’s very pragmatic, but you can also flip this around – almonds are a luxury compared to other more practical foods, whereas LLMs can help a coder net an income if used properly. I don’t think you can justify almonds if you’re going to claim AI usage is unethical on purely environmental grounds. And dairy milk is twice as much as almond milk in terms of water, so if you have dairy in your diet, cutting that out is going to be a lot more effective for reducing your water footprint than not using LLMs.
Anyway, check out the third link for more info on the total water usage of data centers; it doesn’t really add up to much compared to much larger things like golf courses. I don’t get why anyone would use water usage as a reason to agitate against AI for given that there are so many worse problems AI is causing.
almonds have value, while data centers dont generate profit.
From this page it turns out that every prompt is one glass of water. Is there any chance we run out of water at this point ?
There have been reports of AI data centers further draining water reserves in areas of non abundant nor sufficiently recovering water. Which has not only environment but social and human consequences in the area.
It’s so important to differentiate between commercial LLMs and AI as a general concept.