from streetfestival@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world on 30 May 2024 11:39
https://lemmy.ca/post/22239178
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 Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.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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This is the best summary I could come up with:
It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span.
The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.
Google’s global datacentre and Meta’s ambitious plans for a new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) further underscore the industry’s energy-intensive nature, raising concerns that these facilities could significantly increase energy consumption.
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.
In an era where we expect businesses to do more than just make profits for their shareholders, governments need to evaluate the organisations they fund and partner with, based on whether their actions will result in concrete successes for people and the planet.
As climate scientists anticipate that global heating will exceed the 1.5C target, it’s time we approach today’s grand challenges systemically, so that the solution to one problem does not exacerbate another.
The original article contains 766 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
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.
Dumb.
“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.
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Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
Such as?
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What about this?
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.
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I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people I see 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 specific use cases or just don’t care. And a large part actually hate on 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Oh my God that’s hilarious that you are just making up a strawman of it being helpful for reasons you don’t even use.
What a weird libertarian crypto shill perspective that is so absolutely unhelpful for anyone.
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Just so you know, you are entirely misunderstanding what the term “strawman” is used to refer to. In general, it will make you at least appear to be intelligent if you use words in the proper context.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
I didn’t set up any opposing point of view to argue with. No matter what your view on this issue is, that simply isn’t what I’ve done in this situation.
Despite the fact that we are on different sides of an issue, I was still able to help you with something that may prevent you from looking stupid in the future. See how that works? Someone doing something to help someone other than themself.
Nah.
You created your own fake argument for crypto currency despite not using it that way and not being the conversation when it’s about energy use.
You built your own strawman. Of an imaginary person that is benefiting in a way that makes you feel better.
You are also condescending. It doesn’t make you right in an argument it makes you self assured and self serving. Looks like I was helpful too.
They are not imaginary. There are millions of them. I’ve met many of them, and so can you if you ever decide that people from poorer countries are worth your time.
And again, that simply isn’t what a strawman is. Read the link. Everything else aside, you are not using that word in the way people use it. It is as if you are insisting French people say “bone apple tea” before they eat, and then you are calling my condescending for letting you know that you misheard it. I understand it can be hard to admit when you were mistaken, but quite frankly, it will end up causing less harm to your ego in the long run if you do.
You are just full of slightly wrong information aren’t you.
That is what a straw man is. It’s an argument that you make up for the purpose of having an easy win. You even keep making emotional attacks to belittle your opponent. You are making Ad Hominem attacks to make me seem completely out of touch with poor people when I am one but you don’t know cause you didn’t ask and assumed.
Literally an example is getting bribed and buying a dog and when people complain about the bribe you say people don’t like dogs but you do.
Also a “Bone Apple Tea” is when someone says something like “as the Japanese say Sorry-naw-ra” you are wrong goodbye.
I understand that Bone Apple Tea is a different type of mistake then what you are making. I was just pointing out that you were misunderstanding something, and when someone corrects you, you get defensive instead of trying to learn.
Someone said crypto has no use, I pointed out that for millions of people, it does have a use. You may not like this fact, but that doesn’t make the response invalid.
*than
Thank you!
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I have lived in countries like what I’ve described and spent much time with people who are from there, and I financially support people from such places. I see nothing wrong with sharing their situation with people who think they know everything about how a technology is used when they clearly do not.
Yes, I assume you and others are from privileged societies based on your perspective and the things you say. Sometimes, it is very obvious when people have lived their lives in very specific environments.
The way you come across is as someone who doesn’t see any use in getting to know people from societies very different from your own. Simultaneously, you want to feel like you have the correct way of seeing the world, and anyone who sees it differently must be malicious and playing some sort of trick on you. Whenever you feel like you have it all figured out, that’s when you should be looking for your blind spot.
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If you lived or have been around people struggling with collapsing currencies, then you wouldn’t be so naive and bitter towards the solutions that many are using.
👍
You ever think you project a lot on others?
No no see he has lived among the common people that one spring break, he alone can advocate for their interests. Eat, Pray, Love is basically about him. He is enlightened now.
Not me alone. I can’t advocate for them as well as they can for themselves. It must drive you nuts that so many people stand up for the Gazans.
Wow you really are just flinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks aren’t you?
Some of us have actually seen stun grenades go off and had their cameras broken by police officers. Don’t even try to convince me you’ve been there with me. After all, sometimes it’s very obvious when people have lived their lives in very specific environments. Right?
I’m sorry about your camera. That genuinely must have been really scary. It is great to have those kinds of experiences in your life. I hope you continue to have a passion to stand up for what you believe in, even when other people try to intimidate you and belittle you out of what you know to be true and good.
Don’t try and high road me after all the nasty things you said about me for no reason other than you’re a petty, small person who couldn’t stand seeing the pristine name “crypto” besmirched. You don’t know shit about me or what I’ve been through.
Fuck off. I’m just blocking you. Don’t bother responding. Be a better person.
99.99% of crypto is rubbish. If you think I said something incorrect, then point it out and ask for an explanation. Discussion isn’t nearly as awful as you are making it out to be.
They do this “I’m taking the high road” after saying incredibly rude and directly insulting things and responds as if the upset people are wrong.
I truly don’t know if they are confused why their tactic isn’t working or is just a very deeply seated self absorbed individual, and thinks of themselves as truly the only person that can be correct with zero nuance.
Honestly I should’ve known better than to take their bait. I should’ve blocked them the moment they showed up.
tbh if you’re worried about fiat currency, you shouldn’t be investing in crypto currency (which is even more volatile imo) but instead in real, physical assets (such as food and housing).
Then again, i believe that the big problems can only be solved by repairing the society as a whole. Investing in your own wealth, imo, isn’t worth it. But your choice is yours.
Almost nobody who has ever purchased bitcoin and held onto it until now has lost anything*. This is not the case for ANY fiat currency on earth. There is a very good reason that so many people are flocking to it as a store of value. Holding value in real estate is a good idea, but most food loses its value even faster than the worst fiat currencies.
*The exception here is a small handful that happened to have purchased only in the last few weeks, and they have only lost about 1% of their value.
That part of your argument is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Not that heavy - this is much more than can be said of any fiat currency. Especially the ones that are in rapid collapse compared to the main players, like USD or EUR. A currency that can hold value is the difference of being able to feed your family or not for a lot of people.
Oh it’s you. Enjoy your weekend.
Thanks! You too!
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)
As far as I know there would be, it’s just that nobody is using them that way
Yeah! Accelerating societal collapse!
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.
“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.)
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You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
Guys guys! There’s room for all of us to eat our fair share of natural resources and doom the planet together!
Difference is that AI is absolutely pointless lmao
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:
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
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.
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.
That seems like a lot. Where are you getting that number?
Edit: consumes = uses not drinks
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: www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts
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, contaminating everything.
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?
I'm Canadian. Milk comes in liters.
If you're saying that 2 cubic meters can't fit in the back of a pickup truck, here's some truck capacities. A cubic yard is 0.764555 cubic meters, so a full sized pickup can hold 3.4 cubic meters of cargo.
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.
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 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.
Not just corrosion, but also to prevent precipitation in evaporative cooling systems (the most common ones).
Evaporative systems require constant input of new water; if you’re adding saltwater the salt will concentrate and it’ll become a saturated brine, and once the brine evaporates a bit the salt precipitates. It’ll happen mostly on the cooling fills (that will need to be replaced more constantly), but the main issue is that some precipitate does get carried by the brine and clogs the pipes.
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.
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:
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.
Freshwater renews at a limited rate.
Mostly to the air, as promoting the evaporation of the water.
More like non sequere than non sequitur. Read the whole paragraph:
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.
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 4e4*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%
I can’t tell if this is serious since most homes don’t need heated every day…
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.
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
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%.
this includes the power used on the back end, not just the power used by the end user.
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.
4e4 not 4e5, 4e5 is 400,000.
sorry yes, typed it wrong, right final number though
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 may be related - cryptocurrency people needed a new thing to prop up their Nvidia shares, and “AI” fills that niche.
Ding ding ding
[edit] Ah, crypto bros are here, it explains a lot.
Why would they hold Nvidia shares and not just crypto?
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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. They’re getting away with this because doing things and then asking for permission / forgiveness is a very Sillicon Valley thing to do, for now.
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.
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)
New technologies will sometimes need more energy. Thats hardly news. If we continue yo switch to renewables the impact will also be small. AI isnt even listed as its own point, heck it is not even listed in most energy budgets, yet it sounds like there will be no energy left for the rest, which is laughable, since it likely uses around 1% of the energy needed (its estimated at 2% for it in general)
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!”
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.
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More likely someone who knows how to properly use ChatGPT took their previous job
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.
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.
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
So when exactly is all of this going to stop? First we had town-scale crypto farms, that were juicing enough energy to leave other people with no electricity. Then we switched to NFTs, and the inefficient ever-growing blockchain, and now we’re back to square one with PISS, and it telling people to put glue on pizza, and suicide off the golden gate bridge
Crypto and proof of work algorithms inherently waste energy.
AI using a lot of energy is like 4k video using a lot of energy, yeah, it does right now, but that’s because we’re not running it on dedicated hardware specifically designed for it.
If we decoded 4k videos using software at the rate we watch 4k videos, we’d already have melted both ice caps.
AI bad though!
Never. Cope and seethe luddite. Btw AI plagiarizes less than humans. Back to Reddit, now!
I hope i can become this delusional one day. Life would be so much easier
Bruh you’re projecting harder than an IMAX cinema
It’s going to stop when the price of energy reflects its external cost. Externalities are very well understood by economists, so big oil has convinced us to go after consumers instead.
We need a Green New Deal, not a villain of the week.
You know what’s ironic? We’re all communicating on a decentralized network which is inefficient when compared to a centralized network.
I’m sure we could nitpick and argue over what’s the most efficient solution for every little thing, but at the end of the day we need to see if the pros outweigh the cons.
I highly doubt the “people” downvoting the nerds here understand what a decentralised network is, I bet some of them think Lemmy is just an app owned by a megacorp somewhere. How it works must be like magic to the unwashed .world masses.
We all know this, and we all know the “ai” they have right now is anything but that.
But these companies are making billions from this gold rush hype, so they could give two shits about the planet
This article may as well be trying to argue that we’re wasting resources by using “cloud gaming” or even by gaming on your own, PC.
Gaming actually provides a real benefit for people, and resources spent on it mostly linearly provide that benefit (yes some people are addicted or etc, but people need enriching activities and gaming can be such an activity in moderation).
AI doesn't provide much benefit yet, outside of very narrow uses, and its usefulness is mostly predicated on its continued growth of ability. The problem is pretrained transformers have stopped seeing linear growth with injection of resources, so either the people in charge admit its all a sham, or they push non linear amounts of resources at it hoping to fake growing ability long enough to achieve a new actual breakthrough.
I’m going to assume that when you say “AI” you’re referring to LLMs like chatGPT. Otherwise I can easily point to tons of benefits that AI models provide to a wide variety of industries (and that are already in use today).
Even then, if we restrict your statement to LLMs, who are you to say that I can’t use an LLM as a dungeon master for a quick round of DnD? That has about as much purpose as gaming does, therefore it’s providing a real benefit for people in that aspect.
Beyond gaming, LLMs can also be used for brainstorming ideas, summarizing documents, and even for help with generating code in every programming language. There are very real benefits here and they are already being used in this way.
And as far as resources are concerned, there are newer models being released all the time that are better and more efficient than the last. Most recently we had Llama 3 released (just last month), so I’m not sure how you’re jumping to conclusions that we’ve hit some sort of limit in terms of efficiency with resources required to run these models (and that’s also ignoring the advances being made at a hardware level).
Because of Llama 3, we’re essentially able to have something like our own personal GLaDOS right now: reddit.com/…/local_glados_now_running_on_windows_…
github.com/dnhkng/GlaDOS
Go ahead and point. I’m going to assume when you say “AI” that you mean almost anything except actual intelligence.
I think you’re confusing “AI” with “AGI”.
“AI” doesn’t mean what it used to and if you use it today it encompasses a very wide range of tech including machine learning models:
Speech to text (STT), text to speech (TTS), Generative AI for text (LLMs), images (Midjourney/Stable Diffusion), audio (Suno). Upscaling, Computer Vision (object detection, etc).
But since you’re looking for AGI there’s nothing specific to really point at since this doesn’t exist.
Edit: typo
Yes, this is exactly what I meant. Anything except actual intelligence. Do bosses from video games count?
I think it’s smart to shift the conversation away from AI to ML, but that’s part of my point. There is a huge gulf between ML and AGI that AI purports to fill but it doesn’t. AI is precisely that hype.
If “AI doesn’t mean what it used to”, what does it mean now? What are the scientific criteria for this classification? Or is it just a profitable buzzword that can be attached to almost anything?
Yes, it doesn’t exist.
Edit: Ok it really doesn’t help when you edit your comment to provide clarification on something based on my reply as well as including additional remarks.
I mean, that’s kind of the whole point of why I was trying to nail down what the other user meant when they said “AI doesn’t provide much benefit yet”.
The definition of “AI” today is way too broad for anyone to make statements like that now.
And to make sure I understand your question, are you asking me to provide you with the definition of “AI”? Or are you asking for the definition of “AGI”?
Count under the broad definition of “AI”? Yes, when we talk about bosses from video games we talk about “AI” for NPCs. And no, this should not be lumped in with any machine learning models unless the game devs created a model for controlling that NPCs behaviour.
In either case our current NPC AI logic should not be classified as AGI by any means (which should be implied since this does not exist as far as we know).
You read too many headlines and not enough papers. There is a massive list of advancements that AI has brought about. Hell, there is even a massive list of advancements that you personally benefit from daily. You might not realize it, but you are constantly benefiting from super efficient methods of matrix multiplications that AI has discovered. You benefit from drugs that have been discovered by AI. Guess what what has made google the top search engine for 20 years? AI efficiency gains. The list goes on and on…
People in this thread think AI is just the funny screenshot they saw on social media and concluded that they are smart and AI is dumb.
Absolutely. I am surprised, I would expect more from people who would end up at a site like this.
It isn’t resource efficient, simple as that. Machine learning isn’t something new and it indeed was used for decades in one form or another. But here is the thing: when you train a model to do one task good, you can approximate learning time and the quality of it’s data analyzis, say, automating the process of setting price you charge for your hotel appartments to maximize sales and profits. When you don’t even know what it can do, and you don’t even use a bit of it’s potential, when your learning material is whatever you was dare to scrap and resources aren’t a question, well, you dance and jump over the fire in the bank’s vault. LLM of ChatGPT variety doesn’t have a purpose or a problem to solve, we come with them after the fact, and although it’s thrilling to explore what else it can do, it’s a giant waste*. Remember blockchain and how everyone was trying to put it somewhere? LLMs are the same. There are niche uses that would evolve or stay as they are completely out of picture, while hyped up examples would grow old and die off unless they find their place to be. And, currently, there’s no application in which I can bet my life on LLM’s output. Cheers on you if you found where to put it to work as I haven’t and grown irritated over seeing this buzzword everywhere.
* What I find the most annoying with them, is that they are natural monopolies coming from the resources you need to train them to the Bard\Bing level. If they’d get inserted into every field in a decade, it means the LLM providers would have power over everything. Russian Kandinsky AI stopped to show Putin and war in the bad light, for example, OpenAI’s chatbot may soon stop to draw Sam Altman getting pegged by a shy time-traveler Mikuru Asahina, and what if there would be other inobvious cases where the provider of a service just decides to exclude X from the output, like flags or mentions of Palestine or Israel? If you aren’t big enough to train a model for your needs yourself, you come under their reign.
That is a good argument, they are natural monopolies due to the resources they need to be competitive.
Now do we apply this elsewhere in life? Is anyone calling for Boeing to be broken up or Microsoft to be broken up or Amazon to be broken up or Facebook?
We are missing big time on breaking them into pieces, yes. No argument. There’s something wrong if we didn’t start that process a long time ago.
Ok, first off, I’m a big fan of learning new expressions where they come from and what they mean (how they came about, etc). Could you please explain this one?:
And back to the original topic:
It’s not that simple at all and it all depends on your use case for whatever model you’re talking about:
For example I could spend hours working in Photoshop to create some image that I can use as my Avatar on a website. Or I can take a few minutes generating a bunch of images through Stable Diffusion and then pick out one I like. Not only have I saved time in this task, but I have used less electricity.
In another example I could spend time/electricity to watch a Video over and over again trying to translate what someone said from one language to another, or I could use Whisper to quickly translate and transcribe what was said in a matter of seconds.
On the other hand, there are absolutely use cases where using some ML model is incredibly wasteful. Take, for example, a rain sensor on your car. Now, you could setup some AI model with a camera and computer vision to detect when to turn on your windshield wipers. But why do that when you could use this little sensor that shoots out a small laser against the window and when it detects a difference in the energy that’s normally reflected back it can activate the windshield wipers. The dedicated sensor with a low power laser will use far less energy and be way more efficient for this use case.
Makes sense, so many companies are jumping on this as a buzzword when they really need to stop and think if it’s necessary to implement in the first place. Personally, I have found them great as an assistant for programming code as well as brainstorming ideas or at least for helping to point me in a good direction when I am looking into something new. I treat them as if someone was trying to remember something off the top of their head. Anything coming from an LLM should be double checked and verified before committing to it.
And I absolutely agree with your final paragraph, that’s why I typically use my own local models running on my own hardware for coding/image generation/translation/transcription/etc. There are a lot of open source models out there that anyone can retrain for more specific tasks. And we need to be careful because these larger corporations are trying to stifle that kind of competition with their lobbying efforts.
The transformer technology did come built for a specific purpose, automated translation.
Lol
I don’t understand how you can argue that gaming provides a real benefit, but AI doesn’t.
If gaming’s benefit is entertainment, why not acknowledge that AI can be used for the same purpose?
There are other benefits as well – LLMs can be useful study tools, and can help with some aspects of coding (e.g., boilerplate/template code, troubleshooting, etc).
If you don’t know what they can be used for, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a use.
Ah yes the multi-billion dollar industry of people reading garbage summaries. Endless entertainment.
See, I’m not even sure if you’re criticizing LLMs or modern journalism…lmao
Unfortunately, they seem to be one and the same these days.
LLMs help with coding? In any meaningful way? That’s a great giveaway that you’ve never actually produced and released any real software.
FWIW I do that all the time, it’s helpful for me too.
I gave up on ChatGPT for help with coding.
But a local model that’s been fine-tuned for coding? Perfection.
It’s not that you use the LLM to do everything, but it’s excellent for pseudo code. You can quickly get a useful response back about most of the same questions you would search for on stack overflow (but tailored to your own code). It’s also useful for issues when you’re delving into a newer programming language and trying to port over some code, or trying to look at different ways of achieving the same result.
It’s just another tool in your belt, nothing that we should rely on to do everything.
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Yeah it is a bit weak on the arguments, as it doesn’t seem to talk about trade offs?
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Love how we went from “AI needs to be controlled so it doesn’t turn everything into paperclips” to “QUICK, WE NEED TO TURN THE PLANET INTO PAPERCLIPS TO GET THIS AI TO WORK!!”
ITT hella denialism.
It is a little scary. Machine learning / LLMs consumes insane amounts of power, and it’s under everyone’s eyes.
I was shocked a few months ago to learn that the Internet, including infrastructure and end-user devices, already consumed 30% of world energy production in 2018. We are not only digging our grave, but doing it ever faster.
The Sam Altman fans also say that AI would solve climate change in a jiffy. Problem is, we already have all the tech we need to solve it. We lack the political will to do it. AI might be able to improve our tech further, but if we lack the political will now, then AI’s suggestions aren’t going to fix it. Not unless we’re willing to subsume our governmental structures to AI. Frankly, I do not trust Sam Altman or any other techbro to create an AI that I would want to be governed by.
What we end up with is that while AI might improve things, it almost certainly isn’t worth the energy being dumped into it.
Edit: Yes, Sam Altman does actually believe this. That’s clear from his public statements about climate change and AI. Please don’t get into endless “he didn’t say exactly those words” debates, because that’s bullshit. He justifies massive AI energy usage by saying it will totally solve climate change. Totally.
I agree that these arguments are stupid, but is anyone actually saying we should do those things?
Yes, Sam Altman himself.
Seems he didn’t say what you said he did. Why did you lie?
Why do you keep embarrassing yourself?
Posioning the well. You can admit your lies btw
No one is.
You know I have never once heard anyone saying what you are saying that they are. I personally think it would be better for us to address bad arguments that are being made instead of ones we wish existed solely so we can argue with them.
You mean the ones Sam Altman is actually saying?
Claim:
"The Sam Altman fans also say that AI would solve climate change in a jiffy. "
What he said:
"If we spend 1% of the world’s electricity training powerful AI, and that AI does figure out how to get (to carbon goals) that would be a massive win, (especially) if that 1% lets people live their lives better.”
Were you just assuming I would take you at your word?
Check my edit in the post above, made over an hour before you posted this.
Actually made after I posted that. Why do you keep lying? It’s messed up. This is low stakes internet comments.
And no he didn’t say what you swore he said.
Because I’m not lying, you’re incapable of looking past the surface of Sam Altman’s obviously self serving comments.
Yeah you were.
Unfortunately for you, we can actually see edit and post times on comments:
<img alt="" src="https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/67a4cd22-4a0f-4cdb-ba6c-732e57f4cf77.png">
My comment, last edited May 30, 12:29:07 GMT-5.
<img alt="" src="https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/a1d21b38-ddec-4fb2-9c91-b5d80abaafff.png">
Your comment, posted May 30, 1:55:04 GMT-5.
So it wasn’t an hour before. It was closer to 1.5 hours. You got me.
This isn’t just about internet points. You’re defending a shithead on the basis of “he didn’t say exactly those words”, as if context does not exist.
Keep on lying. Did he say what you said he did? No? Then you lied.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
~ Frank Herbert, Dune
Thing is, I could maybe be convinced that a sufficiently advanced AI would run society in a more egalitarian and equitable way than any existing government. It’s not going to come from techbros, though. They will 100% make an AI that favors techbros.
Edit: almost forgot this part. Frank Herbert built a world ruled by a highly stratified feudal empire. The end result of that no thinking machine rule isn’t that good, either. He also based it on a lot of 1960s/70s ideas about drugs expanding the human mind that are just bullshit. Great novel, but its ideas shouldn’t be taken at face value.
And we already know “how to get to carbon goals” that Altman mentioned we need AI to figure out.
Now look into animal farming!
Seriously, though, our population growth rates are unsustainable, and we really better start getting in with nuclear power soon.
I already look into it, I choose to be vegetarian.
Nuclear power plants are a patch to the bigger issue, the idea of infinite progress. We need to reduce consumption.
Yeah but as long as our population keeps growing than I’m not sure how else we get to a sustainable world. Obviously it has to be an intentional, consensual cultural shift, I’m not suggesting forcing people to not have kids. But I didn’t know how the earth doesn’t just collapse at some point as long as people keep having more and more kids and our population keeps growing.
ETA: oh and I’m vegan btw
Nothing like the good old magical-thinking-from-guys-who-love-logic.
Believing oneself to be the rational one in life continues to sadly be the origin of so many blind spots in people’s thinking.
What is this even? Batteries for UPS in a datacenter wouldn’t be a patch on even a few days of production of EVs, water isn’t being shipped from “drier parts of the world” to cool datacenters, and even if it were, it’s not gone forever once it’s used to cool server rooms.
Absolutely, AI and crypto are a blight on the energy usage of the world and that needs to be addressed, but things like above just detract from the real problem.
The water is because datacenters have been switching to evaporative cooling to save energy. It does save energy, but at the cost of water. It doesn’t go away forever, but a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can’t use it again without desalination and using even more energy.
Where do you think rain comes from? Why do hurricanes form over the ocean?
Dude, please. If things just worked out like that, we wouldn’t have water issues piling up with the rest of our climate catastrophe.
No no they’ve got a point. Everyone knows that the invisible hand of the free market and the invisible hand of the replenishing water table just reach out, shake hands, and agree to work it all out.
Rainforests. Like the Amazon that is being deforested obscenely in some areas
That may all be true, but the amount of water used by these data centers is miniscule, and it seems odd to focus on it. The article cites Microsoft using 700,000 liters for ChatGPT. In comparison, a single fracking well in the same state might use 350,000,000 liters, and this water is much more contaminated. There are so many other, more substantive, issues with LLMs, why even bring water use up?
Edit: If evaporative cooling uses less energy it might even be reducing total industrial water use, considering just how much water is used in the energy industry.
The forefront of technology overutilizes resources?
Always has been.
Edit: Supercomputers have existed for 60 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The concern is for value though. Like, if I’m going to use a massive amount of power and water to compute, I should be considering value to humanity as a whole.
AI is being sold as that, but so far, it’s actually harming instead of helping. Supercomputing was helping pretty much right away.
I suppose you could argue that if general supercomputing was invented now, it would be used for just as superficial uses. Maybe the context of personal computing, the internet, and corpo interests shape that.
I think we’ll improve this a lot. Now it’s a race to be first, later it will be a race to be profitable and keep costs low.
Plus the sun outputs a lot more energy than earth can ever consume so we just need to get better at collecting it without creating waste on the side.
We’re already going to have to deploy wind and solar at a breakneck pace to solve global warming. Why do we need a technology that would force us to install even more?
Pass a carbon tax. Oh wait that would be too easy.
It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.
Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.
Sigh. You can hold any opinion you want about the ideal society. This is a good idea for the society we have now. If we all die it’s not going to matter if Adam Smith or Karl Marx was correct.
I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?
I think that some are allergic to any slightest notion of capitalism being good
Which may be because recent history has proven beyond doubt that capitalism without regulation is catastrophical and capitalists will always push the boundaries & try to get rid of regulation, thereby it is always catastrophical, with temporary periods where it looks good on the surface.
Carbon taxes doesn’t make capitalism good, it’s still like, the cause of the problem in the first place
hey i think you attracted some of those people you mentioned :)
Sometimes I just want to see online world burn
Now do I want to engage em or not? Probably not I guess, it would be tiring especially since any nuance is lost on the web in favour of black and white thinking
I’ll play some guitar or eat burgers while they produce their stuff. Maybe draw something or blender hm
The key to healthy internet is to wisely choose your keyboard battles and not get bogged down by the army of simpletons
On top of that, if you refuse to defend your vague statements implying it would be a waste of your time and beneath you, you end up being always right!
I mean only something that can crumble needs defending. If something is made from undefeated steel it can be left and is as pristine as ever upon return.
Adam Smith would go absolutely ballistic if he were to see our current system. Not at all his vision.
GTFO with your time-tested solution to negative externalities.
Why don’t you just hand over all your income to the government just to be sure you won’t engage in any unnecessary activity.
What are you on about? A carbon tax is a way to lower the tragedy of the commons in terms of air pollution. It is the free market compromise. Allowing individuals and companies time and giving them incentive to stop doing something that hurts us as a whole. The socialist answer would be to ban it outright. You are getting the best solution the capitalist market allows. Additionally it aligns pretty well with traditional capitalist economists have argued before: a resource owned as a whole will be mismanaged.
I honestly don’t get why it isn’t a more popular idea. I would much rather live in a world where people are being gently pushed into making the right decision with adequate time to adapt vs a world that is on fire.
And on the off chance that 99% of climate science is wrong we still benefit from having a less acidic ocean, less smog, less local air pollution, and spending less money on maintenance of so many machines.
Of course it would… lmao are you kidding me? Have you never seen a server farm? Hell NSA has huge warehouses of servers.
Last year, before I joined this organization, IT decided to get off Microsoft’s cloud service because after some calculations they realize that on-prem hosting was significantly cheaper than cloud hosting. Now I believe more and more organizations small and large/enterprise are getting off cloud or doing a mixture / hybrid because the costs are not justifiable.
And for AI? Requiring GPUs? Huge energy consumers.
AI Training is a flexible energy consumer, meaning it can be switched on and off at will, so that it can take advantage of excess solar power during the daylight, providing extra income to solar panel parks. The important thing to do is to install solar panels, and then AI training isn’t an environmental problem anymore.
We already have a more elegant solution than training AI when solar arrays produce more electricity than the grid needs - batteries. It strikes me as a better option to save the energy for later use than to burn it off to train AI.
I would say that both are interesting proposals to look at. Of course, doing the math and crafting the best approach is work and takes time, and I can’t give many details in a lemmy comment.
It is for sure a tricky question. Another comment pointed out that we may be coming at the topic from different directions. I’ll admit that the energy demands of AI make me nervous, when I consider how hard the transition to renewables already is without the added load, but I’m not familiar with work in that space to make AI training less energy intense. What options are being worked on?
(Other than SMR or betting on fusion)
Or dams
Heck yeah! Love me some pumped hydro
It looks like you and the commenter you replied to are talking about two different problems. You’re talking about what to do about excess solar energy, they are talking about how to power AI training in an environmentally-friendly way.
Ah, that makes sense! Yeah, I’m out of my depth when it comes to how to train an AI model. I tend to leap into defense mode when intermittency of renewable energy comes up, because it’s very often an anti-renewables talking point, when we actually do have a lot of solutions for it.
“Burn it off to train AI” is a silly thing to consider given how much computing occurs just to even argue about this.
Wow, AI really will kill us, just not in the way anyone imagined
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Oh no let’s build more gigantic server farms about it
There are layers of wrong and stupid to this article.
“The cloud” accounts for something like 80% of the internet across the entire planet. I’d be curious what 80% of transportation infrastructure would end being in comparison… no takers? We’re only comparing to (some) flights instead of, I dunno, the vast bulk of our fossil fuel powered transport infra?
Oh no, the most popular song in the world used the same amount of energy as 40k homes in the US. The US probably has something in the range of a hundred million homes. The efficiency of computing equipment increases by a sizable percentage every single year, with the odds being good the same data could be served at 1/20th the cost today. So why aren’t we talking about, say, heat pumps for those homes? You know, since they’re still using the same amount of energy they did in 2018?
What is this idiocy? You realize that a chip fab uses something to the tune of ten million gallons of water per day, right? Ten million. Per day. I’m not even looking at other industrial processes, which are almost undoubtedly worse (and recycle their water less than fabs) - but if you’re going to whine about the environmental impact of tech, maybe have a look at the manufacturing side of it.
Man, we’re really grasping at straws here. More complaining about water usage, pollution, water security, labor standards, human rights violations… wait, were we talking about the costs of data centers or capitalism in general? Because I’m pretty sure these issues are endemic, across every industry, every country, maybe even our entire economic system. Something like a data center, which uses expensive equipment, likely has a lower impact of every single one of these measures than… I dunno… clothes? food? energy production? transport? Honestly guys, I’m struggling to think of an industry that has lower impact, help me out (genuine farm to table restaurants, maybe).
There are things to complain about in computing. Crypto is (at least for the time being) a ponzi scheme built on wasting energy, social media has negative developmental/social effects, etc. But the environmental impact of stuff like data centers… its just not a useful discussion, and it feels like a distraction from the real issues on this front.
In fact I’d go further and say its actively damaging to publish attack pieces like these. The last few years I didn’t drive to the DMV to turn in my paperwork, I did it over the internet. I don’t drive to work because I’m fully remote since the pandemic, cutting my gas/car usage by easily 90%. I don’t drive to blockbuster to pick out videos the way I remember growing up. The sheer amount of physical stuff we used to do to transmit information has been and is gradually all being transitioned to the internet - and this is a good thing. The future doesn’t have to be all bad, folks.
Thank you. The 700000 litres in particular pissed me off… that’s a 9 meter cube. Whoopdie doo
For comparison, a single hydraulically fractured oil well uses over 100 times as much water.
The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes’ emissions are large. It’s a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.
“I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs.” It’s a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.
Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn’t strike you as… a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.
Which is actually a very good idea economics-wise but fabs didn’t care much for the longest time because while crucial it’s still a minor part of their operating infrastructure. They had bigger fish to fry.
The thing is if you clean a wafer with ultrapure water, the resulting waste water might have some nasty stuff in it… but tap water has more stuff in it, just not as nasty. They generally need to process the waste water to be environmentally safe, anyway, doesn’t take much to feed it back into the cycle and turn it into ultrapure, again.
Side note in case you’re wondering what it’s like to drink that kind of water: It’s basically a novel way to burn your tongue. The osmotic pressure due to lack of minerals will burst cell walls but you’re not a microorganism so you’ll most likely be fine and the load on your overall mineral stores is only marginally higher than when drinking ordinary water, we get the vast majority of our minerals from food.
I’d say it is but more along the lines of feeding waste heat into district heating. Someone can shower with those CPU cycles.
Cmon, outside of ol’ Bitcoin, my freedom of money networks are a drop in the bucket.
Good assessment, thanks
Gotta nitpick you there. According the Moore’s law (really more of a rule of thumb), the price of the silicon used to serve those videos should be 1/16 of what it is today. I’m not aware of any corresponding law that describes trends in energy consumption. It’s getting better for sure, but I’d be shocked if there was a 20x improvement in 6 years.
Goddamn what a beautiful comment, brings a tear to my eye
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.
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.
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Source: Implement trained cnn and gnn models in hardware for real-time particle identification and tracking for high-energy physics.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/c5c95b5a-4de9-461f-9762-bb647601def9.jpeg">
No reason for this to have been removed
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.
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.
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.
Huh? Why would you think this?! I’d love to explore this line of thought with you.
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.
…aboutamazon.com/…/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.
Quit being so dramatic. Nobody is forcing you to use those things. Lemmy in particular is full of people who talk in detail about how they’ve replaced products and services from companies like Google and Microsoft with alternatives they find more consumer-friendly. And I guarantee you major brands are gonna offer ways to turn off AI features, because turning them off saves a lot of money in data centers and improves battery life in consumer systems.
You know you can disable the AI overview from Google, right?
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.
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
Maybe you shouldn’t take everything Google says at face value. Have you seen their new AI Overviews?
You’re even directly quoting their press release and presenting it as a fact, but it’s debatable: www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-million…
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.
But think about all of the good it’s done. Crappy article mills would be set back months if we turned it off!
My kids can also make poop dragon pictures. Has entertained them for hours.
Just because that is what you see of AI does not mean that’s all it does. Dunning-kruger goddamn
stackoverflow.blog/…/developers-get-by-with-a-lit…
You’re right. People just see pop articles about a small aspect of a much wider range of technology in its infancy and fire off hot takes. Other aspects are revolutionizing data processing in physics, for example, but you have to dig a little deeper than a snide rage-bait article for that.
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
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.
you’re right on that of course
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 just to produce stacks of advertorials, mild propaganda and personal vendettas leaving a trail of blog posts across multiple servers.
All that for glorified autocomplete
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.
You are insulting someone simply because they didn’t go along with your strawman? Intelligence is in short supply these days.
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
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
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.
users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
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.
Nothing at all?
If capitalism is a forest fire, than the industrial revolution was like hitting a cache of kerosene, computers were like hitting a cache of gasoline, and AI is like hitting a smaller pile of gasoline. Yes it will accelerate things, but that’s it. It’s not causing any new effects we haven’t already seen.
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.
Edit: found one. TabbyML
there are lots actually: bito.ai/…/free-github-copilot-alternatives-for-vs…
that article is clearly biased towards bito but it’s a decent list none-the-less
here is a better one: stackoverflow.blog/…/developers-get-by-with-a-lit…
Nice link!!
Codegeex and blackbox look good as far as features go
FauxPilot and CodeGeeX look promising for self hosting. Thanks!
I think you are vastly over estimating how many developers are using GitHub Copilot.
It’s also a laundering scheme to make free software proprietary.
That’s bs now and will only become more so with time.
This was posted two days ago: stackoverflow.blog/…/developers-get-by-with-a-lit…
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.
Do you have a source to counter stack overflow’s developer survey?
I love all the people telling you you’re wrong, few if any are actually developers themselves.
For those that aren’t: stackoverflow.blog/…/developers-get-by-with-a-lit…
People here hate AI with a literally blind passion and I don’t get it.
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.
But after you’ve written the code, don’t you find that the LLM is great at documentation?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Fair enough - I just hope the advancements in AI do not outpace our capabilities in producing a better hardware for the job, and that what’s left after finds a good use in other tasks.
Because otherwise it will grow more and more into a huge ecological problem.
Someone else explained how a carbon tax is different than carbon offsets, but I’ll go a step further and say we should be using a cap & trade system. It would go something like this (at least in my egalitarian version):
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 excessive energy consumption prohibitively expensive goes some way towards discouraging this at least.
Ban all 4K video then.
First gen, 4k video rendering without hardware support also consumed orders of magnitude more power than any other common thing before it, good thing we banned it, instead of you know, just letting the technology mature and develop for a couple years til we had hardware chips that could do it for almost no power.
Hell, video games are less useful for the world than AI and they consume orders of magnitude more power than ChatGPT, so let’s ban them too right?
Right, so the imperative to consume less power inspired the innovation needed to make it ultimately viable in the long term. Rather than people being left to consume infinite resources without a care in the world. Let’s hope that the imperative to be efficient and not use all resources all the time inspires this to also becoming viably efficient rather than regulators/officials just allowing it to spin out of control.
Yes, electricity still costs companies money so at a base level they are incentivized to minimize its usage, and then on-top of that carbon taxes should be helping to cover the environmental and incentive costs for further energy reducing innovations.
If you just want to ban electricity consuming industries I don’t know why you’d start with AI, which is brand new and has genuine useful value to society, and not say, something like advertising which is just an economic distortion and massive drain on society.
Did I say at some stage that I just want a flat, nuanceless ban on industries? I answered a hypothetical posed about individual’s personal consumption.
AI needs reigning in for so many different reasons, energy consumption or otherwise. Its utility to society is more than counterbalanced by the dangers that it and its unregulated expansion poses to that same society. If nothing else, government and industry bodies to catch up with it and impose appropriate standards.
People said the same things about computers for the same reasons. I’m glad we didn’t listen to them.
and a helluvalotta stars
If someone wants to pay that much for energy and it’s priced at a level that makes it sustainable, who are we to say it’s not worth it?
The main argument I’ve seen against higher prices for things energy and water is that it would place an undue burden on low-income people, but that’s one of the many problems that could be eliminated in its entirety by a universal basic income program. Even if it’s just a bare-bones program that only covers the cost of an average person’s water and energy needs, such a system would give everyone an incentive to conserve when possible, and it would do it without burdening people who can’t afford it.
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Hmm, that makes me think we could adopt a tiered pricing system for things like water. The first 100 gallons are priced at 10 cents each, then usage beyond that goes up to 50 cents each?
You could tweak the rates & threshold to make more sense – I don’t know water rates off the top of my head, and that probably varies by orders of magnitude across the entire U.S. Also, I have no idea what water usage rates look like for different types of properties. A sports stadium, an office building, an aluminum processing plant, and a SFH with a rain garden will all have really different water usage details.
All this is kind of hinting at a broader “environmental impact” measure. That gets super complicated, though.
That depends on the show they put on. There are many of us that would pay a few bucks to watch someone use a vibrator that powerful on themselves.
Nothing wakes my weasel like a vibrator powered by diesel.
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Not unlike the species of it’s creators, go figure.
But it’s okay, because now we can get wrong answers faster than ever, and we’ve taken human creativity and joy out of art.
We can solve entire new classes of problems that we never could before.
Your problems are with capitalism and how we distribute our resources, not with advancements in automation.
This particularly story isn’t about wealth distribution though. It’s about environmental damage caused by this technology. So that’s a whole other class of problem. As for the other problems being about capitalism, I agree for sure that capitalism is a source of many many problems… but while we are in that system we should still try to minimise the problems. So if this technology has major problem when combined with capitalism, then we should either stop using capitalism, or stop using the technology - or both, until we make up our mind which we prefer to keep!
Every story is somewhat about wealth distribution. Your argument is fundamentally that AI is not worth it to spend the resources we are spending on it. If wealth was distributed more fairly, that would not be an argument since the money and carbon taxes spent on it would be an accurate representation of the will of the average person and its utility to them. That argument makes the most sense in the context of an inordinate amount of r sources being controlled and directed by the wealthy.
Except that it doesn’t. AI is no more frivolous and power hungry than any other industry. Video games consume far more power for instance and provide no economic value back.
So either something is EVERYTHING from the start or it’s not and thus not worth pursuing further.
Did I get your position right? The usefulness and applications for AI both now and in the future far exceeds what you’ve tried to boil it down to (thus destroying any nuance), your willful ignorance is showing.
but ai bad, and all that.
“As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. … I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. … it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. … If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.”
-Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859
yes, baudelaire was right. he still is
So few people learn the soulful art of the organ ever since the damn pianoforte came along! And the guitar is so easy that art will die, because anyone can learn to strum chords!
AI companies*
This metric doesn’t say anything.
Do you mean it’s without context or comparison?
Im not being funny. I’m just stupid.
So it takes 700,000 litres of water to cool a machine eh? Think about a water cooled PC, now, is that water cooled PC hooked up to your sink and continuously draining water? Or did you fill it up one time and then at the end when you’re done with it, dump the water back down the drain?
700,000 litres of water in a closed loop cooling system is not a problem in any way shape or form.
And even if it’s not in closed loop, water probably goes back to river at worst. Better option is using computers as preheating stage in central heating system.
You’re technically correct, although there usually is some make-up that’s periodically necessary. You’ll want to blowdown some of that water from time to time to try and prevent scale/accumulation and even biomass buildup. It’s probably on the order of like 1-2%, and probably not continuously.
It would be better for the article to quantify this amount of water, that’s regularly leaving the system and needs to be replenished. 1% of 700,000 L is still a lot of water, but it’s very hard to measure the sustainability impact without knowing how often they happens. Once a year? Multiple times a year? Or once every few years?
Just for my credentials, I’m a chemical engineer by training and I used to do a little work with a closed loop steam generation and cooling system.
I’m just saying that at that point, when we’re talking maybe 1% of 700,000 litres across an entire industry, then we have a lot of lower hanging fruit to save water. That amount of water is just flat out wasted at like a single industrial plant on a Tuesday.
No disagreements there. I’m more concerned about the power usage than the water usage anyway.
Without temperature difference energy can’t be derived. It’s just useless data without it.
The whole article throws data without meaning.
Data is not information. Is this the amount of the water taken out of reach of farmers? Probably not. Is it the amount of energy used for cooling? Nope because liters is not an appropriate unit of energy. Is it the cost? Nope because that must be in dollars. So it’s data but not information. It can’t be compared to an hypothetically allegedly more efficient system.
I know this is probably way off topic, but it made me think of Friendship is Optimal, especially the ending.
if it’s not crypto miners with GPUs it’s AI, these narratives never really connect well with reality. /u/0ptimal wrote a great comment on this post: alexandrite.app/lemmy.world/comment/10355707
To no surprise, the other comments are full of laypeople that feel they understand the entire field they have never studied well enough to preach to others about just how useless and terrible it is, who also know nothing about the subject.