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 Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.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.
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
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Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
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AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.
I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.
Most people just either find it useful for some use cases or just hate it.
Such as?
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What about this?
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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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.
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.
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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That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).
Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always
- oversimplifying complex matters
- showing blatant lack of reading comprehension, and distorting/lying what others say
- vomiting certainty on things that they assumed, and re-eating their own vomit
- showing complete inability to take context into account when interpreting what others say
- chain-gunning fallacies
- “I’m not religious, but…”
always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.
Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.
(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)
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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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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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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
But no, AI bad AI bad AI bad AI bad lalalaa I can’t hear you AI bad /s
Seems like you’re hearing it perfectly, but not listening.
“The world is complicated and scary! I don’t understand it so it must be bad! M-muh planet farting cows evil industry fuck the disabled/sick/queer!” - What luddites actually believe.
Anprims/eco-fashes begone. If the planet was destroyed for the betterment of conditions for the proletariat today and future alike there’d be literally no issue, it’s just some rock lol, AI is far more important. Also brutalism and soviet blocs are the best architectural styles, everything else is bourgeois cringe.
Dumb.
So… Absolutely need to be aware of the impact of what we do in the tech sphere, but there’s a few things in the article that give me pause:
Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
- “Could”. More likely it was closed loop.
- Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
Can you say non sequitur ?
The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn’t go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there’s no power left. To use a simily, there’s plenty of water but the pipes aren’t in place.
This article is well intentioned FUD, but FUD none the less.
“Could”. More likely it was closed loop. As I understand it this is an estimate, thus the word “could”. This has nothing to do with using closed or open look water cooling. Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
The point they are trying to make is that fresh water is not a limitless resource and increasing usage has various impacts, for example on market prices.
The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn’t go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there’s no power left. To use a simily, there’s plenty of water but the pipes aren’t in place.
The point being made is that resources are allocated to increase network capacity for hyped tech and not for current, more pressing needs.
Is there a reason it needs to be fresh water? Is sea water less effective?
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.
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.
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.
The average German citizen consumed 129 litres per day
That seems like a lot. Where are you getting that number?
Edit: consumes = uses not drinks
The EPA states that each American uses an average of 82 gallons or 310.4 litres a day (study from 2015). Source: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts
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.
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.
“Could”. More likely it was closed loop.
Nope. Here’s how data centres use water.
It boils down to two things - cooling and humidification. Humidification is clearly not a closed loop, so I’ll focus on the cooling:
- cold water runs through tubes, chilling the air inside the data centre
- the water is now hot
- hot water is exposed to outside air, some evaporates, the leftover is colder and reused.
Since some evaporates you’ll need to put more water into the system. And there’s an additional problem: salts don’t evaporate, they concentrate over time, precipitate, and clog your pipes. Since you don’t want this you’ll eventually need to flush it all out. And it also means that you can’t simply use seawater for that, it needs to be freshwater.
Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
Freshwater renews at a limited rate.
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
Mostly to the air, as promoting the evaporation of the water.
Can you say non sequitur ?
More like non sequere than non sequitur. Read the whole paragraph:
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects. This will only get worse as households move away from using fossil fuels and rely more on electricity, putting even more pressure on the National Grid. In Bicester, for instance, plans to build 7,000 new homes were paused because the electricity network didn’t have enough capacity.
The author is highlighting that electrical security is already bad for you Brits, for structural reasons; it’ll probably get worse due to increased household consumption; and with big tech consuming it, it’ll get even worse.
Data center cooling towers can be closed- or open-loop, and even operate in a hybrid mode depending on demand and air temps/humidity. Problem is, the places where open-loop evaporative cooling works best are arid, low-humidity regions where water is a scarce resource to start.
On the other hand, several of the FAANGS are building datacenters right now in my area, where we’re in the watershed of the largest river in the country, it’s regularly humid and rainy, any water used in a given process is either treated and released back into the river, or fairly quickly condenses back out of the atmosphere in the form of rain somewhere a few hundred miles further east (where it will eventually collect back into the same river). The only way that water is “wasted” in this environment has to do with the resources used to treat and distribute it. However, because it’s often hot and humid around here, open loop cooling isn’t as effective, and it’s more common to see closed-loop systems.
Bottom line, though, I think the siting of water-intensive industries in water-poor parts of the country is a governmental failure, first and foremost. States like Arizona in particular have a long history of planning as though they aren’t in a dry desert that has to share its only renewable water resource with two other states, and offering utility incentives to potential employers that treat that resource as if it’s infinite. A government that was focused on the long-term viability of the state as a place to live rather than on short-term wins that politicians can campaign on wouldn’t be making those concessions.
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Mixing and matching abstract measurements doesn’t work when comparing two things.
it actually is an enlightening comparison when you dig into it. It’s saying that the energy required to power one play of a song is 4e5*365/5e9 of the energy to heat a home for one day. That comes out to about 0.3%, i.e. if you watch a three minute youtube video three times and do absolutely nothing else that day but heat your house (dont use any other electricity, dont eat anything, dont travel anywhere) you increase your energy usage by a total of 1%
It does not work like that.
The problem with such statements is the energy costs are nowhere near fixed. The amount of energy needed to play a song on my iPod shuffle through a wired headset is wildly different from the power needed to play that same song on my TV through my home theater equipment.
The same is true on the backend. The amount of power Google spends serving up a wildly popular band is way less than what they burn serving up an unknown Indy band’s video. That’s because the popular band’s music will have been pre-optimized by Google to save on bandwidth and computing resources. When something is popular, it’s in their best interests to reduce the computational costs (ie power consumption) associated with serving that content.
I was just using the numbers given in the article, presumably its an average including any sort of caching.
Yeah thats bullshit. Unless you have a hyper efficient heating system and power your internet with a badly tuned 1950s generator, theres no way youre getting 1%.
this includes the power used on the back end, not just the power used by the end user.
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%.
4e4 not 4e5, 4e5 is 400,000.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah it is a bit weak on the arguments, as it doesn’t seem to talk about trade offs?
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!!”
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.
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.
Frankly, I do not trust Sam Altman or any other techbro to create an AI that I would want to be governed by.
“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.
we already have all the tech we need to solve it
And we already know “how to get to carbon goals” that Altman mentioned we need AI to figure out.
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.
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
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
There are layers of wrong and stupid to this article.
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights.
“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?
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.
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?
…about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3… 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…
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.
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.
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
The forefront of technology overutilizes resources?
Always has been.
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!
Pass a carbon tax. Oh wait that would be too easy.
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
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.
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.
the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights
This comparison is bad. Commercial flights don’t use electricity, they use jet fuel, pumping fumes directly into the atmosphere. I don’t see a single complaint about HOW electricity is produced. I just read about how there’s too much solar power in California. A serious disconnect in the logic blaming AI for pollution when we should be blaming the way we produce electricity.
They’re taking about emissions, not energy use. You have a reading comprehension issue. The emissions are from the energy production. It’s logical to say that a, largely pointless, technology using high amounts of electricity cause emissions through the generation of electricity to power the pointless AI tech.
we should be blaming the way we produce electricity
I’m also referring to emissions, just redirecting focus about HOW electricity is produced. Also, AI is not pointless, that’s a bad claim. You have a comprehension issue.
I didn’t miscomprehend, you just disagree with my reasonable assertion that AI is pointless and sucks. Hope this helps!
That is not a reasonable assertion at all. AI is being used in more ways than what is being described in your rage-bait media diet. “AI is pointless and it sucks” is a blatantly ignorant statement.
It’s marginal utility is not worth the energy expenditures.
You just don’t know what it is beyond memes.
No reason for this to have been removed
Removed by mod
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.
