The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates
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 Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.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.
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.
Good assessment, thanks
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.
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.
Cmon, outside of ol’ Bitcoin, my freedom of money networks are a drop in the bucket.
Goddamn what a beautiful comment, brings a tear to my eye
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
Guys guys! There's room for all of us to eat our fair share of natural resources and doom the planet together!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Oh makes sense.
A lot of industry does use grey water or untreated water for cooling as it's substantially cheaper to filter it and add chemicals to it yourself. What's even cheaper is to have a cooling tower and reuse your water, in the volumes it's used at industrial scales it's really expensive to just dump down the drain (which you also get charged for), when I worked as a maintenance engineer I recall saving something like 1m cad minimum a year by changing the fill level in our cooling tower as it would drop to a level where it'd trigger city water backups to top up the levels to avoid running dry, and that was a single processing line.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without temperature difference energy can't be derived. It's just useless data without it.
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?
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!
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.
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.
The whole article is blaming t"the cloud" as if it didn't serve services consumed by users. What do they want? To shut down the internet?
Energy transition is something these companies are working on.
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/climate-solutions/carbon-free-energy
Reaching these goals isn't easy.
Yeah, cuz consumers really like getting useless ai results mixed in with their searches and shit. I don't know how I lived before having clippy 2.0 added to fucking everything, including my desktop.
It's entirely relevant to blame producers for creating and shoving this shit down our throats.
You know you can disable the AI overview from Google, right?
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.
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.
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.
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: https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/
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!
Mixing and matching abstract measurements doesn't work when comparing two things.
AI -and cryptocurrencies- use massive amounts of energy and the only value they produce is wealth. We don't get correct, reliable and efficient results with AI, and we don't get a really useful currency but a speculatory asset with cryptocurrencies. We are speeding into a climate disaster out of pure greed.
This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it's competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world, and highly structured coding languages are just the easiest lowest hanging fruit.
Yes we are heading to a climate disaster because of greed, but that has nothing to do with AI.
I think you are vastly over estimating how many developers are using GitHub Copilot.
That's bs now and will only become more so with time.
This was posted two days ago: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
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?
It's also a laundering scheme to make free software proprietary.
I love all the people telling you you're wrong, few if any are actually developers themselves.
For those that aren't: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
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?
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: https://bito.ai/blog/free-github-copilot-alternatives-for-vs-code/
that article is clearly biased towards bito but it's a decent list none-the-less
here is a better one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
Nice link!!
Codegeex and blackbox look good as far as features go
FauxPilot and CodeGeeX look promising for self hosting. Thanks!
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.
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.
"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.
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
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: https://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.
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.
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.
Yeah, seriously. Did the person you were replying to think the energy that's powering datacenters was all clean?
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.
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!!"
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
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.
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!
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
https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
and a helluvalotta stars
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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 companies*
Wow, AI really will kill us, just not in the way anyone imagined
Me: ChatGPT, can you create a system that's capable of powering your systems in a environmentally sustainable way?
ChatGPT: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
I mean ChatGPT can't do it but humans can and are... Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
The new ARM powered surface laptops that consume like 30W of power are more capable of running an AI model than my gaming PC from 2 years ago that consumes ~300W of power.
I'm referencing the short story, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Because they're all part of a technocult trying to make a digital god.
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.
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.
Or dams
Heck yeah! Love me some pumped hydro
"Burn it off to train AI" is a silly thing to consider given how much computing occurs just to even argue about this.
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)
The forefront of technology overutilizes resources?
Always has been.
Edit: Supercomputers have existed for 60 years.
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.
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.
Oh no let's build more gigantic server farms about it
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 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!
I know this is probably way off topic, but it made me think of Friendship is Optimal, especially the ending.
Not unlike the species of it's creators, go figure.
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)