To paraphrase another Twitter post, "AI uses the same amount of power per day as Guatemala for the sole purpose of making kinda acceptable slide decks for consultants to use when telling other corporate types how many people to fire"
I’ve got solar panels and AC. I’m keeping the house at meat locker freezing while staying within the solar panel production. Might as well use the power when it’s there.
Some people will complain about using AC in general. They can sweat all they want - I’m keeping cool.
We're so into pushing the limits of AI, but we're forgetting about the important stuff, like making sure everyone has power when the weather goes crazy. It's like we're so focused on the shiny new toy that we're ignoring the basics. It's like we're trading our populations health for a few cool pictures. We need to think about the bigger picture and make sure we're not sacrificing what really matters for the sake of technology.
The irony here is most AI is "mundane" and not diffusion or LLM AI.
For instance... the "AI" X is using to produce feeds ingest posts, serve ads and such.
X, Facebook and so on are the real villains here, and Mastadon, Lemmy, and (I guess?) Bluesky are the heroes, skipping all that attention optimization nonsense.
79 °F (26 °C)?! That's the unbearable temperature you need the AC for. If that was the limit, there'd be no point in having it, at least where I am. 20 °C (68 °F) is room temp and comfortable, although I'd prefer 18 °C (64 °F).
Interesting statistics on this (mind you, this is all from quick Google searches because I was curious). Data centers use about 90 billion kWh of power a year globally (which seems to include servers, cooling, and all the misc energy usage) while AC use is about 250 billion kWh per year globally.
Of that 90 billion kWh a year, I have no clue how much of it is used on AI (and how much AI is going to increase that number in the future) but it seems like, today at least, AC usage puts a lot more stress on the power grid than data centers do.
You also have to account for how that power is used. Data centers will use a pretty consistent amount all year long where AC usage spikes when needed hitting the grid with huge loads all at once.
Kinda wish the people I rent from would do this. They keep theirs at like 65 and I've been freezing my nuts off in their basement all summer. It's their house and they deserve to be comfortable in it but damn. It's a good excuse to keep active I guess.
I call bullshit. Stable Diffusion XL has energy footprint of about 0.29 watt hours per image while generating. That is roughly equivalent to running a 0.5 Watt energy LED light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes. Even for training the costs are not that extreme. Stable Diffusion needed 150,000 GPU hours. At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
Not a fan of disinformation so I'll post this here as well:
I run ComfyUI locally on my own Laptop and generating an image takes 4 seconds, during which my 3070 Laptop GPU uses 80 Watts (the maximum amount of power it can use).
It also fully uses one of the 16 threads of my i7-11800H (TDP of 45W). Let's overestimate a bit and say it uses 100% of the CPU (even though in reality it's only 6.25%), which adds 45 watts resulting in 125 watts (or 83 watts if you account for the fact that it only uses one thread).
That's 125 watts for 4 seconds for one image, or about 0.139 WH (0.000139KWH). That would be 7200 images per KWH. Playing one hour of Cyberpunk on a PS5 (assuming 200 watts) would be equivalent to me generating 1440 images on my laptop.
We need more AIs not humans. Perhaps try living life like people do in third world. They never complain about dying from heat because they aren't a pampered candy ass who get spoiled spoonfed.
Hosting will be where it's cheap, and that's not in Phoenix or Vegas, except those things that must be near-line. Deep thought shit will be in rural Oregon or Virginia, where juice more plentiful and trouble is not.
1 AI search uses the equivalent of 10 google searches...
Just imagine how much power you're using up browsing the web lol.
AI is not making or breaking power grids, water sources, or any other bullshit alarmist prop you're peddling like AI isn't being used all over from image generation, checking your shitty grammar, or saving us all time from writing bullshit proper emails every day.
LLMs are 5 tits of awesome that I'll be suckling on every chance I get.