Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI
Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI
Company will require certain suppliers to run on 100% carbon-free electricity ... by 2030
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Holy fuck. I knew that AI did use above average amounts of power, but THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT added to the total emissions of a data giant like Microsoft????? That's absurd! How the hell did they create something so inefficient??
Efficiencies are in the works from a lot of angles (new hardware, novel agent structures, new neural net types, etc). The first computers filled rooms, and AI seems to be improving much faster. 4x the rate of Moore's Law, if it holds.
The Jevons paradox would like a word
To tie that back to MS, the code base for Windows is crufty af. I expect efficiencies to continue to come from the research and open source domains, but it's fair to point out that corpo only implement efficiencies that cost money if they can't offset that cost onto externalities like cheap labor and foreign resource degradation.