The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates

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
  
  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
- and recycle their water less than fabs
  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.
  But the environmental impact of stuff like data centers… its just not a useful discussion,
  I'd say it is but more along the lines of feeding waste heat into district heating. Someone can shower with those CPU cycles.
- Goddamn what a beautiful comment, brings a tear to my eye
- Cmon, outside of ol’ Bitcoin, my freedom of money networks are a drop in the bucket.
- with the odds being good the same data could be served at 1/20th the cost today
  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.

Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
- You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
  
  Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
  
  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.)
  
  "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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Dumb.
  
  "The world is complicated and scary! I don't understand it so it must be bad! M-muh planet farting cows evil industry fuck the disabled/sick/queer!" - What luddites actually believe.
  Anprims/eco-fashes begone. If the planet was destroyed for the betterment of conditions for the proletariat today and future alike there'd be literally no issue, it's just some rock lol, AI is far more important. Also brutalism and soviet blocs are the best architectural styles, everything else is bourgeois cringe.

Pass a carbon tax. Oh wait that would be too easy.
- It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.
  Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.
  
  Sigh. You can hold any opinion you want about the ideal society. This is a good idea for the society we have now. If we all die it's not going to matter if Adam Smith or Karl Marx was correct.
- 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.
  
  a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can't use it again without desalination
  Where do you think rain comes from? Why do hurricanes form over the ocean?

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.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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.
- “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?
- “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.

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

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.
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.
  
  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?
- Gaming actually provides a real benefit for people, and resources spent on it mostly linearly provide that benefit (yes some people are addicted or etc, but people need enriching activities and gaming can be such an activity in moderation).
  AI doesn't provide much benefit yet, outside of very narrow uses, and its usefulness is mostly predicated on its continued growth of ability. The problem is pretrained transformers have stopped seeing linear growth with injection of resources, so either the people in charge admit its all a sham, or they push non linear amounts of resources at it hoping to fake growing ability long enough to achieve a new actual breakthrough.
  
  AI doesn't provide much benefit yet
  Lol
  I don't understand how you can argue that gaming provides a real benefit, but AI doesn't.
  If gaming's benefit is entertainment, why not acknowledge that AI can be used for the same purpose?
  There are other benefits as well -- LLMs can be useful study tools, and can help with some aspects of coding (e.g., boilerplate/template code, troubleshooting, etc).
  If you don't know what they can be used for, that doesn't mean they don't have a use.
  
  I'm going to assume that when you say "AI" you're referring to LLMs like chatGPT. Otherwise I can easily point to tons of benefits that AI models provide to a wide variety of industries (and that are already in use today).
  Even then, if we restrict your statement to LLMs, who are you to say that I can't use an LLM as a dungeon master for a quick round of DnD? That has about as much purpose as gaming does, therefore it's providing a real benefit for people in that aspect.
  Beyond gaming, LLMs can also be used for brainstorming ideas, summarizing documents, and even for help with generating code in every programming language. There are very real benefits here and they are already being used in this way.
  And as far as resources are concerned, there are newer models being released all the time that are better and more efficient than the last. Most recently we had Llama 3 released (just last month), so I'm not sure how you're jumping to conclusions that we've hit some sort of limit in terms of efficiency with resources required to run these models (and that's also ignoring the advances being made at a hardware level).
  Because of Llama 3, we're essentially able to have something like our own personal GLaDOS right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1csnexs/local_glados_now_running_on_windows_11_rtx_2060/
  https://github.com/dnhkng/GlaDOS

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.
  
  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!
- 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.
- we've taken human creativity and joy out of art.
  “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

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.
- 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.
- That’s mainly just bitcoin at this point. Other top network use proof of stake. Dont throw the baby out with the bath water.
  Also, I’d reckon a secure transactional network is a serious end product. But I understand most here don’t share the same freedom of money philosophical views as the cypherpunks.
  
  But it's not secure. At least not in any way more secure than your password is, or that coin that's in your jacket pocket. The whole security aspect is just another strawman.
- 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. :(
- That is an absurd reduction of reality, blatant illustration of dunning-kruger in relation to LLMs
  
  LLMs are just predictive text but bigger
  
  Or is it? Dun-dun-DUNNN!
- I mean, that's also all you or I am.
  
  Speak for yourself, loser. Repeating shit you heard an influencer say on Twitch is cringe.

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 4e4*365/5e9 of the energy to heat a home for one day. That comes out to about 0.3%, i.e. if you watch a three minute youtube video three times and do absolutely nothing else that day but heat your house (dont use any other electricity, dont eat anything, dont travel anywhere) you increase your energy usage by a total of 1%
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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%.
  
  I can't tell if this is serious since most homes don't need heated every day...

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.
  
  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.
  
  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/
  
  Nothing at all?
  
  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
- We get it, you don't know what you're talking about.
  God, I love it when laypeople feel they understand the entire field they have never studied and are oh-so-confident to preach to others who also know nothing about the subject.

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.
  
  Now look into animal farming!
  Seriously, though, our population growth rates are unsustainable, and we really better start getting in with nuclear power soon.
- 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?
  
  The current metric is equivalent tons of CO2, and I think we actually do have numbers for that on vegetarian vs omnivorous vs heavy meat diets.
  A bit harder to quantify for a human life though, certainly. We are able to at least convert methane emissions to a CO2 equivalent
- Cars collectively emit far more carbon than ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is only going to get more optimized from here.
  Ultimately the answer should be in a heavy carbon tax, rather than having a divine ruler try and pick and choose where it's worth it to spend carbon.
  
  Part of why right wing politics are becoming so popular again is that so many politicians shove the financial responsibility of cutting carbon onto the normal population. My point is that it feels useless to cut my own emission as long as massive corporations can just randomly emitt way more without consequence. Also, microsoft use electricity for more that just chatgpt.

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.

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.
  
  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.
  
  Yeah, seriously. Did the person you were replying to think the energy that's powering datacenters was all clean?
  
  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.

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!!"

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.

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!
- 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

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.
  
  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.
  
  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?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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):
  Require "carbon credits" to be spent to legally generate carbon and other greenhouse gasses (GHGs).
  Have a GHG treaty where signatories collectively decide on a GHG budget, i.e. an acceptable total level of GHG emissions.
  Issue an equal amount of credits to each individual such that the total amount issued equals the total GHG budget.
  Let people buy and sell carbon credits in a market system.

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
  Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
  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.
  
  Or dams
  
  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.
  
  "Burn it off to train AI" is a silly thing to consider given how much computing occurs just to even argue about this.

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.
- 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.

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

I know this is probably way off topic, but it made me think of Friendship is Optimal, especially the ending.

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!

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)

I think we'll improve this a lot. Now it's a race to be first, later it will be a race to be profitable and keep costs low.
Plus the sun outputs a lot more energy than earth can ever consume so we just need to get better at collecting it without creating waste on the side.
- We're already going to have to deploy wind and solar at a breakneck pace to solve global warming. Why do we need a technology that would force us to install even more?

It's a new blockchain. It'll fizzle out but we'll come up with a new buzzword by then.
- It won’t fizzle out; it already has legitimate business use cases. (A lot fewer than the marketing bros want you to believe, but real use cases nonetheless.) Blockchain and Augmented Reality never reached this point, so they fizzled. We’ll see a huge AI winter soon just like we did in the dot com bust in 2000.
- It will not be economically viable once AI companies have to pay for their training data. So far they made some deals with press/media but multimedia is a can of worms that's waiting to explode in our faces. They're getting away with this because doing things and then asking for permission / forgiveness is a very Sillicon Valley thing to do, for now.
  Technology itself seems to be in a plateau. The whole AI computer thing is just moving computation offline because amounts of energy needed are unsustainable and have to be dumped on consumers. We haven't seen that much progress since ChatGPT took the world by storm.
  I'm not saying AI is a fad. It's revolutionizing medical research for example, and those industries actually own the data they're training AI on. EU sees this and is currently working on streamlining exchanging this data across member states too.
- thing is that few if any use cases for blockchain were found and any actual useful things would not require much energy. The high energy crypto itself does nothing useful over more efficient alternatives and I don't know what you mean by fizzle out but it still uses massive amounts of energy. the language models unfortunately do things that are useful and is much more likely to keep drawing power.
  
  And the really perverted incentive of crypto is that due to the way difficulty is done, in particular with PoW systems, the more adoption there is the more energy intensive it becomes. Scaling actually leads to more inefficiency by design. I mean it’s totally asinine.
- Arguably that may be related - cryptocurrency people needed a new thing to prop up their Nvidia shares, and "AI" fills that niche.
  
  Why would they hold Nvidia shares and not just crypto?
  
  Ding ding ding
  [edit] Ah, crypto bros are here, it explains a lot.

The ugly truth behind journalist: broke English majors are guzzling resources at planet-eating rates
By age of 21 most journalist have produced 336 metric tons of Co2 and and 20 000 lbs of waste just to produce stacks of advertorials, mild propaganda and personal vendettas leaving a trail of blog posts across multiple servers.