I want cover letters to be shot in the street at noon
I have local AI for this reason. All it does is toast my balls a bit, and waste 10’s of watts of electricity.
There’s a misconception regarding the “consumption” of water, also a bit of a bias towards AI data centers whereas most used water is actually from energy production (via carbon, fuel or even hydroelectric) which is actually a factor to be considered when calculating the actual water use and consumption.
Regarding energy production and water “consumption” I read some papers and as far as I could understand numbers flactuate wildly. 5-40% of the water that runs through the system ends up being consumed via evaporation (so from potentially drinkable/usable for agriculture water to mostly water that ends up in the sea).
What I’m trying to say is that, yes, we should be very aware of the water that we consume in our big data centers but should also put a great focus on the water used by the energy that fuels the data center itself, much of the discourse ends up being “haha use water for email silly” when it should be a catalyst for a more informed approach to water consumption.
Basically I fear that the ai industry can make use of our ignorance and eappease with some “net zero” bs completely ignoring where most of the water is consumed and how.
And yes there are solutions to avoid using fresh water for energy production: solar/wind, using sea water, using polluted water, more sophisticated systems that actually “consume” as little water as possible. These methods have drawbacks that our governments and industry refuse to face and would rather consume and abuse our resources, I really want people to focus on that.
Somebody said The Apple ads for AI look like they’re describing the people who are the biggest pieces of shit you work with or know.
or they could run the models on their own machines and not cause environmental problems for the rest of us
How does it actually consume the water?
Cooling of datacenters.
How does it consume water? I thought it would be a closed loop?
It doesn’t. “Wasting water” is bullshit most of the time. What you waste is the energy powering pumps and sewage plants.
“Wasting water” is bullshit most of the time.
Pumping water out of reserves, using it as coolant, and then disposing the hot water into local waterways where the heat kills off the local ecology is “waste” on several levels.
This is a common practice for industrial cooling, as pumping water and releasing it is cheaper than cycling the water through a large ventilator and recovering it.
Cooling a datacenter doesn’t “consume” water in any way.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
That’s not true.
What a mouthful of a PDF lol. But as far as I understand, that PDF has nothing to do with datacenter cooling. Cooling a datacenter usually happens in a closed loop, meaning there is no place the water could evaporate (which is the closest thing we have to “consuming water”) to, so there is no loss. The water is cooled via a heat exchanger, which is not opening up the loop. We have the same concept with AIOs on PCs, and you don’t have to refill the water every now and then, because it doesn’t evaporate.
The PDF refers to power production (as most sources of power do rely on water), where there is certainly some amount of loss. But that is not what I was arguing against.
Ren’s most recent work focuses precisely on how AI is increasing water use. A large language model like OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT-3 must first be trained, a data and energy intensive process that can also boost water use. Ren found that training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s high-end data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters, or about 185,000 gallons, of water.
Once the AI model is in use, each inference, or response to queries, also requires energy and cooling, and that, too, is thirsty work. Ren and his colleagues estimate that GPT-3 needs to “drink” a 16-ounce bottle of water for roughly every 10-50 responses it makes, and when the model is fielding billions of queries, that adds up.
The researchers are saying otherwise. I tend to believe them
It’s very cool that you tend to believe them, but I’d like to understand how something in a closed loop is “evaporating” - that is physically impossible. I once heard they are planning to build datacenters in the ocean, but even then evaporation is unlikely as the datacenters won’t boil the ocean. The only way to make this work is if they submerge it in a small pond/lake or just flood the building, and keep dumping water into it - which is stupid aswell because there are MUCH better materials for that that are NOT conductive, like special oils, which are not water based.
So ye, believing researchers is one thing, but believing something that physically is not possible because it fits your narrative is stupid.
How is it consuming so much water? It is probably used for cooling the data centers, but why could it not be reused or even used as heating network?
Most power generation usually uses steam as a way of converting heat into work. So that power consumption is still a bigger issue than the data center heat management.
That steam is not wasted water either right?
Wasted water as in readily usable water, if they build a plant somewhere it will cut down from the natural sources and create their own thermal energy that the world has to also dispel.
Which leads to the bigger issue, all of this contributes to global warming. Along with forcing rationing of water, like dude just live one year in Cali to get a sense of water fears. It’s a downward spiral, often called the singularity.
We are creating destruction of worlds for the sake of what? AI waifus? Not having to solve your own issues? To not think? We fought for the freedom to not be brainless slaves, and we hand back the reigns to the elite above us. The internet was already a beast untamed and unleashed upon children, please do not support this one.
Goes back in the atmosphere but it means the natural waterways get less water down from the powerplant
It probably doesn’t consume as much. Cars however… 👀
Projected to consume 25% of total domestic energy production by the time the build out is done
Don’t cars account for 30% of total energy consumption, and 70% of petroleum? Not defending AI here, the last thing we need is another unchecked, massive, resource hog.
Don’t cars account for 30% of total energy consumption, and 70% of petroleum?
Transportation does. But that includes planes, trains, and boats, not just cars.
Not defending AI here, the last thing we need is another unchecked, massive, resource hog.
I’ve seen the argument that AI will reduce travel demand. But I’ve also seen AI guys lobby aggressively to end Work From Home.
where you get this number?
Arm CEO Rene Haas cautions that if AI continues to get more powerful without boosts in power efficiency, datacenters could consume extreme amounts of electricity.
Haas estimates that while US power consumption by AI datacenters sits at a modest four percent, he expects the industry to trend towards 20 to 25 percent usage of the US power grid by 2030, per a report from the Wall Street Journal.
This does misunderstand what actually costs the energy – it’s training the models that’s costly, not using the already trained ones. Although to be fair using them increases incentive for new ones to be trained… But yeah asking ChatGPT for a recipe idea isn’t burning an ounce of gasoline.
But they are always training new models
Right, I mentioned that the more they’re used the more incentive there is to train new ones. But also it’s not like buying a product from the store which then creates a demand for a replacement, it’s much fuzzier and it’s difficult to point to any one user as increasing the demand for more models. Realistically I think we’ve gone well past the point where it makes sense to train general purpose LLMs any further, it’s drastically diminishing returns for marginally higher quality. The continued fervor is being driven by the same people that drove crypto and NFT prices way beyond reality: speculators and VC parasites trying to shove the new hype buzzword into anything they can get their hands on.
Using them is also very energy intensive (though much less so than training).
Playing a AAA game amount of energy vs running an entire data center on full blast amount of energy, is the comparison I like to make.
Yes, and now not just cringe gamers are using that electricity. At least that was an experience wholely unique, this is people delegating thought, artistry, and processing. Meaning now it can be use for passive things in day to day life.
The increase then can be measured by any time that wasnt spent on gaming, now needing a large enough mole hill to want and circumvent. Gaming already was escapism of social cognizant responsibilities, I say this as a dude who spent every 80 hours a week on gaming, and have 11k hours in league.
Circumventing these things outside of gaming will essentially lead to a dependency. I hardly trust adults to self govern, but kids I can see being swindled by the ‘ability’ granted. Rather than the dependency and lack of one’s innate thought and memory.
It just makes me scared, no I dont think it will ever fully replace a person’s mind, but it will grasp it. It can make a person doubtful of themselves and in doubt we are most persuadable. With recent politics nationwide trying to turn into fascist states fundamentally built on hate, I do not want kids to be raised persuaded without their will. While also removing part of their learning capabilities and reducing their capacity.
Cities will seem like labor mills to house the slaves, while being more aware of freedom than those truly free.
C’mon man Matrix was on this shit, if that’s too boring try adventure time.
(I don’t game anymore)
I think that to a degree we’re buying into the showmanship and claims of AI companies concerning the future, when the reality is that there are hard limits to the functionality of generative AI and LLMs. They want us to think that they’re building Rocco’s Basilisk because that’s some good terrifying viral marketing. But it isn’t true.
I’ve personally tried these tools at home. I’ve got LM Studio and ComfyUI on my PC. They’re novel and all, but they do have a hard limit to usefulness. You cannot rely on an information tool that returns the wrong information half the time. Not because it’s annoying but because people want and need to get stuff done, and ultimately AI will get in the way of getting stuff done.
It does not matter about the limit, if they can convince people to sell out. The kids are still fucked and delayed. Your dismissiveness devalues the harm a tool like this can do. Just how the internet spread rapidly facilatating crime and is only recently being wrangled. Social existence is centralized, intelligence can be too - then it can be sold at a subscription. With you the creator losing all ownership.
It’s just the head of the iceberg. Soon the rest will melt too.
I think the future will be somewhere between what we consider normal now and the austere dystopia you envision. This AI shit certainly isn’t making the world any better, that’s for sure.
Honestly that’s not what I envision, that’s just an extension of every fear in media and religious philosophy. From the buddhist one is all, that extends the rammifications of every action. To the Christian ideals of god creating ‘life’. Fallout 4 and Synths. Cyberpunk and Soul Killer. Full Metal Alchemist and the philosopher’s stone/homunculi.
The goal of those in power is to replace the people they need to be in power. This can progress to be much more. We are on the stepping stones of giants and you must assess the ripples. AI is being fed to the masses for a reason, it can facilitate 1984-esque control of information. We are already seeing thought crimes being implicated on people through their immigration processes. Along with thought crimes already being the prime directive behind piracy.
You do not steal, you are theoretically losing them money and that is seen as worth incarceration. Even if it was something you wouldn’t purchase or support. They spread the internet before the ramifications became apparent. AI is next if man does not heed.
Oh there’s no question, humanity will be dumber because of AI. I’ve already seen it, and it JUST started. Imagine it in 10 years with how good it is. AI babies are the new ipad babies. There will be zero thinking for yourself, zero problem solving ability. And those of us who shun it will be called the idiots. Mark my words.
While the order of magnitude is correct, running the bigger models is closer to playing a AAA game on 8 computers at the same time.
Yeah I did forget to consider that a lot of the web hosted models have a whole array of “experts” - Sub-LLMs that help fill in specialized information that a more generalized LLM wouldn’t have. Not a problem for someone running an AI model on their home computer but something that likely happens most times that you’re querying an AI online.
That’s also true, though it’s important to remember that the “experts” aren’t experts in the classical sense. Say you have a word made up of 3 tokens, it’s possible that each token is routed to a different expert. It’s just a model architecture.
people who complain about mountains of disposable diapers at landfills misunderstand the problem. it’s the poop of newborn babies that’s the problem, not the ones who have gone on to become adults. although to be fair their growing up increases the chance of more poop-producing babies.
but yeah sleeping around without birth control isn’t contributing to even one extra poop-filled diaper.
What country? Sir Lanka? This isn’t a useful comparison as is, I’ll see if I can dig up actual numbers.
Following for the results of your work here so I can use it in the future.
From this 2023 paper, looks like if all Nvidia AI servers are running 24/7, you’d get an energy consumption of about 5.7–8.9 TWh per year. Nvidia servers make up 95% of the AI market (according to the paper) so that’d be pretty close to what AI servers would consume.
The paper also estimates about 20% of crypto mining GPUs no longer mining etherium converted to AI, which contributed another 16.1 TWh per year.
This doesn’t include some AI, but it should be the majority.
Between those two sources, that gives 23.4 TWh per year. That gives 0.08 exta joules per year per this converter. That’s 22% of Sri Lanka’s energy consumption (which is the lowest country).
So AI in a year uses at much energy as Sri Lanka uses in 3 months. At least in 2023. I’ll see if I can find a more recent study.
So that assumes AI requests use 100 percent of the hardware 100 percent of the time.
Yes, but those servers are pretty ai specific, so that’s a decent assumption. Looks like Nvidia is drastically ramping up production of these servers, so current electricity use might be about 10x, I’m working on it.
100% utilization 100% of the time? That seems like an unlikely figure, right?
100% utilization yes, but server uptimes are in the 99 percent range.
Idle consumption vs full utilization consumption are two very different things, though - this will have a large impact on the final number.
This is the kind of comment I love on Lemmy.
There’s plenty of countries missing from that rankings list, and I bet those are the ones using less energy. Especially considering microstates like Vatican, the statement could be technically correct
I can’t find any info on Vatican City’s energy use, but possibly. You could go even further and compare to not widly recognized countries like sealand, where you have the energy consumption of a residential house or two. But that would be wildly misleading.
Omg it’s the guy from the meme
It’s Sir Lanka, disprover of bullshit
If you want to be snarky, at least be accurate.
I found a blogpost that cites a Business Insider article that implies this claim as formulated is way off:
Reported energy use implies that ChatGPT consumes about as much energy as 20,000 American homes. An average US coal plant generates enough energy for 80,000 American homes every day. This means that even if OpenAI decided to power every one of its billion ChatGPT queries per day entirely on coal, all those queries together would only need one quarter of a single coal plant. ChatGPT is not the reason new coal plants are being opened to power AI data centers.
It goes on to argue that while it’s true that AI related electricity use is booming, it’s not because of LLM chatbots:
AI energy use is going to be a massive problem over the next 5 years. Projections say that by 2030 US data centers could use 9% of the country’s energy (they currently use 4%, mostly due to the internet rather than AI). Globally, data centers might rise from using 1% of the global energy grid to 21% of the grid by 2030. …
97% of the total energy used by AI as of late 2024 is not being used by ChatGPT or similar apps, it’s being used for other services. What are those services? The actual data on which services are using how much energy is fuzzy, but the activities using the most energy are roughly in this order:
* Recommender Systems - Content recommendation engines and personalization models used by streaming platforms, e-commerce sites, social media feeds, and online advertising networks. * Enterprise Analytics & Predictive AI - AI used in business and enterprise settings for data analytics, forecasting, and decision support. * Search & Ad Targeting - The machine learning algorithms behind web search engines and online advertising networks. * Computer vision - AI tasks involving image and video analysis – often referred to as computer vision. It includes models for image classification, object detection, facial recognition, video content analysis, medical image diagnostics, and content moderation (automatically flagging inappropriate images/videos). Examples are the face recognition algorithms used in photo tagging and surveillance, the object detection in self-driving car systems (though inference for autonomous vehicles largely runs on-board, not in data centers, the training of those models is data-center based), and the vision models that power services like Google Lens or Amazon’s image-based product search. * Voice and Audio AI - AI systems that process spoken language or audio signals. The most prominent examples are voice assistants and speech recognition systems – such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and voice-to-text dictation services.You conveniently seem to have left this part from your first linked article out of your argument:
De Vries estimated in the paper that by 2027, the entire AI sector will consume between 85 to 134 terawatt-hours (a billion times a kilowatt-hour) annually.
“You’re talking about AI electricity consumption potentially being half a percent of global electricity consumption by 2027,” de Vries told The Verge. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”
No, I think that gets conveyed in the second half, the argument isn’t that AI as a whole isn’t using a lot of electricity, it’s that this electricity use is being misattributed to LLM chatbots which are only a very small part of it.
You are so incredibly lazy using AI for this lol
How would I have used AI here, it’s mostly quotes from the article? You’re way off anyway, it actually took me a little while to try out different ways of formatting that list in Lemmy and making the hyperlinks in the quotes display correctly, let alone finding this in the first place as it was the source of the graph I had seen somewhere that I was thinking initially of posting, or reading the thing in order to pick out appropriate passages. To be clear, I have put way too much effort into writing internet comments over the years to be using LLMs for that now and I promise you I do not do that.
It’s super interesting that a nicely formatted, bulleted and quoted comment like yours was immediately accused of being Ai. I know that AI generally use a similar format when summarizing, but that’s just because it’s been trained on lots of people writing real summaries.
I’m worried that the new keyboard warriors of the internet are just going to be harassing people with AI accusations. I’ve seen gamedevs accused of having their store page text written by AI, artists who’ve had incredible and personal works doubted, and authors having organized harassment campaigns over false Ai suspicions. People are getting really overzealous about being anti AI and it’s getting a bit irrational.
I think maybe the confusion has to do with how that list at the bottom is meant to be another quote rather than a summary, but since it is a code block that looks different from the other quotes that might imply that it isn’t a quote. Now that I’m looking at things more, in hindsight I should have done it like this:
- list1
- list2
I just didn’t realize it mattered much and figured it cluttered the page less the first way
Miyazaki’s sadness was enough for me. He is right. This is humans losing faith in humans. Trust the machine, not yourself.
That stuff Miyazaki said was before generative AI existed. He was commenting on procedural animation being used poorly in a 3D simulation. It’s fair to apply his sentiment to AI, but he himself was not talking about AI.
Those animations were cursed.
Oh yeah, the presentation he was commenting on did suck, and while what he said to those guys was harsh it was entirely justified.
Also AI is still worse than a human on things like essay writing. Why do I know? Cause I just finished grading midterms!
We have teachers on lemmy; somebody poke it with a stick
His popular AI quote is from 2016 and is missing a lot of context. What he was commenting on isn’t anything like the current generative AI wave. That being said, he doesn’t seem to have publicly rectified it so it might still represent his views.
Agreed. Based on ongoing circumstances and the general response from other high-profile animators in the industry, I am inclined to think that Miyazaki and others at Ghibli are still against AI art. But I also do feel that the quote from 2016 is being reused without the essential context.
Miyazaki opened his response by talking about a friend of his who suffers from a physical disability, which is entirely irrelevant to the topic of generative AI. In context, it was directed at a reinforcement-learning AI model that some artists implemented to try to animate human-like models in unorthodox and unnatural ways, with the proposed utility of using it for zombies or similar. Their suggestion was that these unnatural learned movements are meant to be seen as disturbing and monstrous.
The “insult to life itself” remark was with regards to how they seemed to be making a mockery of disability and, with his friend in mind, was not something he could approve of.
Don’t really see how that doesn’t relate. So its not a reinforcement learning model designed to make animations. Cool, the result is still the same. Humanity losing faith in itself quote really can’t be applied in a different way to only refer to this one specific model that was made to make terrifying animations, it clearly applies to handing all this human made work over to machines that dont understand why we make what we make. The machine, and subsequently the people who created it, were accused by Miyazaki of not knowing suffering. Not having any idea about something they were trying to emulate. This is what struck his core. The lack of empathy or connection to the subject. The root of all of our connections and bonds come from shared experience and empathy. He was speaking on the abandonment of these principles and AI is the epitome of it all.
Thank you, way too many people here who seem to completely misunderstand the nature of Miyazaki’s resentment towards AI.
He was not simply put off by the appearance of the animations, but rather repulsed by the entire process and the idea that machines could ever replicate the creativity of humanity. This is a man that had one of his animators work more than a year on a 4 second shot, refusing to use CGI in any capacity to speed that process up. The notion that he would have anything but contempt for AI is laughable.
I would be interested in seeing the power consumption required to generate for an AI vs an artist, on an individual basis it might not stack up the way people want.
Capitalist dystopia got us comparing ingested calories per unit of art
Fuuuck, comment of the day right here IMO. This hit me.
Maybe about 33% less electricity than human digital art? I don’t feel like calculating this myself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/11v5ovu/comment/jcsj7uy/
I mean it’s not about the convience of writing bullshit emails and generating fun pictures, that can be done locally easily, it’s about these “AI” companies being shit.
You’re not gonna save the world by not using ChatGPT, just like you won’t save all those slaves in Zambia by not buying from Apple, and just like you didn’t destroy Twitter by joining Bluesky.
To have real effect requires systemic change, so if you want to actually make a difference you can do things like canvassing, running for local office positions and school boards, educating friends and family about politics, or try killing a few politicians and tech CEOs. You know, basic stuff.
Also I asked Gemini’s Deep Research to research this for me because why not UwU
Executive Summary
Estimates for the energy consumed by ChatGPT during its training and inference phases vary considerably across different studies, reflecting the complexity of the models and the proprietary nature of the data. Training a model like GPT-3 is estimated to require around 1.3 GWh of electricity1, while more advanced models such as GPT-4 may consume significantly more, with estimates ranging from 1.75 GWh to over 62 GWh.2 Models comparable to GPT-4o are estimated to consume between 43.2 GWh and 54 GWh during training.3 These figures represent substantial energy demands, with the training of GPT-4 potentially exceeding the annual electricity consumption of very small nations multiple times over. The energy used during ChatGPT inference, the process of generating responses to user queries, also presents a wide range of estimates, from 0.3 watt-hours to 2.9 watt-hours per query.4 This translates to an estimated annual energy consumption for inference ranging from approximately 0.23 TWh to 1.06 TWh. This level of energy demand can be comparable to the entire annual electricity consumption of smaller countries like Barbados. The lack of official data from OpenAI and the diverse methodologies employed by researchers contribute to the variability in these estimates, highlighting the challenges in precisely quantifying the energy footprint of these advanced AI systems.4
You’re who the meme is about
You’re who my comment is about.
