[HN Gopher] Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI...
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Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
Author : melling
Score : 132 points
Date : 2024-07-02 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| strangattractor wrote:
| So this is why people eventual become batteries for the matrix.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| Apparently, instead of batteries the original idea was to have
| them be part of a brain based neural net which makes a lot more
| sense than batteries. But this was felt to be too complicated.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I was always bothered by that
| aspect of the movie but your explanation makes a lot more
| sense.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Wow, it would make so much more sense. Humans could be doing
| processing for AI when they are asleep in virtual world and
| what they consider their waking hours with free will would be
| actually a dream so they can regenerate. AI would be syncing
| their dreams and providing structure to maintain illusion
| that it's a real world.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Exactly. Why they gave up on the human collective neural net
| movie plot and replaced it with the human batteries one is
| beyond me. It makes no sense, humans make terrible batteries.
|
| If the machines from the Matrix needed to use some mammals as
| batteries, why not just use cows instead of humans? They'd be
| much more complacent with living in the Matrix, grazing on
| virtual fields, and less likely to wise up and try to escape
| and rebel against the machines since they're not very
| intelligent and the machines would need a lot less processing
| power to simulate a realistic cow world than the world in
| 1999 for humans.
|
| To wit, if someone has access to a lot of GPU compute, could
| you please use gen-AI to re-make the Matrix but with the
| characters as cows, I'd pay to watch it. Would definitely
| beat Matrix Resurrections or whatever that cash grab turd was
| called.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| It's an easy analogy to say in <10 seconds that non-
| technical people can understand. Had they not mentioned
| "bioelectricity" at all, it might have been harder to
| nitpick.
| affgrff3 wrote:
| I came up with this explanation to make me enjoy the movie
| more: The world outside the matrix is not the real world,
| but just another layer by the machines for obfuscation. In
| the real real world humans are actually used as processing
| units but since it is easier for the humans to accept and
| not ask further questions, the intermediate level with
| humans as batteries is introduced by the machines.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial.
| Consumers are not demanding AI.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Source?
| morkalork wrote:
| Gemini's terrible search answers didn't become a viral meme
| because people liked and appreciated it.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Businesses and wealthy people want AI so they can lay people
| off and hold onto their money, and build stuff faster to
| capture more marketshare / power.
|
| There wasn't demand for computers either. Or, the industrial
| revolution.
|
| AI is a competitive advantage for those that can leverage it.
| Swizec wrote:
| Consumers ask for AI all the time. Their requests sound like
| this: - "Google search is drowned by SEO, I
| can't find anything anymore" - "Wow all these ads suck"
| - "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots" -
| "My job applications all go into a black hole" - "LoL
| gmail can't even find emails I know are there" - "Ffs
| stop autocorrecting to duck" - "Oh wow we can't even
| say 'vagina' anymore because The Algorithm" - "Support
| doesn't even read my message, why do I bother" - "I
| can't keep up with all my inboxes" - "This meeting
| should've been an email" - "The press release makes no
| sense, can someone translate corporatespeak?" - "Ecomm
| sites are awful why can't I just find what I'm looking for?"
|
| etc.
|
| We already use AI for all sorts of things. This will only
| accelerate. Half the things that used to be AI aren't even
| called AI anymore. That's because "AI" is a marketing label.
| When a technology becomes mundane, it ceases to be called AI
| and we find something new.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Those sound like requests for _not_ AI.
|
| > "Google search is drowned by SEO, I can't find anything
| anymore"
|
| It's now powered by AI. [0]
|
| > "Wow all these ads suck"
|
| Well, they're powered by AI. [1]
|
| > "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots"
|
| Yeah, mostly because the social media feed is all low-
| effort stuff generated with AI. [2]
|
| > "My job applications all go into a black hole"
|
| Likely because of an AI screening tool. [3]
|
| [0] https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-
| great-sear...
|
| [1] https://ads.google.com/intl/en_us/home/campaigns/ai-
| powered-...
|
| [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/91113437/ai-making-meta-
| apps-bas...
|
| [3] https://compensationxl.com/companies-are-using-ai-in-
| their-h...
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Are you sure they're asking for AI? It sounds to me like
| they are asking for the Internet to be turned off.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| How would you describe the behavior of Character.AI's millions
| of users if not demand? Who's paying OpenAI their billions of
| revenue? You can argue about how _durable_ the demand for AI
| is, but I don 't see how it's tenable anymore to claim it
| doesn't exist.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > How would you describe the behavior of Character.AI's
| millions of users if not demand?
|
| "Disturbing"?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It seems to me that "I'm disturbed by consumer demand for
| AI" is different than and contradictory to "consumers are
| not demanding AI".
| nytesky wrote:
| You ask a good question. Who is paying for AI, and is OpenAI
| profitable. A lot of the demand is there when cost is
| subsidized by investors -- will it continue when price
| actually must bare costs and profits?
| umvi wrote:
| I'm demanding more/better code-completion style AI for sure.
| It's an invaluable part of my workflow now and I'm happy paying
| a monthly fee for the service.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Sure, but you are paying for that. It also has nothing to do
| with the bizarre and untrustworthy AI answers being shoved
| into Google and Bing search results, or Facebook's terrible
| AI search bar.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's become a really indispensable productivity boosting
| tool. Code, translation, broad research, summarization,
| writing drafts, finding that word you know but just can't
| remember, making up terrible puns... the list goes on.
|
| Hours of work compressed into a minute or two at most.
| peppertree wrote:
| Pretty sure people said the same about fiber internet in the
| 2000's.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| People also said the same thing about NFTs, and they were
| correct.
|
| I think "AI" will eventually have more consumer facing uses,
| but the current crop is incapable of telling truth from
| fiction which severely limits the appeal to Google's main
| user base. OpenAI is riding on hope and it feels like Google
| is chasing after that application to avoid looking like they
| are behind, but it's not clear that actual customer demand is
| looking for Google to offer such half baked technology.
| organsnyder wrote:
| And that's still somewhat true. I'm up at our cottage right
| now, where we have 300mbps cable internet. The upstream is
| paltry (10mbps), but I haven't really felt it impacting my
| work (and my kids are still able to stream everything they'd
| like, too). Sure, I miss the 5gbps symmetrical we have at
| home, but in reality there's not a huge real impact.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| People said the same thing about the Segway, and 3D TVs, and
| NFTs
| sva_ wrote:
| > _A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman
| wrote in 1998, "The growth of the Internet will slow
| drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'--which states
| that the number of potential connections in a network is
| proportional to the square of the number of participants--
| becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each
| other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the
| Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the
| fax machine's."_
|
| - https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/pau
| l...
| omnicognate wrote:
| I'm all for doing down Nobel prize winning Paul Nobel prize
| winning Krugman and his Nobel prize (did you know he got a
| Nobel prize?) but as hideously as most of that has aged the
| bit about most people having nothing to say to each other
| was spot on.
| sva_ wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're just being snarky, and I guess the
| qualifier ' _most_ ' before ' _people_ ' makes your
| statement irrefutable, but I personally have met a lot of
| people on the internet with whom I've had meaningful
| conversations.
|
| I met many of them as well - friends and relationship
| partners alike. Most people nowadays date through the
| internet, and I'm sure a lot of those will live a happy
| live together.
|
| In fact, by the end of this year, I'm going to marry a
| girl who's from the other side of this planet, and I
| would never have met her without the internet.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| ... and they were right, and there was a massive destruction
| of capital invested in companies that installed dark fiber
| and went bankrupt. The difference was that the dark fiber
| then got lit later on, because it was useful physical
| infrastructure.
|
| The same cannot be said of the present AI boondoggles.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| ChatGPT is the fastest product in history to reach 100M MAUs.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-on-track-to-surpass-1...
|
| Consumers are definitely demanding something like ChatGPT.
| Other companies are trying to ride the wave, and their attempts
| often feel forced as they're trying to inject LLMs where they
| don't really belong.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It was/is free. All that proves is people have faster access
| to news.
|
| Lets see what it's DAUs are on a long term basis.
| llama_drama wrote:
| Is it possible, in general, to know where something belongs
| -- whether it's an LLM or anything else -- before you try?
| brink wrote:
| Exactly. I was the first to adopt nearly every new technology
| in my family growing up. With AI, I query claude like twice a
| week for things that a search engine never gives to me straight
| like - "How long do I cook a rack of ribs?", but it's not
| something I'm about to pay $20/mo for, which is the only way
| that AI is sustainable. I use it sparingly, and I only use it
| because it's free. There's just not much appeal to something as
| unreliable as AI.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Consumers were not demanding the internet or computers either.
| But it turns out they were useful for consumers and especially
| for the profits of capitalists. People may not like it but AI
| will be an important part of our lives soon.
| alecco wrote:
| I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones
| trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy
| consumption.
|
| Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence
| massive Utah Data Center? (for example)
| bogota wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear that it's easy to sell rage against
| companies right now. News just tells people what they want to
| hear in this age
| kortilla wrote:
| Because the NSA doesn't care about their public image or
| energy consumption. Google at one time did so this makes them
| pretty big hypocrites
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yeah. Public pressure might actually work against Google,
| but it's unlikely to work against the NSA so easily.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm curious for your perspective:
|
| It seems clear that the article is not about arbitrary
| data center usage, it's about a large increase in data
| center usage at Google, attributable to AI.
|
| The initial premise of the thread was "Why isn't this
| about (arbitrary data center other than Google)?"
|
| Isn't that easily answered by: because it's about the
| delta, and the context of AI, where Google is perceived
| behind, and Satya famously pointed out the energy demands
| x their margins puts them in a strategic situation with
| only bad choices?
|
| Witb that context, do you believe this is attributable to
| someone picking what to write articles about, based on
| how much they'll be able to influence them to change
| their behavior?
| rtkwe wrote:
| It was talked about a lot when it was first opened, news
| massively biases towards new topics.
| rpeden wrote:
| Bias toward new topics is why it's called news. Otherwise,
| we'd have to call it olds.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think it's right to characterize this as a hit piece.
| They're reporting on a document Google published, using
| Google's numbers and framing. If Google didn't want people to
| talk about their carbon consumption they would presumably not
| have published this report.
| refulgentis wrote:
| What's new to me?
|
| A couple year ramp in phrasing like "hit piece" used to
| describe mundane news.
|
| Put another way: I see a ramp in use of hit piece for writing,
| where _not_ writing, given you have the info, would be
| described as _a cover up_.
| zamalek wrote:
| Grok's ASIC is pretty efficient afaik.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| We can care about two things at the same time. This isn't a
| "hit piece", it's reporting on Google's own 2024 environmental
| report.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| No you can't that's why the attention economy is very
| competitive
| kolinko wrote:
| MS and Apple seem to be doing an awesome job as well
| skywhopper wrote:
| The NSA's data center is a drop in the bucket compared to the
| hundreds of similar data centers operated by Google, Amazon,
| Microsoft, Facebook, et al. And I would not call increasing
| your power consumption YoY by 13% or whatever it was to be
| "trying". To the extent they are trying, it's only to squeeze
| the value out of their real estate and to avoid blowing their
| transformers. They can spin that as "saving energy" until
| something like LLMs with their GPU requirements comes along.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's because the NSA's "massive" datacenter is actually tiny,
| cannot contain the things that paranoid people think it
| contains, cannot do the things weirdos imagine it does.
| TheGamerUncle wrote:
| pretty sure lol that what snowden has shown reveals you are
| quite wrong
| jsiepkes wrote:
| And once again a big tech company proves that as soon as their
| "principes" are put to the test they will abandon them almost
| instantly.
|
| When buying some wind energy was easy and wasn't really a trade-
| off they were quick to use big phrases like being "committed to
| the planet" and such. Commitments seem to be rather "flexible"
| with these companies.
| moandcompany wrote:
| They said they were an "AI-first company" :)
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Microsoft: spends an absolute fortune on AI compute.
|
| Also Microsoft: Here, take this "carbon aware" Windows Update.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I mean they're just doing what the oil companies did to great
| success for decades, the bullshit about buying a hybrid or
| electric car, or recycling^1 your plastic. Why reckon with
| the impact of your global industry on the planet and have to
| answer hard questions when you can just make it the consumers
| fault and guilt powerless people into using a canvas bag^2
| instead of a plastic one, despite the fact that the only
| reason all the fucking plastic bags exist is because your
| company is making them by the billion?
|
| 1: If you want to get angry, look into what an utter farce
| plastic recycling is.
|
| 2: Not that reusable bags are a bad thing in the slightest, I
| just don't like being condescended to for using a free
| resource provided at point of sale by a multi-national
| conglomerate that's burning the world and then turning around
| to chide me for having a slightly older car than I otherwise
| could.
| MicolashKyoka wrote:
| meaningless stat in the grand scheme of things. eventually, it
| will all transition to nuclear/solar. the question is does it
| move the needle in a meaningful way right now. so much hand
| wringing about carbon emissions only for germany to end up
| burning coal again.
| timeon wrote:
| Germany meme is nice, but it is probably just a dent in global
| coal use that breaks new record almost every year. Transition
| to nuclear/solar is still fantasy.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
|
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
| Frieren wrote:
| I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-
| currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in
| the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business.
|
| The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of
| electricity.
|
| There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies
| developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and
| problematic than useful. AI future (and present) is on analyzing
| big chunks of data about chemical bounds, traffic-flow,
| astronomical observations, etc.
|
| But all that really useful AI is not attracting the kind of
| investment that flashy consumer-oriented chat-bots are getting.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| For what it's worth, _all_ of that really useful AI you
| mention(and then some!) is attracting the kind of investment
| you want, you just don 't hear about it because it's not
| interesting to the average person.
| ETH_start wrote:
| There is reason to be cautious about every kind of endeavor
| where the potential for enrichment can cloud judgment. However,
| the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the
| magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental
| societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are
| on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat
| bots.
| piva00 wrote:
| > However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this
| radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in
| specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for
| that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial,
| and that includes chat bots.
|
| The improvements it can be dreamed of to the bottom line of
| companies by replacing expensive labour are massive, that's
| why it got US$ 1tn Capex downed into it as noted in another
| article from Goldman Sachs shared today on HN.
|
| It doesn't mean it's massively beneficial to societal
| functions, a bigger case for that would be a clean, and
| massively cheap energy source (if fusion turned out to be
| viable and scalable, for example) but we don't see US$ 1tn
| poured into the pursuit of that because it does not promise
| improving companies' bottom line in a short time frame.
|
| AI can definitely turn out to be a panacea but more and more
| grifters are attaching themselves to it, and the companies
| churning out the most advances of it are not really invested
| in improving society as a whole, that's the marketing speak
| used but we in tech have seen those empty promises of utopian
| changes turning out to be just smoke and mirrors for the
| surveillance capitalism age to set in.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _AI can definitely turn out to be a panacea but more and
| more grifters are attaching themselves to it, and the
| companies churning out the most advances of it are not
| really invested in improving society as a whole_
|
| I came to see the "AI hype" not as reminiscent of crypto-
| hype, but of _dot-com boom_. Lots of grifters attached
| themselves to this new Internet thing. Lots of bullshit
| products was made. Lots of people lost their shirt through
| this. That had no bearing on how useful the Internet was,
| and turned out to be. And so today, we also have a lot of
| AI-grifters, and this also doesn 't mean the underlying
| tech is bogus.
| sva_ wrote:
| Not sure if energy use is a sufficient criteria to dismiss some
| technology. This universe progresses by turning low entropy
| energy into high entropy energy, which the use of energy is
| doing. So it seems to be closely tied.
|
| Making processes more energy-efficient is only really a good
| thing as long as it retains its effectiveness.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| > Not sure if energy use is a sufficient criteria to dismiss
| some technology. This universe progresses by turning low
| entropy energy into high entropy energy, which the use of
| energy is doing.
|
| What is the connection between those two sentences?
| smus wrote:
| I currently save so much time a day using chatbots lol
| williamcotton wrote:
| I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful.
|
| I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project:
|
| https://github.com/williamcotton/guish
|
| I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool.
| Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my
| time and I wouldn't have done much else.
| JasonSage wrote:
| Parent did not claim that LLMs are not useful. Parent also
| acknowledges that AI is not a temporary phenomenon.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| OP does downplay them ("more dystopian and problematic than
| useful"). For one, it's a nonsensical statement because
| dystopia and problems are not comparable to utility. A
| generous read of what they meant might be: LLMs are not
| very useful, and are dystopian and problematic in some
| vague way.
|
| Do you believe parent thinks LLMs are very useful? They
| clearly think the real value of AI comes from limited
| applications of ML to science, simulations, optimizations,
| etc instead of general-purpose automation and capabilities
| that LLMs provide.
| muglug wrote:
| So three years ago you'd spend less time with your kids in
| order to write a 2,000-line FOSS app for understanding Bash
| scripts?
|
| I'm not sure that's a good thing.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| Exactly, you agree: the lack of LLMs is not good. LLMs
| turned a bad outcome into a good one.
| zamalek wrote:
| It turns out AI will kill us, but not in the way that the
| billionaires were paranoid about. Who needs guns when a planet-
| sized gas chamber will do?
| gmm1990 wrote:
| the infinite paper clip machine concept was prescient
| kens wrote:
| The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to
| the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year,
| "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and
| supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The
| supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting
| of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50%
| surge due to AI.
|
| Google's document is at:
| https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e...
| See pdf page 8 / document page 7 for details, as well as the
| graph on page 32/31.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Maybe AI summarized the document for the reporter.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline
| doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is
| straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often
| within that document. It's directly from Google, and is
| significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As
| we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions
| may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's
| clear that AI advancements are the biggest hurdle in terms of
| energy use and therefore CO2 emissions for Google.
| qeternity wrote:
| It doesn't say "versus last year", but it does say: "Google's
| emissions also increased 13% year over year in 2023, per the
| report."
| thethirdone wrote:
| What is the surrounding text for "versus last year"? I
| cannot find "versus" or "year" in the article.
| ajross wrote:
| It's indeed pretty spun. Some quick googling shows that real
| GDP is up 11.5% from 2019-2024, which makes up a bunch of the
| "effect" right there (obviously datacenter power isn't
| directly tied to economic activity as a first principles
| thing, but like everything else at scale it's going to be
| pretty darn close).
|
| Of the remainder, I get an average yearly increase of... 5.8%
| over the time period in question. I mean, that's an effect,
| but it's certainly not a big one.
| pkage wrote:
| Claiming that emissions surged 50% due exclusively to AI (as
| in the headline) is unsupported by the Google report, which
| is the article's singular source.
|
| Again, looking at the graph of emissions at Google on pg 31,
| it's clear that the increase is linear after a dip 2019-2020
| and the report identifies supply chain issues as a major
| source of emissions in addition to datacenter electricity
| costs--again, notably _not_ specifically calling out their AI
| training /inference costs as a reason for their increase. The
| report does identify AI as a challenge going forwards,
| however that's not the same as saying it's exclusively
| responsible for the last 5 years of emissions.
| thethirdone wrote:
| The article does a good job of clearly stating that the 48%
| is compared to 2019, but words like "surge" and "spike" do
| not closely match that factual basis and imho are misleading.
|
| Attributing the 48% to AI specifically is largely baseless
| though. From my skim, the Google report does not make any
| specific claims about the increase in datacenter emission
| coming from AI. The closest claims are on page 12 where "the
| rapid advancement of AI has brought necessary increased
| attention to its energy consumption and resource demands" is
| juxtaposed with "total data center electricity consumption
| grew 17%"
|
| In particular the third "key point" seems highly misleading.
|
| > The company attributed the emissions spike to an increase
| in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions
| driven by rapid advancements in and demand for AI.
|
| The word "spike" does not occur in the document and the 48%
| number is never close to a mention of AI. While the 17%
| "spike" may have been attributed to AI by Google, I think it
| is clear the document does not attribute the 48% to AI.
| asdff wrote:
| 48% increase since 2019 still sounds pretty bad to me. Not like
| any of their products improved in that time.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Let's not forget what happened in 2020: _the world went into
| lockdown over COVID-19_. Everyone was trying to do emergency
| gear-shift into remote work, and the demand for online
| collaboration services - and supporting infrastructure -
| exploded.
|
| That IMO can easily account for majority of the increase
| since 2019, and it seems that this is another example of why
| you have to be suspicious of any average that includes
| pandemic years in its range. 2020-2022 was a unique period in
| all kinds of ways.
|
| EDIT: Google's document even acknowledges that, in footnote
| 103 linked to from page 32. Quoting:
|
| _Although 2020 was the most recent emissions inventory
| available at the time the target was set, 2020 was deemed to
| not be representative of a typical year, because operations
| were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The next most recent
| year with representative data, 2019, was selected as the base
| year._
| icehawk wrote:
| Google's own numbers say 2020 the smallest YoY increase.
|
| Difference between 2019 and 2020: +2.901 TWh
|
| Difference between 2020 and 2021: +3.149 TWh
|
| Difference between 2021 and 2022: +3.489 TWh
|
| Difference between 2022 and 2023: +3.531 TWh
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to_ 2019*
|
| That's a smoking gun, alright. If you compare today to just
| before the pandemic, you're going to get all kinds of weird
| results that can mostly be attributed to the world working in
| emergency mode for 2020-2022.
| klyrs wrote:
| Timnit Gebru was fired in late 2020 for publicly examining the
| energy consumption of LLMs, perhaps that would be a more
| poignant start-time.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Gebru's estimates of AI energy consumption were adopted from
| Strubell. Strubell's estimates of AI energy consumption are
| ridiculous and according to David Patterson range from 88x to
| 10000x high. My humble opinion on the affair is that the
| conflict between Gebru and the rest of the company arose from
| Gebru's refusal to use the best and most comprehensive
| information on AI energy consumption, that is what they had
| access to firsthand as a privilege of being a Google insider.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240702163550if_/https://www.gs...
|
| page 31:
|
| "In 2023, our total GHG emissions were 14.3 million tCO2e
| [metric tons of carbon dioxide], representing a 13% year-over-
| year increase and a 48% increase compared to our 2019 target
| base year. This result was primarily due to increases in data
| center energy consumption and supply chain emissions. As we
| further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may
| be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the
| greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated
| with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure
| investment."
|
| "...reducing emissions may be challenging..."
|
| The supposed justification for this level of pollution and
| water use [see page 42] is debatable. The expected profits are
| highly speculative.
|
| What seems more clear is that unless things change it is going
| to to nigh impossible for young people to rise to challenges of
| climate change while simultaneously being addicted to
| mobile/Wifi internet access. Disconnecting a kid today from the
| internet is like separating a junkie from their drugs.
| seydor wrote:
| Scaling hypothesis baby! maybe the bitter lesson wasn't so bitter
| after all
| v101 wrote:
| Nice, carbon is good for flora!
| philipkglass wrote:
| Here's the underlying report that this CNBC story is based on:
| https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e...
|
| The key driver for the CO2 growth is "scope 2" emissions, mainly
| electricity demand from data centers. See pages 34-38 in the PDF
| for the definition of scope 2 emissions and overall progress on
| running data centers with carbon free energy. They're currently
| at 63% CFE, the same as in 2022, but absolute growth in
| electricity consumption also meant absolute growth in emissions
| from the other 37%.
| slashdave wrote:
| In my imagination, I picture a long-time Google employer who
| spent his/her entire career dutifully pouring over every minutia
| of their search infrastructure to squeeze the most performance
| out of every watt, in a quest to make Google a better, more
| environmentally friendly company. And then comes AI...
| xnx wrote:
| > And then comes AI...
|
| And the optimization work they did is even more significant and
| useful?
| xnx wrote:
| Google's latest environmental report posted today:
| https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024...
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