[HN Gopher] AI's energy footprint
___________________________________________________________________
AI's energy footprint
Author : pseudolus
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-05-20 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| mentalgear wrote:
| When companies make ESG claims, sensible measurement and open
| traceability should always be the first proof they must provide.
| Without these, and validation from a credible independent entity
| such as a non-profit or government agency, all ESG claims from
| companies are merely PR puff pieces to keep the public at bay
| (especially in "AI").
| stevage wrote:
| esg?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Environmental/Social/Governance. From Wikipedia:
|
| Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is shorthand for
| an investing principle that prioritizes environmental issues,
| social issues, and corporate governance.
| kkarakk wrote:
| when has ESG not been FUD or a way to bypass sanctions from
| poorly thought out climate change targets?
| mg wrote:
| The brain uses 20% of the human body's energy.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if mankind will evolve similar to an
| organism and use 20% of all energy it produces on AI. Which is
| about 10x of what we use for software at the moment.
|
| But then more AI also means more physical activity. When robots
| drive cars, we will have more cars driving around. When robots
| build houses, we will have more houses being built, etc. So
| energy usage will probably go up exponentially.
|
| At the moment, the sun sends more energy to earth in an hour than
| humans use in a year. So the sun alone will be able to power this
| for the foreseeable future.
| amelius wrote:
| One problem: all this energy is eventually turned into heat ...
| mg wrote:
| Most of the sunlight that hits a roof is already turned into
| heat. Whether you use that for calculations or not does not
| make a difference.
|
| Not sure about the exact numbers, but I guess that at the
| moment normal roofs and solar panels absorb very roughly
| about the same percentage of sunlight.
|
| So if in the future solar panels become more efficient, then
| yes, the amount of sunlight turned into heat could double.
|
| Maybe that can be offset by covering other parts of earth
| with reflective materials or finding a way to send the heat
| back into the universe more effectively.
| amelius wrote:
| What if you put a solar farm in a desert, though?
|
| And also, people should paint their roofs white.
| vmg12 wrote:
| > When robots drive cars, we will have more cars driving around
|
| This doesn't seem true. In SF, waymo with 300 cars does more
| rides than lyft with 45k drivers. If self driving cars
| interleave different tasks based on their routes I imagine they
| would be much more efficient per mile.
| mg wrote:
| Existing rides will be done more efficiently but since rides
| are so much cheaper without a driver, much more rides will be
| done.
|
| A car driving from A to B will cost less than 50% of the
| current price. Which will unlock a huge amount of new rides.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Is it really only 300 cars? They feel like they're
| everywhere!
| simonw wrote:
| I thought it was more than that too, but according to
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/alphab...
|
| > _With more than 700 vehicles in its fleet - 300 of which
| operate in San Francisco - Waymo is the only U.S. firm that
| runs uncrewed robotaxis that collect fares._
|
| Those numbers are from April 2025.
| floxy wrote:
| >We've also incrementally grown our commercial fleet as
| we've welcomed more riders, with over 1,500 vehicles
| across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin.
|
| https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/scaling-our-fleet-through-
| us-...
| asdff wrote:
| If waymo is doing more rides with 300 cars than 45k drivers
| on lyft, we can assume then that waymo cars are on the road
| serving customers at least 150x as long of time as a lyft
| driver. So yes it could really mean more cars are "around"
| even if the fleet is much smaller.
| floxy wrote:
| >This doesn't seem true.
|
| Seems like we are way too early in the adoption curve to
| tell. Currently the average number of passengers per trip is
| >1.0 across the whole fleet. Some day, I'd expect that to dip
| below 1.0, as people send an empty car to pick up the dog
| from the vet, or circle the block to avoid having to pay for
| parking, etc.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| > energy usage will probably go up exponentially
|
| kindof sounds like Jevons paradox?
| https://wiki.froth.zone/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| briandear wrote:
| Why not nuclear?
| mg wrote:
| Building and running a nuclear reactor involves a lot of
| physical activity. And if the past is an indicator, we always
| move from physical activity to the flow of electrons.
|
| The discussion about nuclear vs solar remind me of the
| discussions about spinning HDs versus solid state drives when
| they were new.
| carunenjoyerlp wrote:
| HDDs build the backbone of all large storage systems, they
| serve many purposes today. Magnetic tape is still in use
| too
| Scarblac wrote:
| But the article says that energy use by AI is 48% _more_ carbon
| intensive than the US average. So talk of solar power is a red
| herring -- that 's not what it is running on now.
| mg wrote:
| I am thinking about the future here.
|
| I don't think there will be much carbon intensive energy
| creation in a few decades from now. It does not make sense
| economically.
| Scarblac wrote:
| You said "for the foreseeable future", which I interpret as
| being about now.
|
| Anyway I hope you're right, but so far global CO2 output is
| still growing. All the other energy has only come on top of
| carbon intensive energy, it hasn't replaced any of it.
| Every time we build more, we find new ways of spending that
| much energy and more.
| mg wrote:
| Seeing 20 years into the future is quite possible in some
| aspects.
|
| I remember how me and my friends discovered email in 1999
| and were like "Yay, in the future we'll all do this
| instead of sending letters!". And it took about 20 years
| until letters were largely replaced by email and the web.
| And when the first videos appeared on the web, it was
| quite clear to us that they would replace DVDs.
|
| Similar with the advent of self driving cars and solar
| energy I think.
| asdff wrote:
| This assumes no technological adaptions towards efficiency.
| Consider yourself walking a mile and the energy expenditure. It
| isn't insignificant. Now imagine you have a bicycle. Some
| bicyclists will train and do century rides, a distance that
| were never possible merely walking for a day. But these are few
| bikers overall, most will not maximize capability to that
| extent but will still be taking advantage of the efficiency of
| the bike.
| adrianN wrote:
| The important part remains internalizing emission costs into the
| price of electricity. Fussing over individual users seems like a
| distraction to me. Rapid decarbonization of electricity is
| necessary regardless of who uses it. Demand will soar anyway as
| we electrify transportation, heating, and industry.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I agree but reducing consumption or increase of efficiency are
| still very important aspects of the energy transition. What is
| not consumed does not need to be generated.
| adrianN wrote:
| Yeah, but pricing signals are a good way of reaching those
| goals.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Businesses will only start doing that in significant amounts
| when carbon emissions are priced according to their
| environmental impact.
| Lerc wrote:
| I don't think it a given that reducing energy consumption is
| a required part of the transition.
|
| Increasing demand can lead to stimulus of green energy
| production.
| Uehreka wrote:
| There's no rule that increased demand will necessarily
| stimulate green energy production, only that it will
| stimulate energy production. And getting people to care
| about climate gets tougher, not easier, when energy demand
| goes up.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Sometimes I see chatter about using solar or nuclear or
| whatever power for data centers, thereby making them "clean,"
| and it's frustrating that there isn't always the
| acknowledgement that the clean energy could displace other
| dirty generation.
|
| Even with things like orphaned natural gas that gets flared
| otherwise - rescuing the energy is great but we could use it
| for many things, not just LLMs or bitcoin mining!
| nostrademons wrote:
| If you internalize emissions costs into the price of
| electricity, reduced consumption will happen naturally.
| Precisely nobody likes higher energy bills, so there's a
| natural incentive to reduce consumption as long as you're
| paying for it.
| delusional wrote:
| "internalizing emissions" is the kind of thing that's
| really easy to say, even conceptualize, but really
| difficult to implement.
|
| You could do it better than we are doing now, but you'll
| always have people saying: "that's unfair, why are you
| picking on me"
| Proofread0592 wrote:
| > When you ask an AI model to write you a joke or generate a
| video of a puppy, that query comes with a small but measurable
| energy toll and an associated amount of emissions spewed into the
| atmosphere. Given that each individual request often uses less
| energy than running a kitchen appliance for a few moments, it may
| seem insignificant.
|
| > But as more of us turn to AI tools, these impacts start to add
| up. And increasingly, you don't need to go looking to use AI:
| It's being integrated into every corner of our digital lives.
|
| Forward looking, I imagine this will be the biggest factor in
| increasing energy demands for AI: companies shoving it into
| products that nobody wants or needs.
| Uehreka wrote:
| In the short term perhaps, but even without carbon pricing the
| raw electricity prices will probably tamp down the enthusiasm.
| At someone point it'll become cool for activist investors to
| demand to see ROI for AI features on earnings calls, and then
| the fat will get trimmed just like any other trend that goes
| too far.
|
| I think the bigger underrated concern is if LLMs fall into an
| unfortunate bucket where they are in fact generally useful, but
| not in ways that help us decarbonize our energy supply (or that
| do, but not enough to offset their own energy usage).
| keybored wrote:
| Try to buy something that isn't wrapped in three layers of
| plastic. Or that isn't made of plastic itself. Then go to the
| checkout and see their "PSA" about how asking for a plastic bag
| to carry your plastic merchandise kills the planet.
|
| I'm sorry. I'm being blocked by some mysterious force from
| understanding what "actual human" means. And I don't know how
| to get you in contact with your car manufacturer. Would you
| like me to repeat my 20 step suggestion on how to troubleshoot
| "why does my shitty car put the A/C on freezer mode whenever
| "Indian Summer" tops the charts in Bulgaria", but with more
| festive emojis?
| BewareTheYiga wrote:
| http://archive.today/mnHb8
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The book "AI Atlas" covers the energy and other costs of AI.
| emushack wrote:
| Link?
| simonw wrote:
| You mean this one? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_AI
|
| It's from 2021 so won't cover the 2022-onwards generative AI
| boom.
|
| From the Wikipedia summary it sounds like it's about machine
| learning algorithms like classification, AlphaGo and concerns
| about ethics of training and bias.
| briandear wrote:
| What's the net energy footprint of an employee working in an
| office whose job was made redundant by AI? Of course that human
| will likely have another job, but what's the math of a person who
| was doing tedium solved by AI and now can do something more
| productive that AI can't necessarily do. In other words, let's
| calculate the "economic output per energy unit expended."
|
| On that note, what's the energy footprint of the return to office
| initiatives that many companies have initiated?
| Scarblac wrote:
| When human civilization crashes due to yearly climate change
| caused famines it won't matter how useful the work done by the
| AIs was.
| folkrav wrote:
| > Of course that human will likely have another job, but what's
| the math of a person who was doing tedium solved by AI and now
| can do something more productive that AI can't necessarily do
|
| That's a lot of big assumptions - that the job getting replaced
| was tedious in the first place, that those other "more
| productive" job exists, that the thing AI can't necessarily do
| will stay that way long enough for it not to be taken over by
| AI as well, that the tediousness was not part of the point
| (e.g. art)...
| carunenjoyerlp wrote:
| Net energy change of people doing work on their desk versus
| browsing the internet versus playing games, you will likely not
| see difference at all. They're all at rest, more or less
| thinking something. People at home sofa always have metabolic
| processes running regardless of whether it produces additional
| value to some corporation
| lm28469 wrote:
| > a person who was doing tedium solved by AI and now can do
| something more productive that AI can't necessarily do.
|
| Like driving a uber or delivering food on a bicycle ? Amazing!
| est31 wrote:
| I wonder how the energy requirements are distributed between
| training and inference. Training should be extremely flexible, so
| one can only train when the sun shines and nobody uses the huge
| amount of solar power, or only when the wind turbines turn.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| AFAICT the energy cost of training is still fairly low compared
| to cost of GPU's themselves so especially during a land grab
| it's important to drive as near as possible full utilization of
| the GPU's, energy be damned.
|
| I doubt this is going to change.
|
| That said, the flip side of energy cost being not a big factor
| is that you could probably eat the increase of energy cost by a
| factor of say 2 and this could possibly enable installation of
| short term (say 12h) battery storage to enable you to use only
| intermittent clean energy AND drive 100% utilization.
| carunenjoyerlp wrote:
| >you might think it's like measuring a car's fuel economy or a
| dishwasher's energy rating: a knowable value with a shared
| methodology for calculating it. You'd be wrong.
|
| But everyone knows fuel economy is everything but a knowable
| value. Everything from if it has rained in the past four hours to
| temperature to loading of the vehicle to the chemical composition
| of the fuel (HVO vs traditional), how worn are your tires? Are
| they installed the right way? Are your brakes lagging? The
| possibilities are endless. You could end up with twice the
| consumption.
|
| By the way, copy-pasting from the website is terrible on desktop
| firefox, the site just lags every second, for a second.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| fuel economy, like blood glucose levels, is impacted by many
| factors, but you can measure it over time. you might not be
| able to prescribe a course of action but you can make
| corrections to the course you're already on.
| emushack wrote:
| I would like to see more data centers make use of large-scale Oil
| Immersion-Cooling. I feel like the fresh water use for cooling is
| a huge issue.
|
| https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10101126
| carunenjoyerlp wrote:
| Isn't water just the transfer medium between the server and the
| heat exchangers outside? How would changing that to oil help?
| chneu wrote:
| It wouldn't really help.
|
| Oil might be able to carry more heat but it's more expensive
| to use.
|
| Oil immersion is something nerds like to think is amazing but
| it's just a pain in the ass for negligible benefits. Imagine
| the annoyance of doing maintenance.
| asdff wrote:
| Wouldn't it be no different but your hands get a little
| oily? Say you take out a ram stick, oil goes into the empty
| dimm slot, but so what because its displaced again when you
| put in the new ram stick.
| lxgr wrote:
| There are various data center cooling techniques, and not all
| of them use water. As a result, water usage, and water usage
| efficiency, vary wildly:
|
| https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/
|
| https://datacenters.microsoft.com/sustainability/efficiency/
| giantg2 wrote:
| With all the issues and inefficiencies listed, there is a lot of
| room for improvement. I'm hopeful that just as the stat they give
| for data center energy not rising from 2005-2017, so to will the
| AI energy needs flatten in a few years. GPUs are not very
| efficient. Switching to more task specific hardware will provide
| more efficiency eventually. This is already happening a little
| with stuff like TPUs.
| Lerc wrote:
| The point that stood out to me as concerning was
|
| _" The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was
| 48% higher than the US average."_
|
| I'd be fine with as many data centers as they want if they
| stimulated production of clean energy to run them.
|
| But that quote links to another article by the same author. Which
| says
|
| _" Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly
| "dirty." Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing
| regions, like Virginia, the "carbon intensity" of the energy they
| use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was
| published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that
| 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of
| electricity that are dirtier than the national average. _"
|
| Which in turn links to https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09786
|
| Which puts the bulk of that 48% higher claim on
|
| _" The average carbon intensity of the US data centers in our
| study (weighted by the energy they consumed) was 548 grams of
| CO2e per kilowatt hour (kWh), approximately 48% higher than the
| US national average of 369 gCO2e / kWh (26)."_
|
| Which points to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-
| intensity-electric...
|
| For the average of 369g/KWh. That's close enough to the figure in
| the table at
| https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-01/egrid2022...
|
| which shows 375g/KWh (after converting from lb/MWh)
|
| But the table they compare against shows. VA
| 576g/KWh TX 509g/KWh CA 374g/KWh
|
| and the EPA table shows VA 268g/KWh TX
| 372g/KWh CA 207g/KWh
|
| Which seem more likely to be true. The paper has California at
| only marginally better than the national average for renewables
| (Which I guess they needed to support their argument given the
| number of data centers there)
|
| I like arxiv, It's a great place to see new ideas, the fields I
| look at have things that I can test myself to see if the idea
| actually works. I would not recommend it as a source of truth.
| Peer review still has a place.
|
| If they were gathering emissions data from states themselves,
| they should have caclulated the average from that data, not
| pulled the average from another potentially completely different
| measure. Then their conclusions would have been valid regardless
| what weird scaling factor they bought in to their state
| calculations. The numbers might have been wrong but the
| proportion would have been accurate, and it is the proportion
| that is being highlighted.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| there are still negative externalities to high renewable-energy
| usage (heat and water usage, which itself requires energy to
| purify once returned to the sewer, plus the environmental
| impact of building an enormous heat island in places where
| there was little industry previously).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you are old enough you remember posting to Usenet and the
| warning that would accompany each new submission:
|
| _This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the
| entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds
| if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure
| you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you
| want to do this? [ny]_
|
| Maybe we meed something similar in LLM clients. Could be phrased
| in terms of how many pounds of atmospheric carbon the request
| will produce.
| wmf wrote:
| Only if that same warning is attached to literally everything
| else you do. It's unfair to single out AI for using energy.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| But "asking ChatGPT" is something people do so casually
| without there being any apparent clues of the costs
| associated with that. I guess that is true of pretty much
| everything online though.
|
| Even driving your car around you at least are somewhat aware
| of the gas you are burning.
| asdff wrote:
| That could be solved by charging more for the service. That
| is the only reason you are aware of the gas burning after
| all, you aren't conducting your own aq test you are
| noticing you are filling up twice a week at $50 a tank.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| I would bet most ppl drive around with very little
| awareness of how much it's costing, either in money or
| environmental impact. Many people I've met seem to measure
| efficiency by how much it costs to fill up the tank.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| They're aware of the price they pay for the gas, not the
| emissions. I would wager that the mass ignorance of the
| impact of fossil fuels (and rubber on roads) that the
| broader population has is a significant reason why we're in
| this climate mess today.
| jbm wrote:
| > rubber on roads
|
| Funny how this suddenly became a thing after
| electrification became a thing. Need to find a new way to
| wag the finger after all.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Well many of my fellow Americans would only accept an EV
| if it's gigantic, and even though I can't leave the house
| without seeing a Prius or a RAV4 hybrid, the news acts
| like it's gas versus electric as if Toyota hadn't solved
| this twenty years ago
| phillipcarter wrote:
| It's always been a thing? I'm pro-electrification, BTW.
| keybored wrote:
| You would wager. Based on what?
|
| There's been decades of lies about climate change. And
| once the truth got out society was already massively
| dependent on it. For cars specifically it was a
| deliberate policy to make e.g. the US car-dependent. And
| once the truth got undeniable the cope was switched to
| people's "carbon footprint" (British Petroleum). In fact
| there are rumors that the cope echoes to this day.
|
| Zoom out enough and it becomes obviously unproductive to
| make "mass ignorance" the locus of attention.
| wmf wrote:
| "Civilization advances by extending the number of important
| operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
| -- Alfred North Whitehead
|
| Emissions should be fixed on the production side
| (decarbonization) not on the demand side (guilt/austerity).
| marcellus23 wrote:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/6/whats-the-carbon-
| footpr...
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| fairness to one polluter over another isn't the real issue -
| look at prop 65 in california; or if you're not used to this
| in CA, think of any time you've been on-call. alert fatigue
| is real and diminishes the urgency of the underlying message.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's unfair to single out AI for using energy._
|
| Why? AI isn't a human being. We have no obligation to be
| "fair" to it.
| yongjik wrote:
| A lot of us live in a country where "rolling coal" is a thing.
| I fear your prompt may have an opposite of the intended effect.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Taxing anything that can pollute (methane, gasoline, diesel)
| would let The Hand sort it out
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Carbon taxes are incredibly unpopular, because it makes
| easy and convenient things expensive.
| blkhawk wrote:
| I find that message very curious because the message itself
| clearly does not cost much but the machines it is send on do.
| So the more messages that are send the less the messages will
| cost.
| keybored wrote:
| You don't need it for any pragmatic benefit because it won't
| work. It doesn't work for eating meat. It won't work for AI.
|
| The only purpose is to scapegoat the possible environmental or
| economic fallout. Might as well put it on individuals. Like
| what's always done.
|
| I've already seen it on the national broadcast. There some
| supposed experts were wagging their fingers about using AI for
| "fun". Making silly images.
|
| Meanwhile we're gonna put AI to good use in arms races: more
| spam (automated applications, ads, ads, ads, abuse of services)
| and anti-spam. There's gonna be so much economic activity.
| Disruptive.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Individual LLM requests are vanishingly small in terms of
| environmental impact; inference providers use a _lot_ of
| batching to do lots of work at once. Furthermore, LLMs and
| diffusion models are not the only ML workload. While generative
| AI tickles investors, most of the ML actually being deployed is
| more mundane things, like recommendation systems, classifiers,
| and the like; much of which is used for adtech purposes
| adversarial to that of users. If LLMs and diffusers were the
| _only_ thing companies used ML for, but efficiency gains from
| new hardware remained constant, we 'd still be at the 2017
| baseline for environmental impact of data centers.
|
| Likewise, I doubt that USENET warning was ever true beyond the
| first few years of the networks' lifetime. Certainly if
| everything was connected via dial-up, yes, a single message
| could incur hundreds of dollars of cost when you added the few
| seconds of line time it took to send up across the whole world.
| But that's accounting for a _lot_ of Ma Bell markup. Most
| connections between sites and ISPs on USENET were done through
| private lines that ran at far faster speeds than what you could
| shove down copper phone wiring back then.
| teekert wrote:
| I wonder what the carbon footprint of all those ads is.
| amelius wrote:
| Not just the ads, but also the overconsumption which they
| cause.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| We really need to improve the power grid. I don't think about "A.
| I." very much, but I am glad that _something_ is making us
| upgrade the grid.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I'm glad that the needs of AI and the sustainable capabilities of
| nuclear fission go well together.
| simonw wrote:
| I found this bit interesting:
|
| > In 2017, AI began to change everything. Data centers started
| getting built with energy-intensive hardware designed for AI,
| which led them to double their electricity consumption by 2023.
|
| As we all know, the generative AI boom only really kicked into
| high gear in November 2022 with ChatGPT. That's five years of
| "AI" growth between 2017 and 2022 which presumably was mostly
| _not_ generative AI.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Well, this was disappointing:
|
| > There is a significant caveat to this math. These numbers
| cannot serve as a proxy for how much energy is required to power
| something like ChatGPT 4o.
|
| Otherwise this is an excellent article critiquing the very real
| problem that is opacity of these companies regarding model sizes
| and deployments. Not having an honest accounting of computing
| deployed worldwide _is_ a problem, and while it 's true that we
| didn't really do this in the past (early versions of Google
| searches were undoubtedly inefficient!), it's not an excuse
| today.
|
| I also wish this article talked about the compute trends. That
| is, compute per token is going significantly down, but that also
| means use of that compute can spread more. Where does that lead
| us?
| blkhawk wrote:
| the numbers in the article are all over the place. I mean the
| article seems to try and some of the more general calculations on
| paper should work out but especially the image gen ones I can
| sorta disprove with my own experiences in local gen.
|
| Even were it matches sorta (the 400 feet e-bike thing) that only
| works out for me because I use an AMD card. An NVIDIA card can
| have several times the generation speed at the same power draw so
| it all falls down again.
|
| And the parameters they tried to standardize their figures with
| (the 1024x1024 thing) is also a bit meh because the SAME amount
| of pixels in a different aspect ratio can have huge variations in
| gen speed and thus power usage. for instance for most illustrious
| type checkpoints the speed is about 60% higher at aspect ratios
| other than 1024x1024. Its all a bit of a mess.
| bbor wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing! I share some concerns others
| have about this piece, but I'm most shocked about their finding
| that image generation is cheaper than text. As someone who's gone
| down this rabbit hole multiple times, this runs against every
| single paper I've ever cited on the topic. Anyone know why? Maybe
| this is a recent change? It also doesn't help that multimodal
| transformers are now blurring the lines between image and text,
| of course... this article doesn't even handle that though,
| treating all image models as diffusion models.
| fred69 wrote:
| Might have missed it but was disappointed to see no mention of
| externalized costs like the scraping burden imposed on every IP-
| connected server. From discussions on HN this sounds quite
| substantial. And again, why exactly should the few AI companies
| reap all the value when other companies and individuals are
| incurring costs for it?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I work in DCO, thats Data Center Operations if you're not aware.
| I've tried explaining the amount of power used to my elderly mom;
| it isn't easy! But here's my best take:
|
| The racks I am personally responsible for consume 17.2kW. That's
| consistent across the year; sure things dip a bit when
| applications are shut down, but in general 17.2kW is the number.
| Presuming a national average of 1.2kW per home, each rack of
| equipment I oversee could potentially power 14 houses. I am
| responsible for hundreds of these racks, while my larger
| organization has many thousands of these racks in many locations
| worldwide.
|
| I've found no other way to let the scale of this sink in. When
| put this way she is very clear: _the price isn't worth it to
| humanity_. Being able to get, say, Door Dash, is pretty neat! But
| not at the cost of all our hoarded treasure and certainly not at
| the cost of _the environment on the only planet we have access
| to_.
|
| The work done by AI will only ever benefit the people at the top.
| Because to be frank: they won't share. Because the very wealthy
| have _hoarding disorder_.
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