Technology

Because demand for data centers is rising, with AI as just one of many reasons.

But that's not as flashy as telling people it takes the energy of a small country to make a picture of a cat.

Also interesting that we're ignoring something here -- big tech is chasing cheap sources of clean energy. Don't we want cheap, clean energy?

To be fair, nuclear power is cool as fuck and would reduce the carbon footprint of all sorts of bullshit.

Because the training has diminishing returns, meaning the small improvements between (for example purposes) GPT 3 and 4 will need exponentially more power to have the same effect on GPT 5. In 2022 and 2023 OpenAI and DeepMind both predicted that reaching human accuracy could never be done, the latter concluding even with infinite power.

So in order to get as close as possible then in the future they will need to get as much power as possible. Academic papers outline it as the one true bottleneck.

Volume of requests and power consumption requirements unrelated to requests made, at least I have to assume. Certainly doesn't help that google has forced me to make a request to their ai every time I run a standard search.

That's not small....

100's of Gigawatts is how much energy that is. Fuel is pretty damn energy dense.

A Boeing 777 might burn 45k Kg of fuel, at a density of 47Mj/kg. Which comes out to... 600 Megawatts

Or about 60 houses energy usage for a year in the U.S.

It's an asinine way to measure it to be fair, not only is it incredibly ambiguous, but almost no one has any reference as to how much energy that actually is.

A Megawatt is a unit of power not energy. It means nothing without including the duration, like Megawatt-hours

You should probably not eat things because of how much calories they have or don't have, but because of how much of their nutrients you need, and how much they lack other, dangerous shit. Also eat slowly until you're full and no more. Also move a lot.

We shouldn't need calculators for this healthy lifestyle.

The reason for needing to know which foods are healthy is because... well, we forgot.

On a "respond to an individual query" level, yeah it's not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There's also way too many "hidden" queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.

All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.

Furthermore, that's the median value--the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There's a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there's a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.

Individually you’re spot on. Your AI use doesn’t matter. But, and this is where companies tend to leave off, when you take into account how many millions (or billions) of times something is done in a day (like AI prompts), then that’s when it genuinely matters.

To me, this is akin to companies trying to pass the blame to consumers when it’s the companies themselves who are the biggest climate offenders.

I'll bet you're a stinking water drinker yourself. Probably a liter or two a day. And probably luxuriating in clean water when you could be using your body to recycling toilet water.