Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.
Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.
the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights
This comparison is bad. Commercial flights don’t use electricity, they use jet fuel, pumping fumes directly into the atmosphere. I don’t see a single complaint about HOW electricity is produced. I just read about how there’s too much solar power in California. A serious disconnect in the logic blaming AI for pollution when we should be blaming the way we produce electricity.
They’re taking about emissions, not energy use. You have a reading comprehension issue. The emissions are from the energy production. It’s logical to say that a, largely pointless, technology using high amounts of electricity cause emissions through the generation of electricity to power the pointless AI tech.
we should be blaming the way we produce electricity
I’m also referring to emissions, just redirecting focus about HOW electricity is produced. Also, AI is not pointless, that’s a bad claim. You have a comprehension issue.
I didn’t miscomprehend, you just disagree with my reasonable assertion that AI is pointless and sucks. Hope this helps!
That is not a reasonable assertion at all. AI is being used in more ways than what is being described in your rage-bait media diet. “AI is pointless and it sucks” is a blatantly ignorant statement.
It’s marginal utility is not worth the energy expenditures.
You just don’t know what it is beyond memes.
No reason for this to have been removed
source: your rank asshole
I didn’t miscomprehend, you just disagree with my reasonable assertion that AI isn’t pointless and sucks. Hope this helps!
Yeah, seriously. Did the person you were replying to think the energy that’s powering datacenters was all clean?
AI tech isn’t pointless though. It’s not just about trying to replace artists or whatever. It significantly speeds up things like programming. It’s also used by scientists to mine data to find patterns and make predictions. For Pete’s sake I am pretty sure climate modeling relies on AI and other forms of HPC.
Scientists analyze data using statistics. I don’t see how and LLM helps with that. And it barely helps with programming, not to the extent that it is worth the impact.
I wasn’t just talking about LLMs. Lots of modern data analysis techniques rely on machine learning.
Although LLMs are also used by scientists to help with things like programming that not all scientists are necessarily good at or properly trained in.
Me: ChatGPT, can you create a system that’s capable of powering your systems in a environmentally sustainable way?
ChatGPT: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
I mean ChatGPT can’t do it but humans can and are… Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
The new ARM powered surface laptops that consume like 30W of power are more capable of running an AI model than my gaming PC from 2 years ago that consumes ~300W of power.
I’m referencing the short story, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
Because they’re all part of a technocult trying to make a digital god.
Wow, AI really will kill us, just not in the way anyone imagined
No, this article is extremely biased and doesn’t provide any context to their arguments or comparisons.
The issue isn’t JUST AI. It’s this end game capitalism that will kill us all.
This is horrible article. The only number given related to LLM is 700,000 liters of water used, which is honestly minuscule in impact on environment. And then there are speculations of “what if water used in aria where there is no water”. It is on the level of “if cats had wings, why don’t they fly”.
Everything we do in modern would consumes energy. Air conditioners, public transport, watching TV, getting food, making elections… exactly the same article (without numbers and with lots of hand waving) could have written. “What if we start having elections in Sahara? Think about all the scorpions we disturb!”
Yeah is sounds like some anti-AI person looked for a reason to be mad
They probably got caught using chat gpt to do their job for them.
More likely someone who knows how to properly use ChatGPT took their previous job
Yeah was gonna say this, seems like someone stopped a couple of steps away from discovering that basically the entire modern world is built on top of unsustainable consumption.
I have an overall good opinion of the guardian as a news source, but almost every time I see an opinion piece on their site, it’s utter dogshit. It’s as if they go out of their way to find the absolute worst articles.
But they do get shared a lot, which I guess is what they were going for?
They are really left leaning, not balanced, and it shows in their opinions, but also in news selection. Since fediverse is also left or even significantly left leaning, it gets shared a lot here.
Straight up misleading. Mentioning AI in the headline and then sneakily switching to “the cloud” (i.e. most of the internet) when discussing figures. They say it uses a similar amount to commercial flights? Fine. Ground the flights, I’d rather have the internet a million times over.
It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned
Pass a carbon tax. Oh wait that would be too easy.
It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.
Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.
Sigh. You can hold any opinion you want about the ideal society. This is a good idea for the society we have now. If we all die it’s not going to matter if Adam Smith or Karl Marx was correct.
I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?
I think that some are allergic to any slightest notion of capitalism being good
Which may be because recent history has proven beyond doubt that capitalism without regulation is catastrophical and capitalists will always push the boundaries & try to get rid of regulation, thereby it is always catastrophical, with temporary periods where it looks good on the surface.
hey i think you attracted some of those people you mentioned :)
Sometimes I just want to see online world burn
Now do I want to engage em or not? Probably not I guess, it would be tiring
On top of that, if you refuse to defend your vague statements implying it would be a waste of your time and beneath you, you end up being always right!
Carbon taxes doesn’t make capitalism good, it’s still like, the cause of the problem in the first place
Adam Smith would go absolutely ballistic if he were to see our current system. Not at all his vision.
Why don’t you just hand over all your income to the government just to be sure you won’t engage in any unnecessary activity.
GTFO with your time-tested solution to negative externalities.
I think we’ll improve this a lot. Now it’s a race to be first, later it will be a race to be profitable and keep costs low.
Plus the sun outputs a lot more energy than earth can ever consume so we just need to get better at collecting it without creating waste on the side.
We’re already going to have to deploy wind and solar at a breakneck pace to solve global warming. Why do we need a technology that would force us to install even more?
Oh no let’s build more gigantic server farms about it
if it’s not crypto miners with GPUs it’s AI, these narratives never really connect well with reality. /u/0ptimal wrote a great comment on this post: https://alexandrite.app/lemmy.world/comment/10355707
To no surprise, the other comments are full of laypeople that feel they understand the entire field they have never studied well enough to preach to others about just how useless and terrible it is, who also know nothing about the subject.
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
But no, AI bad AI bad AI bad AI bad lalalaa I can’t hear you AI bad /s
Dumb.
“The world is complicated and scary! I don’t understand it so it must be bad! M-muh planet farting cows evil industry fuck the disabled/sick/queer!” - What luddites actually believe.
Anprims/eco-fashes begone. If the planet was destroyed for the betterment of conditions for the proletariat today and future alike there’d be literally no issue, it’s just some rock lol, AI is far more important. Also brutalism and soviet blocs are the best architectural styles, everything else is bourgeois cringe.
Seems like you’re hearing it perfectly, but not listening.
This is the same excuse crypto bros make. Though that makes sense because the venn diagram between AI evangelists that blow up like the Hindenburg the moment you levy any critique against AI and its usage is basically a circle with crypto bros who assure us that any day now it will stop being treated like penny stocks and actually be useful “because they just like the tech.”
You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
Such as?
What about this?
As a professional editor (video/audio) AI has drastically altered my work in amazing, productive ways.
I’m still a critic of course. For some industries it’s clearly a solution in search of a problem so they can hype investment. A tool being useful doesn’t mean I’m unable to critique it!
I’ve used it to improve selected paragraphs of my writing, provide code snippets and find an old comic based on a crude description of a friend.
I feel like these interactions were valuable to me and only one (code snippets) could have been easily replaced with existing tools.
As far as I know there would be, it’s just that nobody is using them that way
I agree it does. But that has nothing to do with how energy intensive it currently is. You can see in my other comment that I am an advocate for it in my own work - it has great uses in some industries.
We have to be critical of the resources it takes and the ways it is deployed. It’s the only way to improve it. Yet AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.
AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.
I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.
Most people just either find it useful for some use cases or just hate it.
You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.
You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.
It seems like you missed the memo on reading comprehension. I literally quoted the exact part I’m criticizing, which clearly isn’t what you claimed.
And being overly emotional and telling people to STFU online? That’s a masterclass in civility right there.
Ohmahgosh you’re so right, I see it now, you telling them they were wrong to criticize AI was in fact the correct take all along. You’ve shown me the way, All Hail AI. ALL HAIL AI.
What a fucking shill.
Yeah! Accelerating societal collapse!
That’s wrong, I buy drugs online with cryptocurrencies all the time to this day and have done it long before the normies showed up and turned it into a mostly financial scam.
Evading the man and LEOs when the law ain’t right is my god-given right and I’m thankful to be born in the age of onions and crypto.
Crypto bros hate you lol I think you use it the only way it’s actually useful. Drugs and tax evasion/hiding money.
If you could hold your breath long enough to get out of your first world bubble, you would be able to see that bitcoin is massively popular amongst people who need ways to escape their collapsing fiat currencies. It is hilarious how spoiled people who happen to be born in countries where everything is taken care of them are too thick and compationless to even consider that other people have actual problems.
Is that why you use it? Because of your collapsing fiat currency?
I’m lucky enough to be from a country with a relatively stable fiat currency, although it is unclear how much longer that will be the case. In order to protect the value I’ve gained from my work, I do hold some of it in Bitcoin. I also use it to support charitable efforts in less fortunate countries. It is an excellent way to transfer value to exactly who I want to transfer it to without giving massive fees to banks and other companies that facilitate the transfer of funds.
A big thing to remember is that whenever you hold any countries currency, you are basically giving them a blank check to your energy. You are telling them that they can have as much of the value that you have saved that they want. When they print more money, they are taking that value directly from you. It is one thing to pay taxes on income, property, and goods purchased and sold, but on top of that, they have the ability to extract extra value from you just by running their printers. The more you believe that a government represents you and has your best wishes at heart, the more you should be holding their currency.
Good, I hate cryptobros and aibros and artbros and luddites and industrialists and environmentalists, but I love communal living, hate cities, love AI (and AI art), love art (and craft of said art), love nature & the environment and animals, hate vegans, and love science and industry etc.
At this point I have such an ultra-niche hyper-specific take on this (and almost everything) that I feel completely out of touch with most people which seem at first glance to navigate mostly by vibes and emotions of how they feel about a vague aesthetic sense of modernity that day.
Crypto is basically cash for online transactions. Pretty niche, but cool and definitely in demand for some situations.
Just how in the real world you’re shit outta luck if you lose your wallet. Or if you give someone money, but they laugh you in the face you can either cut your losses or try your luck in a fist fight. It’s the same with crypto.
With banks you have a separate authority that can handle all these cases, which is desirable in 99% of all transactions.
Unfortunately it’s volatile af, and the most popular crypto currency (Bitcoin)has untenable transaction costs and transaction limitations (10 transactions per second, globally - what a stupid design decision)
To be fair, crypto will never stand a chance against fiat as a means for payments because governments ensure that it’s complicated to tax. However, the underlying blockchain technology remains very interesting to me as a means of getting around middlemen companies.
Go on benefiting from the people who actually do stuff while simultaneously whining about it. You’ve been using AI for 20 years, you’re just too thick to know about it. There are millions of people in 2nd and 3rd world countries who have had their lives massively improved thanks to bitcoin, you’re just too spoiled and naive and to give a shit about them. Climb down off your soap box and go read something beyond the headline.
I mined crypto for 4 years and have used AI professionally on a daily basis for years but you seem to have a knack for making a lot of assumptions about me so I don’t know why you would stop now.
I am allowed to critique things I use/participate in.
That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).
Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always
- oversimplifying complex matters
- showing blatant lack of reading comprehension, and distorting/lying what others say
- vomiting certainty on things that they assumed, and re-eating their own vomit
- showing complete inability to take context into account when interpreting what others say
- chain-gunning fallacies
- “I’m not religious, but…”
always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.
Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.
(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)
I know what a whataboutism is haha but yes it’s good to see someone else recognize it for what it is.
Cryptos have drastically reduced their energy consumption through technological improvements.
That’s why nobody complains about crypto energy consumption anymore. It’s just bitcoin.
But these LLMs just need more and more with no end in sight.
Yeah “just” Bitcoin which comprises ~50% of the market cap for all of crypto.
Funny how 99.99% of cryptos shrivel up and die while bitcoin continues to serve people all over the world and is constantly becoming more and more popular. Maybe if you lived with, or even gave a shit about, people in below average wealth countries you would understand why Bitcoin is so useful to them.
“aI AnD cRyPtO aRe ThE sAmE bRo”
You know that your take that they both must suck in the exact same ways just because tech bros get hyped about them, is literally just as shallow, surface level, and uninformed as most tech bros?
Like yeah man, tech hype cycles suck. But you know what else was once a tech hype cycle? Computers, the internet, smartphones. Sometimes they are legitimate, sometimes not.
AI is solving an entirely new class of problem that computers have been literally unable to solve for their entire existence. Crypto was solving the problem of making a database without a single admin. One of those is a lot more important and foundational than the other.
On top of that, crypto algorithms are fundamentally based on “proof of work”, i.e. literally wasting more energy than other miners in the network is a fundamental part of how their algorithm functions. Meaning that with crypto there is basically no value prop to society and it inherently tries to waste energy, neither is the case for AI.
Plus guess how much energy everyone streaming 4K video would take if we were all doing it on CPUs and unoptimized GPUs?
Orders of magnitude more power than every AI model put together.
But guess what? Instead we invented 4k decoding chips that are optimized to redner 4k signals at the hardware level so that they don’t use much power, and now every $30 fire stick can decode a 4k signal on a 5V usb power supply.
That’s also where we’re at with the first Neural Processing Units only just hitting the market now.
I did not say AI and crypto are the same. I said the advocates are the same.
I mined from 2012 to 2015. Then I wisened up. Currently I use AI almost every day in my work. I was using it in my production tools before anyone knew with an LLM was outside of academic circles. Hell i barely understood what I was using at first. I am squarely in favor of AI tools. The inability of tech bros to handle the slightest critique is incredibly familiar and frustrating. They spike the conversation at every turn and immediately attack people’s intelligence.
Sure, uninformed tech hypebois suck in the same way, but the arguments around crypto and AI, especially around energy usage, are fundamentally not the same.
You keep responding to a thing I didn’t say.
But I will say now that both are very energy intensive/resource draining and the refusal to have a serious conversation about it - as spearheaded by tech bros/AI evangelists like I’ve described - is incredibly frustrating and makes people like me look down on the entire endeavor as a result.
Intellectually I know there are “responsible” developers and tools being made. But the loudest and most funded are not those people. And we need to consider the impact they have. This includes resource usage.
Edit: this just appeared on my feed https://www.ft.com/content/ddaac44b-e245-4c8a-bf68-c773cc8f4e63
Someone posted a shitty article about AI and power usage, someone pointed out that literally every industry uses a ton of power but AI gets clicks, you said AI and Crypto bros are the same.
If you don’t mean to imply that the counter arguments around AI and Crypto in terms of energy use are the same then write better given the context of the conversation.
And posting another shitty article that just talks about power usage going up across literally all types of industry, including just normal data centers and manufacturing plants, and then vaguely talking about chatGPT’s power usage compared to Google search to try and make it sound like those things are connected, is not having a serious discussion about it.
It’s skimming a clickbait headline of a clickbait article and regurgitating the implication in it like it’s a fact.
👍
Guys guys! There’s room for all of us to eat our fair share of natural resources and doom the planet together!
Difference is that AI is absolutely pointless lmao
I know this is probably way off topic, but it made me think of Friendship is Optimal, especially the ending.
It’s a new blockchain. It’ll fizzle out but we’ll come up with a new buzzword by then.
thing is that few if any use cases for blockchain were found and any actual useful things would not require much energy. The high energy crypto itself does nothing useful over more efficient alternatives and I don’t know what you mean by fizzle out but it still uses massive amounts of energy. the language models unfortunately do things that are useful and is much more likely to keep drawing power.
And the really perverted incentive of crypto is that due to the way difficulty is done, in particular with PoW systems, the more adoption there is the more energy intensive it becomes. Scaling actually leads to more inefficiency by design. I mean it’s totally asinine.
oh yeah. in the end you have a system that creates artificial value by requiring the sacrifice of real value. heres one credit for burning a barrel of oil. oh now you have to burn 2 to get a credit, now its 4, now its 8.
And crypto bros somehow think that this means they are buying energy… But you can’t get it back after it’s burned.
yeah. funny thing is there is like gridcoin which is perfectly fine because it uses the energy for useful work but they don’t like it because it does not have the pyramid scheme artifical value increase. Its value by and large stays in line with energy prices (although if you look historically there is this hilarious spike when idiots were grabbing at everything crypto. it pretty much shows the point in time where cypto became a buzzword thing)
Arguably that is related - cryptocurrency people needed a new thing to prop up their Nvidia shares, hence the enthusiasm for “AI”.
Ding ding ding
It won’t fizzle out; it already has legitimate business use cases. (A lot fewer than the marketing bros want you to believe, but real use cases nonetheless.) Blockchain and Augmented Reality never reached this point, so they fizzled. We’ll see a huge AI winter soon just like we did in the dot com bust in 2000.
AI tools have radically altered all of my video and audio editing over the last three or four years. Audio in particular. The stuff I can not just salvage but actually basically trick you into thinking was recorded in a studio is unbelievable - this audio I used to declare unusable and would suggest reshoots over lol. I can assure you it’s not going anywhere for us in the production world. It’s too awesome and useful. Jobs that took days can take hours even minutes now. It’s kind of wild to me still tbh.
It will certainly die in some industries though as they realize they’re just adding a shiny feature that doesn’t actually improve their product or processes. But for some of us? AI is a standard tool now.
It will not be economically viable once AI companies have to pay for their training data. So far they made some deals with press/media but multimedia is a can of worms that’s waiting to explode in our faces. So far they’re getting away with this because doing things and then asking for permission / forgiveness is a very Sillicon Valley thing to do.
Technology itself seems to be in a plateau. The whole AI computer thing is just moving computation offline because amounts of energy needed are unsustainable and have to be dumped on consumers. We haven’t seen that much progress since ChatGPT took the world by storm.
I’m not saying AI is a fad. It’s revolutionizing medical research for example, and those industries actually own the data they’re training AI on. EU sees this and is currently working on streamlining exchanging this data across member states too.
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Mixing and matching abstract measurements doesn’t work when comparing two things.
it actually is an enlightening comparison when you dig into it. It’s saying that the energy required to power one play of a song is 4e5*365/5e9 of the energy to heat a home for one day. That comes out to about 0.3%, i.e. if you watch a three minute youtube video three times and do absolutely nothing else that day but heat your house (dont use any other electricity, dont eat anything, dont travel anywhere) you increase your energy usage by a total of 1%
Yeah thats bullshit. Unless you have a hyper efficient heating system and power your internet with a badly tuned 1950s generator, theres no way youre getting 1%.
4e4 not 4e5, 4e5 is 400,000.
It does not work like that.
The problem with such statements is the energy costs are nowhere near fixed. The amount of energy needed to play a song on my iPod shuffle through a wired headset is wildly different from the power needed to play that same song on my TV through my home theater equipment.
The same is true on the backend. The amount of power Google spends serving up a wildly popular band is way less than what they burn serving up an unknown Indy band’s video. That’s because the popular band’s music will have been pre-optimized by Google to save on bandwidth and computing resources. When something is popular, it’s in their best interests to reduce the computational costs (ie power consumption) associated with serving that content.
I was just using the numbers given in the article, presumably its an average including any sort of caching.
I can’t tell if this is serious since most homes don’t need heated every day…
They definitely do for most of the year, though?
Depends on location and personal preferences. Most of the US, which the article appears to be usung for home heating numbers, only needs to heat homes for a few months during the year. Sure, New York and Denver might be over half the year but Florida and southern California don’t need much heating at all.
Oh yeah, in extreme hot temperature AC-year-round no snow countries like the US maybe
Yes, averages are a thing.
Why have an average for something that is seasonal?
Because its a comparison, no one cares how much energy playing a video uses compared to heating your house on may the 5th as opposed to december the 12.
Yeah thats bullshit. Unless you have a hyper efficient heating system and power your internet with a badly tuned 1950s generator, theres no way youre getting 1%.
Of course it would… lmao are you kidding me? Have you never seen a server farm? Hell NSA has huge warehouses of servers.
Last year, before I joined this organization, IT decided to get off Microsoft’s cloud service because after some calculations they realize that on-prem hosting was significantly cheaper than cloud hosting. Now I believe more and more organizations small and large/enterprise are getting off cloud or doing a mixture of hybrid because the costs are not justifiable.
And for AI? Requiring GPUs? Huge energy consumers.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
This metric doesn’t say anything.
AI companies*
