I would point out that Google has been “carbon neutral” with it’s data centers for quite some time, unlike others who still rape the environment ahem AWS.
Carbon offsets? Yes indeed. The easiest, most useless way to reach carbon neutral.
carbon neutral is when you don’t emit it in the first place, not by paying someone else to promise to make up for it later.
AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It’s immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
energy for a solution in search of a problem,
Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
Ah yes the classic it is useless and here is a use for it logic.
I take it you haven’t had to go through an AI chat bot for support before huh
I have and don’t see the relevance. The argument is that it is useless and then mentions a use case. If you want to say it’s crap I won’t argue the point but you can’t say X and ~X.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
There’s a sucker born every minute
Tell that to my wallet. I hold a little crypto and it’s down over 50%
There are legitimate uses of AI in certain fields like medical research and 3D reconstruction that aren’t just a scam. However, most of these are not consumer facing and the average person won’t really hear about them.
It’s unfortunate that what you said is very true on the consumer side of things…
I would love to see an AI make an ANSYS model that isn’t shit. They might be able to make cute pictures, but when it comes to making models for CFD or FEA, AI is a complete waste of time.
Don’t worry folks, if we all stop using plastic straws and take 30 second showers, we’ll be able to offset 5% of the carbon emissions this AI has!
Google ghg emissions in 2023 are 14.3 million metric tons. Which are a ridiculous percentage of global emissions.
Commercial aviation emissions are 935.000 million metric tons by year.
So IDK about plastic straws or google. But really if people stopped flying around so much that would actually make a dent on global emissions.
Don’t get me wrong, google is a piece of shit. But they are not the ones causing climate change, neither is AI technology. Planes, cars, meat industry, offshore production… Those are some of the truly big culprits.
But they are not the ones causing climate change
The owners of google are capitalists. They are as responsible for climate change as any other capitalist.
Capitalists serve customers and do not operate in a vacuum. This finger pointing does nothing productive.
Capitalists
serve customershoard wealth through reckless profiteering irregardless of the costs to the rest of human society and do not operate in a vacuum.FTFY. I do agree with your last part, though. The political racketeer establishments that enable them and the fascist security institutions that protect them are equally as culpable as they are.
Somebody is hitting a homerun!
Chad
Capitalists have captured regulation and to a large extent democracy in the US. So finger pointing towards them is entirely useful. Especially given they spend good money to point the finger at us.
I’d rather we give up AI than give up meat or flying. I am not taking a ship half way across the world.
You do you. But other people may have other priorities.
Anyway, how many times have an user to use an AI to even come close to a single commercial plate through the Atlantic? It may be a freaking lot.
You giving away AI, or even forcing all humandkind to do so, might as well do nothing as far as climate change is concerned.
I still believe there are other priorities over one trip every couple of years. Flight is one of the greatest achievements of humanity and I firmly believe it is important to visit other cultures.
I’m not sure about that. I live in a country that is suffering a lot because of tourism. And I’m not very fond of it.
Sometimes I prefer that people would just read our Wikipedia page instead of coming here.
I gather from your comments that you live in Spain, right? You guys suffer from all the 20€ flights going there from other European countries. At those prices you’ll mostly encounter human trash (I know this because I’m from Germany and the the majority of Germans visiting Spain are morons), so I feel with you. These cheap flights need to stop. I’d like to see the kerosene taxed fully for European flights. Have the prices be something to think about.
It’s great if you can afford it. If you can afford to fly even a couple times a year you’re pretty privileged. I can’t, and I’m still privileged.
i cant afford to ride airplanes. you are welcome.
This person has no personality!
He needs to travel!
well pay me the tickets and i will gladly do more international flights everywhere.
Bro… Most peoples “personalities” revolves around “travel”
Telling them to stop brain dead tourism will not accept! Fuck your climate
Congratulations sir, best comment I read since I joined here.
…You joined 3 days ago. 🤣
Yes, and read your whole one year comment history. You were definitely a redditor, right?
You were definitely a redditor, right?
That’s an insult around this here fora, boy
Sadly, yes.
Sounds like not using Google search would be a way more effective way of reducing CO2
And it’s only 10x more useless :)
Wow AI is just so amazing
Ban them
Just don’t use them.
Tell that to schools or companies etc. You can’t just not use them. Maybe you can, but not everyone has that luxury.
The annoying part is how many mainstream tech companies have ham-fisted AI into every crevice of every product. It isn’t necessary and I’m not convinced it results in a “better search result” for 90% of the crap people throw into Google. Basic indexed searches are fine for most use cases.
As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than “agile”, which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.
Before AI it was IoT. Nobody asked for an Internet connected toaster or fridge…
I always felt like I was alone in this thinking. I think anyone with a bit of a security mindset don’t want everything connected, besides it makes them more expensive and easier to break.
It definitely has to walk in the desert for a while. I know multiple people who like it for some stuff. Like cameras and managing air conditioning.
I skimmed the article, but it seems to be assuming that Google’s LLM is using the same architecture as everyone else. I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips instead of a regular GPU like everyone else. Those are generally pretty energy efficient.
That and they don’t seem to be considering how much data is just being cached for questions that are the same. And a lot of Google searches are going to be identical just because of the search suggestions funneling people into the same form of a question.
I hadn’t really heard of the TPU chips until a couple weeks ago when my boss told me about how he uses USB versions for at-home ML processing of his closed network camera feeds. At first I thought he was using NVIDIA GPUs in some sort of desktop unit and just burning energy…but I looked the USB things up and they’re wildly efficient and he says they work just fine for his applications. I was impressed.
Yeah they’re pretty impressive for some at home stuff and they’re not even that costly.
The Coral is fantastic for use cases that don’t need large models. Object recognition for security cameras (using Blue Iris or Frigate) is a common use case, but you can also do things like object tracking (track where individual objects move in a video), pose estimation, keyphrase detection, sound classification, and more.
It runs Tensorflow Lite, so you can also build your own models.
Pretty good for a $25 device!
Exactly. The difference between a cached response and a live one even for non-AI queries is an OOM difference.
At this point, a lot of people just care about the ‘feel’ of anti-AI articles even if the substance is BS though.
And then people just feed whatever gets clicks and shares.
Googles tpu can’t handle llm’s lol. What do you mean “exactly”?
In fact, Gemini was trained on, and is served, using TPUs.
Google said its TPUs allow Gemini to run “significantly faster” than earlier, less-capable models.
Did you think Google’s only TPUs are the ones in the Pixel phones, and didn’t know that they have server TPUs?
I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips
The Coral ones? They don’t have nearly enough RAM to handle LLMs. They only support small Tensorflow Lite models.
They might have some custom-made non-public chips though - a lot of the big tech companies are working on that.
instead of a regular GPU
I wouldn’t call them regular GPUs… AI use cases often use products like the Nvidia H100, which are specifically designed for AI. They don’t have any video output ports.
To be fair, it was never “hidden” since all the top 5 decided that GPU was the way to go with this monetization.
Guess who is waiting on the other side of this idiocy with a solution? AMD with cheap FPGA that will do all this work at 10x the speed and similar energy reduction. At a massive fraction of the cost and hassle for cloud providers.
Google already has their own TPUs, under the name Coral
All of this just to give rich shareholders even more money.
Where are all the people that were so damn pissed with Bitcoins power consumption now?
Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH
It’s far more important that every country fixes how it legally generates power that isn’t green. Make burning coal illegal already.
We hate both.
It’s a different debate because bitcoiners lose literally nothing to green power laws and banning coal. AI users would see a reduction in output quality/speed.
Crypto bros would definitely not be happy, because it would make mining less profitable
Make burning coal illegal already
Perfect citizen
I’d think there’s some serious god damn overlap between the groups that are pissed about these things.
Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH
I don’t think I want to waste my energy on hating these hypocrite Timmies since I haven’t yet encountered a single one of them.
You’re literally responding to an article criticising the power consumption of ai. What do you mean where are the people? They’re right here.
The one article that’s popped up in months of nothing. There was a larger response from people when it was something they saw as worthless using large quantities of power compared to the “helpful ai” that’s consuming the power now.
Shows that it never was about the environment in the first place. Hypocrites.
Criticisms of Bitcoin didn’t really become popular until years after its introduction. Give it time.
So-called “AI” is worthless too so they’ll get their turn.
And yet it’s still garbage…like their search
With adblock enabled I feel like their results are often better than for example Duckduckgo. I recently switched to using DDG as my standard search engine but I regularly find myself using Google instead to get the results I’m looking for.
Interesting, I’m actually the exact opposite. I always start with Google, because it’s usually good enough, but whenever it takes 2-3 tries to get something relevant, I switch to ddg and get it first try.
My issue is mostly with image search results. DDG’s images tend to be less relevant than Google’s. DDG also lacks “smart” results (idk the official term).
For example when you search “rng 25” on Google, it will immediately present you with a random number between 1 and 25. On DDG you have to click on one of the search results and then use some website to generate the number.
Or when searching for the results of a soccer game, Google will immediately present all the stats to you, while on DDG you will only find some articles about it.
Of course it really depends on the kind of search and I’m sure DDG will regularly have better results than Google too.
One example I had with DDG image search was transparent electronics, I couldnt find a way to get electronics with a transparent case, DDG would only give me generic electronics images that had transparency. Google got it though
Those kinds of things are what people often take issue with Google about. Well, the second one anyway. The first is arguably not a search and is instead a calculation, but I admit that’s a little semantical.
The first however, is Google taking information provided by third parties, and presenting it to the user. It prevents traffic from flowing through to the original site, and is something actively complained about.
And I should care about that because? Google is sparing me from visiting a website that will harass me to accept cookies, complain about my adblocker, probably request to send notifications, etc.
The same reason we don’t let companies sell photocopies of books? This isn’t a take on piracy, to be clear. This is a take on one company stealing content from another, and serving it up as if it were their own. And when Google has a monopoly on search, that fucks over everyone but Google, including you.
Extracting information from the internet that is freely available isn’t exactly stealing content. Haven’t you ever copied something from Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia even exist if people can’t use and share its content?
This is terrible. Why don’t we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?
You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.
Wait till they learn about the environmental impacts of the oil industry, or the plastic industry.
Summary:
- AI’s rapid growth has transformed digital life, but its significant environmental impact remains largely unchecked.
- AI-powered features can consume up to 10 times more electricity than traditional searches, potentially equating to a country’s power usage.
- The proliferation of energy-intensive data centers powering AI is outpacing the electric grid’s capacity, forcing utilities to maintain fossil fuel plants for reliability.
- Estimates suggest AI could account for 9% of U.S. energy demand by 2030, substantially contributing to climate change.
- Lack of industry transparency and mandatory reporting makes quantifying AI’s full environmental toll difficult.
- Tech companies negotiate discounted utility rates, shifting costs to ratepayers and reducing incentives for energy efficiency.
- Government regulation has been slow and industry-influenced, focusing on hypothetical future risks over current, tangible harms.
- The burden of AI’s environmental impact disproportionately falls on Global South communities where data centers are located.
- Tech companies resist mandatory disclosures, prioritizing profits over sustainability while the public bears the physical costs.
Just curious. Do your summaries are made by you, human?
Used AI to summarize article about misuse of AI.
Genius.
Using AI the correct way 👌
