- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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 Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.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.
You must log in or register to comment.
There are layers of wrong and stupid to this article.
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights.
“The cloud” accounts for something like 80% of the internet across the entire planet. I’d be curious what 80% of transportation infrastructure would end being in comparison… no takers? We’re only comparing to (some) flights instead of, I dunno, the vast bulk of our fossil fuel powered transport infra?
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.
Oh no, the most popular song in the world used the same amount of energy as 40k homes in the US. The US probably has something in the range of a hundred million homes. The efficiency of computing equipment increases by a sizable percentage every single year, with the odds being good the same data could be served at 1/20th the cost today. So why aren’t we talking about, say, heat pumps for those homes? You know, since they’re still using the same amount of energy they did in 2018?
…about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3… 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…
What is this idiocy? You realize that a chip fab uses something to the tune of ten million gallons of water per day, right? Ten million. Per day. I’m not even looking at other industrial processes, which are almost undoubtedly worse (and recycle their water less than fabs) - but if you’re going to whine about the environmental impact of tech, maybe have a look at the manufacturing side of it.
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.
Man, we’re really grasping at straws here. More complaining about water usage, pollution, water security, labor standards, human rights violations… wait, were we talking about the costs of data centers or capitalism in general? Because I’m pretty sure these issues are endemic, across every industry, every country, maybe even our entire economic system. Something like a data center, which uses expensive equipment, likely has a lower impact of every single one of these measures than… I dunno… clothes? food? energy production? transport? Honestly guys, I’m struggling to think of an industry that has lower impact, help me out (genuine farm to table restaurants, maybe).
There are things to complain about in computing. Crypto is (at least for the time being) a ponzi scheme built on wasting energy, social media has negative developmental/social effects, etc. But the environmental impact of stuff like data centers… its just not a useful discussion, and it feels like a distraction from the real issues on this front.
In fact I’d go further and say its actively damaging to publish attack pieces like these. The last few years I didn’t drive to the DMV to turn in my paperwork, I did it over the internet. I don’t drive to work because I’m fully remote since the pandemic, cutting my gas/car usage by easily 90%. I don’t drive to blockbuster to pick out videos the way I remember growing up. The sheer amount of physical stuff we used to do to transmit information has been and is gradually all being transitioned to the internet - and this is a good thing. The future doesn’t have to be all bad, folks.
Thank you. The 700000 litres in particular pissed me off… that’s a 9 meter cube. Whoopdie doo
For comparison, a single hydraulically fractured oil well uses over 100 times as much water.
The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes’ emissions are large. It’s a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.
“I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs.” It’s a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.
Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn’t strike you as… a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.
Good assessment, thanks
with the odds being good the same data could be served at 1/20th the cost today
Gotta nitpick you there. According the Moore’s law (really more of a rule of thumb), the price of the silicon used to serve those videos should be 1/16 of what it is today. I’m not aware of any corresponding law that describes trends in energy consumption. It’s getting better for sure, but I’d be shocked if there was a 20x improvement in 6 years.
Cmon, outside of ol’ Bitcoin, my freedom of money networks are a drop in the bucket.
Goddamn what a beautiful comment, brings a tear to my eye
and recycle their water less than fabs
Which is actually a very good idea economics-wise but fabs didn’t care much for the longest time because while crucial it’s still a minor part of their operating infrastructure. They had bigger fish to fry.
The thing is if you clean a wafer with ultrapure water, the resulting waste water might have some nasty stuff in it… but tap water has more stuff in it, just not as nasty. They generally need to process the waste water to be environmentally safe, anyway, doesn’t take much to feed it back into the cycle and turn it into ultrapure, again.
Side note in case you’re wondering what it’s like to drink that kind of water: It’s basically a novel way to burn your tongue. The osmotic pressure due to lack of minerals will burst cell walls but you’re not a microorganism so you’ll most likely be fine and the load on your overall mineral stores is only marginally higher than when drinking ordinary water, we get the vast majority of our minerals from food.
But the environmental impact of stuff like data centers… its just not a useful discussion,
I’d say it is but more along the lines of feeding waste heat into district heating. Someone can shower with those CPU cycles.
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.
Do you mean it’s without context or comparison?
Im not being funny. I’m just stupid.
So it takes 700,000 litres of water to cool a machine eh? Think about a water cooled PC, now, is that water cooled PC hooked up to your sink and continuously draining water? Or did you fill it up one time and then at the end when you’re done with it, dump the water back down the drain?
700,000 litres of water in a closed loop cooling system is not a problem in any way shape or form.
You’re technically correct, although there usually is some make-up that’s periodically necessary. You’ll want to blowdown some of that water from time to time to try and prevent scale/accumulation and even biomass buildup. It’s probably on the order of like 1-2%, and probably not continuously.
It would be better for the article to quantify this amount of water, that’s regularly leaving the system and needs to be replenished. 1% of 700,000 L is still a lot of water, but it’s very hard to measure the sustainability impact without knowing how often they happens. Once a year? Multiple times a year? Or once every few years?
Just for my credentials, I’m a chemical engineer by training and I used to do a little work with a closed loop steam generation and cooling system.
I’m just saying that at that point, when we’re talking maybe 1% of 700,000 litres across an entire industry, then we have a lot of lower hanging fruit to save water. That amount of water is just flat out wasted at like a single industrial plant on a Tuesday.
No disagreements there. I’m more concerned about the power usage than the water usage anyway.
And even if it’s not in closed loop, water probably goes back to river at worst. Better option is using computers as preheating stage in central heating system.
The whole article throws data without meaning.
Data is not information. Is this the amount of the water taken out of reach of farmers? Probably not. Is it the amount of energy used for cooling? Nope because liters is not an appropriate unit of energy. Is it the cost? Nope because that must be in dollars. So it’s data but not information. It can’t be compared to an hypothetically allegedly more efficient system.
Without temperature difference energy can’t be derived. It’s just useless data without it.
But it’s okay, because now we can get wrong answers faster than ever, and we’ve taken human creativity and joy out of art.
All that for glorified autocomplete
But now I know that I can jump off the Golden Gate bridge to cure my depression.
The golden gate bridge is so far away from me. I don’t know what to do to cure depression. :(
I plan on building my own Golden Gate Bridge (to scale) and then jump off!
That is an absurd reduction of reality, blatant illustration of dunning-kruger in relation to LLMs
LLMs are just predictive text but bigger
Or is it? Dun-dun-DUNNN!
I mean, that’s also all you or I am.
Speak for yourself, loser. Repeating shit you heard an influencer say on Twitch is cringe.
You are insulting someone simply because they didn’t go along with your strawman? Intelligence is in short supply these days.
Explain to me how we’re not or kindly go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself.
I’m calling it now: you’ll end up poor and unhappy
That’s cool, free will doesn’t exist, whats going to happen is going to happen. I’ve accepted that, so I might die poor, but you’re the only one here with a chance of dying truly unhappy.
You know what’s funny? What negative prompts you’d have to give an LLM to get it to respond the way you do.
You were more entertaining when you just repeated dumb lines from your favourite influencers
AI -and cryptocurrencies- use massive amounts of energy and the only value they produce is wealth. We don’t get correct, reliable and efficient results with AI, and we don’t get a really useful currency but a speculatory asset with cryptocurrencies. We are speeding into a climate disaster out of pure greed.
This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it’s competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world, and highly structured coding languages are just the easiest lowest hanging fruit.
Yes we are heading to a climate disaster because of greed, but that has nothing to do with AI.
I think you are vastly over estimating how many developers are using GitHub Copilot.
That’s bs now and will only become more so with time.
This was posted two days ago: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
We found that most of those using code assistant tools report that these assistants are satisfying and easy to use and a majority (but not all) are on teams where half or more of their coworkers are using them, too. These tools may not always be answering queries accurately or solving contextual or overly specific problems, but for those that are adopting these tools into their workflow, code assistants offer a way to increase the quality of time spent working.
The majority of respondents (76%) let us know they are using or are planning to use AI code assistants. Some roles use these tools more than others amongst professional developers: Academic researchers (87%), AI developers (76%), frontend developers (75%), mobile developers (60%), and data scientists (67%) currently use code assistants the most. Other roles indicated they are using code assistants (or planning to) much less than average: data/business analysts (29%), desktop developers (39%), data engineers (39%), and embedded developers (42%). The nature of these tools lend themselves to work well when trained well; a tool such as GitHub Copilot that is trained on publicly available code most likely will be good at JavaScript for frontend developers and not so good with enterprise and proprietary code scenarios that business analysts and desktop developers face regularly.
But go ahead, speak for the whole goddamn industry, we’re totally not using AI or AI code-assist!!!
Sorry, I’m not seeing how your source is helping your argument.
The line I’m responding to is
“This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it’s competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world.”
While your source says: "The majority of respondents (76%) let us know they are using or are planning to use AI code assistants. "
An un scientific survey (aka not random) which it’s self claims the 75% of people who respond used OR ARE PLANNING ON USING (aka, not use it yet), does not equal virtually every developer.
Also wasn’t stack overflow recently getting bad press for selling content to AI companies? Something that pissed large parts of the developer community? Something that would make developers not happy with AI not take the survey?
Anyway, have a great day, and enjoy your AI assistant.
Do you have a source to counter stack overflow’s developer survey?
It’s also a laundering scheme to make free software proprietary.
I love all the people telling you you’re wrong, few if any are actually developers themselves.
For those that aren’t: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
People here hate AI with a literally blind passion and I don’t get it.
I don’t want to doxx myself or blow my own horn. The programming I do, and many developers do, is not something ChatGPT or Bing AI or whatever it is called can do.
At best, it is a glorified search engine that can find code snippets and read -but not understand- documentation. Saves you some time but it can’t think and it can’t solve a problem it hasn’t seen before, something programmers often have to do a lot.
But after you’ve written the code, don’t you find that the LLM is great at documentation?
Dude, if you’ve never used copilot then shut up and don’t say anything.
Don’t pretend like you write code that doesn’t benefit from AI assisted autocomplete. Literally all code does. Just capitalization and autocompleting variable names with correct grammar is handy, let alone literally any time there’s boiler plate or repetition.
Lmao, the idea that you having an NDA makes you work on super elite code that doesn’t benefit from copilot if hilarious. Ive worked on an apps used by hundreds of millions of people and backend systems powering fortune 10 manufacturers, my roommate is doing his PhD on advanced biological modelling and data analysis, copilot is useful when working on all of them.
Just capitalization and autocompleting variable names with correct grammar is handy
We have had IDEs for decades
Oh do tell us again how you haven’t used copilot without saying the words ‘i haven’t used copilot’. Stackoverflow’s professional developer survey found that 70% of devs are using AI assistants, you think none of them have heard of an IDE or Intellisense before?
Nothing at all?
If capitalism is a forest fire, than the industrial revolution was like hitting a cache of kerosene, computers were like hitting a cache of gasoline, and AI is like hitting a smaller pile of gasoline. Yes it will accelerate things, but that’s it. It’s not causing any new effects we haven’t already seen.
what are the competitors to github’s copilot? I tried it for personal and really like it but can’t use it for work due to IP leak risks.
I’m hoping there is a self hosted option for it.
Edit: found one. TabbyML
there are lots actually: https://bito.ai/blog/free-github-copilot-alternatives-for-vs-code/
that article is clearly biased towards bito but it’s a decent list none-the-less
here is a better one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/
FauxPilot and CodeGeeX look promising for self hosting. Thanks!
Nice link!!
Codegeex and blackbox look good as far as features go
We get it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
God, I love it when laypeople feel they understand the entire field they have never studied and are oh-so-confident to preach to others who also know nothing about the subject.
This is what pisses me off so much about the climate crisis. People tell me not to use my car, but then microsoft just randomly blow out 30% more co2 for AI
We need better carbon (and equivalents) accounting, and knowledge of equivalents.
E.g. Turning 60 people vegetarian = having 1 baby.
1 vegetarian baby or?
I think this implies that a vegetarian baby is only 1/60 less polluting than an omnivore baby.
The current metric is equivalent tons of CO2, and I think we actually do have numbers for that on vegetarian vs omnivorous vs heavy meat diets.
A bit harder to quantify for a human life though, certainly. We are able to at least convert methane emissions to a CO2 equivalent
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
Cars collectively emit far more carbon than ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is only going to get more optimized from here.
Ultimately the answer should be in a heavy carbon tax, rather than having a divine ruler try and pick and choose where it’s worth it to spend carbon.
Part of why right wing politics are becoming so popular again is that so many politicians shove the financial responsibility of cutting carbon onto the normal population. My point is that it feels useless to cut my own emission as long as massive corporations can just randomly emitt way more without consequence. Also, microsoft use electricity for more that just chatgpt.
Look up how much pollution is made from the massive shipping boats when they get into international waters and start burning bilge oil.
I have no doubt about that
You know that Microsoft doesn’t just sit there and burn electricity for fun right?
Microsoft data centers are doing what consumers ask them to do. They are burning data at the request of users, no different than your personal PC.
Actually the main difference is that he computers in their data centers are far more energy efficient than your PC.
I am SHOCKED
So then you realize that it’s not Microsoft burning that electricity, but individual consumers?
I’d still blame microsoft for shoving AI down peoples throats. Search something on bing (or google for that matter) and you get an AI response, even if you don’t want it. It’s the choice of these corporations.
You’re really trying yourself in knots to try and blame the big bad corpos and no one else.
Yes they are shoving it in people’s faces, and when the average person uses their default browser with a default search engine and searches on Bing and it uses AI in addition to a search index they are to blame, but every single user who intentionally seeks out ChatGPT or Copilot is also to blame.
It’s a new technology, people are going to use it and burn energy with it and then eventually we will make a more efficient version of it as it matures, similar to everything else, including traditional search.
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.
Dunno about Microsoft and AWS but AFAIK Google has been powering all their data centers with “renewables” for a very long time.
I’m pretty sure many of these data centers have dedicated power sources due to the high consumption, and opt for things like hydroelectric due to cost per watt.
And at least there’s a serious end product delivered, unlike crypto mining which wastes trillions of hashes to make a secure transactional network.
At least here in the Netherlands, there was a lot of commotion because a data centre tried to buy a windmill park meant to power households as their dedicated power source
New data centers should be forced to also build additional new renewable power.
This would be a decent policy, probably+10% max expected capacity or something and contribute back to the grid.
The whole article is blaming t"the cloud" as if it didn’t serve services consumed by users. What do they want? To shut down the internet?
Energy transition is something these companies are working on.
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/climate-solutions/carbon-free-energy
Reaching these goals isn’t easy.
Yeah, cuz consumers really like getting useless ai results mixed in with their searches and shit. I don’t know how I lived before having clippy 2.0 added to fucking everything, including my desktop.
It’s entirely relevant to blame producers for creating and shoving this shit down our throats.
You know you can disable the AI overview from Google, right?
Quit being so dramatic. Nobody is forcing you to use those things. Lemmy in particular is full of people who talk in detail about how they’ve replaced products and services from companies like Google and Microsoft with alternatives they find more consumer-friendly. And I guarantee you major brands are gonna offer ways to turn off AI features, because turning them off saves a lot of money in data centers and improves battery life in consumer systems.
That’s mainly just bitcoin at this point. Other top network use proof of stake. Dont throw the baby out with the bath water.
Also, I’d reckon a secure transactional network is a serious end product. But I understand most here don’t share the same freedom of money philosophical views as the cypherpunks.
But it’s not secure. At least not in any way more secure than your password is, or that coin that’s in your jacket pocket. The whole security aspect is just another strawman.
Huh? Why would you think this?! I’d love to explore this line of thought with you.
Crypo is as secure as an online bank. Moreso because there isn’t any employee fraud.
FAR more secure. Not just employee fraud but bank failure, theft, wire fraud, govt seizure, etc. so many ways for fiat in a bank to go poof.
Microsoft pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030. Remains to be seen how much greenwashing that is versus actually doing things.
I, too, pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030.
If I cannot meet the criteria, I’ll just move the deadline. Easy peasy, squeeze the world out of resources lemon squeezy.
And the new material science discoceries etc should really help. Given that DeepMind used GNoME to find 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials. That’s kinda a big deal. That was November of last year. Haha people have no idea how much this could help us. We fucked up but the light is shining and we need to run fast. I’m pretty sure, short this miraculous pace of discovery and compound returns, we will/would end up in a runaway climate feedback loop. IPCC has been throwing out their best models because they don’t like the implications that it is going faster than expected and the climate sensitivity may be worse than expected.
People think AI is gonna cook us? The sun would like to make a bet.
The only way to beat time is via simulation. We do it all the time. Otherwise you couldn’t drive a car! You maybe “imagine” / “model” the environment / drivers, the physics, etc.
Without intelligence we are doomed because inaction. We had the technology but apathy and dental won, and now it’s a race against entropy/time.
Basically moonshot or die trying
Maybe you shouldn’t take everything Google says at face value. Have you seen their new AI Overviews?
You’re even directly quoting their press release and presenting it as a fact, but it’s debatable: https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/
But think about all of the good it’s done. Crappy article mills would be set back months if we turned it off!
My kids can also make poop dragon pictures. Has entertained them for hours.
Just because that is what you see of AI does not mean that’s all it does. Dunning-kruger goddamn
You’re right. People just see pop articles about a small aspect of a much wider range of technology in its infancy and fire off hot takes. Other aspects are revolutionizing data processing in physics, for example, but you have to dig a little deeper than a snide rage-bait article for that.
What is this even? Batteries for UPS in a datacenter wouldn’t be a patch on even a few days of production of EVs, water isn’t being shipped from “drier parts of the world” to cool datacenters, and even if it were, it’s not gone forever once it’s used to cool server rooms.
Absolutely, AI and crypto are a blight on the energy usage of the world and that needs to be addressed, but things like above just detract from the real problem.
The water is because datacenters have been switching to evaporative cooling to save energy. It does save energy, but at the cost of water. It doesn’t go away forever, but a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can’t use it again without desalination and using even more energy.
That may all be true, but the amount of water used by these data centers is miniscule, and it seems odd to focus on it. The article cites Microsoft using 700,000 liters for ChatGPT. In comparison, a single fracking well in the same state might use 350,000,000 liters, and this water is much more contaminated. There are so many other, more substantive, issues with LLMs, why even bring water use up?
Edit: If evaporative cooling uses less energy it might even be reducing total industrial water use, considering just how much water is used in the energy industry.
a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can’t use it again without desalination
Where do you think rain comes from? Why do hurricanes form over the ocean?
Dude, please. If things just worked out like that, we wouldn’t have water issues piling up with the rest of our climate catastrophe.
No no they’ve got a point. Everyone knows that the invisible hand of the free market and the invisible hand of the replenishing water table just reach out, shake hands, and agree to work it all out.
Rainforests. Like the Amazon that is being deforested obscenely in some areas
This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.
Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.
If someone wants to use a vibrator that consumes an entire city’s worth of yearly energy consumption each day then I’d say that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Making excessive energy consumption prohibitively expensive goes some way towards discouraging this at least.
If someone wants to pay that much for energy and it’s priced at a level that makes it sustainable, who are we to say it’s not worth it?
The main argument I’ve seen against higher prices for things energy and water is that it would place an undue burden on low-income people, but that’s one of the many problems that could be eliminated in its entirety by a universal basic income program. Even if it’s just a bare-bones program that only covers the cost of an average person’s water and energy needs, such a system would give everyone an incentive to conserve when possible, and it would do it without burdening people who can’t afford it.
That depends on the show they put on. There are many of us that would pay a few bucks to watch someone use a vibrator that powerful on themselves.
Ban all 4K video then.
First gen, 4k video rendering without hardware support also consumed orders of magnitude more power than any other common thing before it, good thing we banned it, instead of you know, just letting the technology mature and develop for a couple years til we had hardware chips that could do it for almost no power.
Hell, video games are less useful for the world than AI and they consume orders of magnitude more power than ChatGPT, so let’s ban them too right?
deleted by creator
If I get you right, you talk of carbon offsets. And investigation after investigation finds that the field is permeated with shady practices that end up with much less emissions actually offset.
So we absolutely should pay special attention to industries that are hogging a lot of energy. Xboxes and especially vibrators spend way less energy than data centers - though again, moving gaming on PCs and developing better dumb gaming terminals to use this computing power while playing with controllers in a living room is an absolute win for the environment.
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
deleted by creator
More likely someone who knows how to properly use ChatGPT took their previous job
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?
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.
Adam Smith would go absolutely ballistic if he were to see our current system. Not at all his vision.
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.
Carbon taxes doesn’t make capitalism good, it’s still like, the cause of the problem in the first place
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 especially since any nuance is lost on the web in favour of black and white thinking
I’ll play some guitar or eat burgers while they produce their stuff. Maybe draw something or blender hm
The key to healthy internet is to wisely choose your keyboard battles and not get bogged down by the army of simpletons
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!
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.
What are you on about? A carbon tax is a way to lower the tragedy of the commons in terms of air pollution. It is the free market compromise. Allowing individuals and companies time and giving them incentive to stop doing something that hurts us as a whole. The socialist answer would be to ban it outright. You are getting the best solution the capitalist market allows. Additionally it aligns pretty well with traditional capitalist economists have argued before: a resource owned as a whole will be mismanaged.
I honestly don’t get why it isn’t a more popular idea. I would much rather live in a world where people are being gently pushed into making the right decision with adequate time to adapt vs a world that is on fire.
And on the off chance that 99% of climate science is wrong we still benefit from having a less acidic ocean, less smog, less local air pollution, and spending less money on maintenance of so many machines.
GTFO with your time-tested solution to negative externalities.
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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 I see 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 specific use cases or just don’t care. And a large part actually hate on 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!
Such as?
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
deleted by creator
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.
What about this?
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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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)
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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
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.)
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
“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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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.
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.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
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.
Guys guys! There’s room for all of us to eat our fair share of natural resources and doom the planet together!
But no, AI bad AI bad AI bad AI bad lalalaa I can’t hear you AI bad /s
Seems like you’re hearing it perfectly, but not listening.
“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.
Dumb.
Difference is that AI is absolutely pointless lmao
AI companies*
