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Author’s point about environmental cost is a frustration I share. Most people in the tech industry are at least somewhat concerned about the environment but the
by BirAdam 3y ago
Author’s point about environmental cost is a frustration I share. Most people in the tech industry are at least somewhat concerned about the environment but their use and endorsements of technologies don’t follow at all: cloud technologies running in massive over-provisioned datacenters, LLMs consuming more energy than some countries, etc. It’s totally cool to strip mine the Earth, clear cut forests, and burn a bunch of coal when it’s for fashionable things, right?
- golol 3y agoEnergy is not really all that bottlenecked.
- bee_rider 3y agoWhat consumes more energy in AI, training or inference? It seems to me that training ought to be a super shift-able workload, a great fit for intermittent green energy sources.
- tomn 3y agoThe expensive bit is not the electricity, it's the cost of the GPUs, so they will train flat out. There is also a massive amount of competition between the various players, and nobody taking part cares about the energy use (otherwise they wouldn't be doing it), so i don't see this happening. (rough numbers: a H100 is 700W, which is $613/year at $0.1/kWh, and the estimated cost is $25000-40000)
- MacsHeadroom 3y agoTypical datacenter power cost is closer to $0.04/kWh. Datacenters mostly use renewable clean energy as well. Environmental concerns are deeply misplaced. 10 minutes of compute in a datacenter is far more environmentally friendly than 10 hours of work by a human.
- bee_rider 3y agoNice, we can just run the ML model—how do you put humans in suspend mode? Or do we just shut them off for now?
- tomn 3y ago> Datacenters mostly use renewable clean energy as well. Environmental concerns are deeply misplaced. Source? I didn't find much. Google talk about buying "carbon-free energy", which isn't bad, but ultimately just moves the carbon to other uses. Energy is also not the only resource being wasted. I also tend to think that the way people talk about energy use of technology is misguided, but ultimately data center energy use does likely form a significant part of my personal carbon footprint, which i care about, so it's quite reasonable to argue against finding new exciting ways to use energy when, to me, the benefits are so often unclear or negative. > 10 minutes of compute in a datacenter is far more environmentally friendly than 10 hours of work by a human. I don't think this is a good way of looking at it. Lots of things that a computer can do quickly would take a human much longer, but that doesn't mean they are good uses of resources. A better solution is to do neither, and this applies to a lot of what the article talks about.
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago>A better solution is to do neither aka "degrowth" That's a non-starter. Doing more is a given. The best we can do is to do more efficiently. Doing more with datacenters is the reason US economic productivity/output has soared in the past 3 decades while per capita energy usage has been stagnant.
- skwirl 3y agoI'd rather shoot for a world where clean energy is abundant than abandon the benefits of ever increasing computational power. Thankfully, this is the world we are trending towards, and not the world of 'humans are a virus' self loathing, even if the toxic mindset is having a moment.