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The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I
- osigurdson 3y agoIt seems extremely unlikely that efficiencies will not be found in the long term.
- TheRoque 3y agoI think with the global warming becoming more and more of an emergency, the "long" term might be an issue, it's time we don't have
- sandspar 3y agoIt's been an "emergency" for 50 years
- osigurdson 3y agoMaybe AI will help us solve it. One thing that doesn't help is hand wringing and fantasies of de-growth (always directed at others, naturally - "my private jet is needed, but let's talk about your sedan").
- osigurdson 3y agoWhat is going to happen? Please publish your models so we can run them ourselves.
- realce 3y ago> in the long term How long? How many degrees of global temperature growth long will it be? Will SV value the development of their personal god-head over the environmental destruction such development creates? You've got a class that can build the AI systems AND build their own escape bunkers and soon their own space vehicles. What incentive exists to care about such issues? Any effeciences created won't drop the over-all wattage used by AI, it'll just increase the amount of AI used. The footprint will never shrink.
- endisneigh 3y agoIt's difficult to really compare. One particular example would be generating an image of a cloud. There are billions of such images in existence, but you could also use a model to generate one, which would take several orders of magnitude more energy than just using your search engine of choice to find one of the billions. In general though, people tend to reach for convenience so I expect the energy usage to increase rather than decrease due to the demand created by the "ease" of AI. On the other hand, if humanity because productive such that we "solve" energy than the point ends up being moot, since any energy increase will be offset by the invention of nuclear cold fusion, or other such things.
- szundi 3y agoSo far google is faster than DALL-E for example, we are saved - for now
- endisneigh 3y agoIt's not really about the speed of getting something, rather energy necessary. Inherently searching for discrete things that are already indexed properly (a large one time cost) will always be faster than inferencing a XXB parameter model. There are contrived examples one could conjure where using AI is slower but ultimately uses less energy than due to the complexity involved, since searching is well, searching preexisting things. If you need something new and you're not good at searching it might require less time and compute in the end to just ask a model than potentially wasting days, weeks or years flailing about.
- freedomben 3y agoIt depends on what you need the image for. If you just want to see what a cloud looks like, then yes Google is far faster. If you need to find an image that isn't encumbered by copyright that you can use for your presentation or blog post, it is much slower.
- germandiago 3y agoIn order to see how much energy AI consumes, a model to know how much energy it saves in alternative non-AI tasks that would be replaced by AI. Without models, even me taking my car somewhere could be bad news. But what is the alternative? More polluting or less?
- ori_b 3y agoHow much less have you been driving due to AI?
- pfdietz 3y agoYou have misinterpreted the argument.
- cuu508 3y agoI read the original comment a few times but could not make sense of it, the first sentence especially. Could you explain the argument?
- bruckie 3y agoThe argument is that you can't say activity A increases or decreases net energy demand without modeling whether there are activities B, C, D, ... whose energy demands will decrease if activity A happens. The implication is that AI may save more energy than it consumes. One made up possibility: maybe you can spend some energy on AI to optimize a supply chain, and that saves 50x as much energy every year after the supply chain is optimized. The driving example was just that: an example. Driving obviously consumes energy, but what if, for example, you're a home energy efficiency contractor, and you're driving to a job to insulate a house, and that's going to lead to a net decrease in energy much greater than the energy you consumed to get there.
- cuu508 3y agoThanks!
- bugglebeetle 3y agoIsn’t this more a problem of running inference for closed-source AI services? Considering we have open models that are now within throwing distance of GPT-4, it would make sense to do those workloads outside data centers running a single service (or even on people’s devices). Of course training still requires lots of resources, but that doesn’t have to happen nearly as frequently.
- totoglazer 3y agoThat energy is still being consumed if it’s happening on device. It’s just more spread out, and potentially less efficient.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThe rate of efficiency optimizations that have occurred in the open source community over the past two years I think call that into question. Services like OpenAI and Anthropic have the highest performing models, but since we have no ideas about what they really are or how they do inference, we can’t say that they’re necessarily more efficient than open source. In fact, people doing things in walled gardens, motivated by maximizing market share, subsidized by big players, are more likely to be doing things inefficiently than research being done out in the open.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoLLMs are a small subset of AI. In the long term, GPUs won't be used to accelerate LLMs.
- aunty_helen 3y agoThis is the same PR campaign that was being used against crypto. You need to wonder why someone is trying to pull the heart strings of those concerned about the environment. Who would benefit from getting the greenies mobilized against AI? Who wants to shift the conversation to concerns around the consumption of AI and why?
- c-cube 3y agoI know it sounds crazy but sometimes people are genuinely worried about climate change and the environment. Not everything is astroturfing.
- aunty_helen 3y agoOk let’s have a balanced conversation about it. AI saves a massive amount of environmental footprint in what it can achieve that would otherwise need to be done by a human process or would be too complicated to be done by a human and so the resulting waste is written off. For a concrete example, because my company helped build this, there’s power plants in the USA wasting less electricity because AI is better able to combine data to predict demand. This is megawatts per day that never needs to be generated because of software running on a couple graphics cards in a server rack using a few hundred watts.
- zht 3y agodid your company build something using LLMs or Gen AI?
- zht 3y agoand what has all of the crypto power usage lead to aside from wealth accumulation? did any of the other use cases pan out?
- croes 3y agoThe consumption is real, so no need for a campaign. At least AI is more useful than crypto currencies but if we mainly get more spam text and fake images the energy costs aren't worth it.
- GaggiX 3y agoDoesn't Google (as they are mentioned in the article) makes vast use of renewable energy?
- bhickey 3y agohttps://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/ > From 2010 to 2022, we signed more than 80 agreements totaling approximately 10 GW of clean energy generation capacity—the equivalent of more than 31 million solar panels. Now, as we enter our third decade of climate action, we’ve set a goal to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030, aiming to procure clean energy to meet our electricity needs, every hour of every day, within every grid where we operate. Achieving this will also increase the impact of our clean energy procurement on the decarbonization of the grids that serve us.
- j7ake 3y agoThe energy usage to run these models can be drastically reduced through optimising and pruning near-zero weights. If you’re an engineer like Carmack, I can imagine this is a problem that would be fruitful to tackle. We are back at saving computation to get real world difference in performance and energy usage.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoThere has not been such a thing as an "Obscene Energy Denand" for half a century, especially not for something that has a chance to turn out to be the most impactful labor-saving technology since the electromechanical computer. The US has the blueprint [1] to step-increase electrical generation at a lower bound of five times, with zero environmental impact, and continue growing for many generations longer than the world population is expected to increase, sitting on the shelf collecting dust for whenever it decides to use it. In light of this, articles with this sort of headline are just scaremongering nonsense. McCarthy didn't tolerate this intentional ignorance [2], so we shouldn't, either. [1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1212086 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1212086 [2] http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/nuclear-faq.html http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/nuclear-faq.html
- willj 3y agoI’d argue Bitcoin is Obscene Energy Demand.
- epolanski 3y agoAt least ChatGPT is writing essays. Whereas Ethereum has clearly shown that you can have a safe chain without this craziness. But from reddit to Bitcoin talk to Bitcoin core development, there's a handful of people that control everything and want the status quo preserved.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago> Bitcoin mining now consumes a hundred and forty-five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year..producing that electricity results in eighty-one million tons of CO2 How do they even calculate it? I heard that bitcoin mining isn't profitable using fossil fuels. The average reward earned per kwh is something like 5 cents.
- epolanski 3y agoHash rate divided by average ASIC hash rate gives you number of machines. You multiply this number by the power consumption of the ASIC and divide it by average emissions for that amount of energy.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoYes but it's not average emissions if say they run over extra(as in the energy for which we don't have storage) solar panel energy.
- alfor 3y agoMy prediction: the advance of tech by AI will far surpasse what it consume in energy. To look at the energy consumption of current model is extremely short sighted. If AI create a new material, a new solar cell, advance fusion reactor is all of humanity that jump forward. Furthermore new generation of AI accelerators and new algorithms will improve efficiency by order of magnitute, it's still early days.
- epolanski 3y agoIf anything your post convinces me that (ab)use of AI will become more ubiquitous and the energy demands much higher.
- salawat 3y agoFor every good thing, come up with a bad. The material created will be a better poison/virus. The algorithm to keep the fusion tokamak from going boom will be at best 99% correct. The new solar cell? More exotic materials required than the current. Blind optimism is a vice we cannot afford.
- neglesaks 3y agoThe post you're responding to doesn't argue from blind optimism, it argued a reasonably-expected gain in net beneficial effects.
- salawat 3y agoNonono. Reasonable is when you communicate the tradeoffs. More efficient, but more complex supply chain. Easier to immediately build, but we have to quadruple the computing power per cubic meter of reactor. More frequently discovered materials, but Uncle Ted can nail down the synthesis of the next VX, and a dispersal system in his garage. Someone comes to me talking net gains. My next question is, "What's under the sheet you don't want to address out loud?" Under there is most often the real meat of the endeavor.
- alfor 3y agoI agree with you too. It's much easier to destroy and to enslave than to create something good. There I was thinking of the possible positive vs electricity cost. Yes we might doom us all with AI. I hope the good win, wild time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- louwrentius 3y agoAI is the new cryptocurrency. Big difference is that it can actually do something useful in a legal way. But does that usefulness really warrant the CO2 emissions?
- alchemist1e9 3y agoSo strange that currency isn’t considered something useful. I’d recommend “The History of Money” by Weatherford. Innovation in monetary and financial systems are directly connected to human progress and an integral part of it. I’d propose in 20-30 years legacy fiat currency advocates will carry a sense of embarrassment trying to explain why they defended such an abusive system based on confiscation and war with a record of death and destruction and collapse, over a system with transparency and fairness that promoted the greatest expansion of clean global energy imaginable and helped end the endless tribal warfare between nations. But yeah … nothing useful.
- franky47 3y agoA radical switch to EVs of the general population, required for net-zero emissions, would be orders of magnitude more taxing on the grid than AI. That being said, the issue with AI is its convenience: countless times I've seen coworkers not think by themselves for 2-3 seconds, but ask ChatGPT instead. Or worse, do it live in meetings when I had the answer from experience.
- escapecharacter 3y ago+1, my primary concern with AI is people misusing it. This is far more important than any “AI will become too powerful and evil” alignment delusion.
- sandspar 3y agoCaptain Jean-Luc Picard pondering a thorny problem with the Klingons: "Computer, think for me."
- ramesh31 3y ago>Captain Jean-Luc Picard pondering a thorny problem with the Klingons: "Computer, think for me." It's actually been a little eerie going back and watching TNG lately. Just a few years ago, the computer's conversational abilities were complete science fiction fantasy. Now it seems quaint.
- freedomben 3y agoIndeed, I've noticed this too. Classic Trek has computer being fiercely logical machines, with some ability to speculate but only based on a logical synthesis of data, and only in a deterministic and error-free way (barring physical/hardware problems or bad data of course). It actually seems quite artificially limited compared to what's happening now!
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYes, because in Star Trek, they had solved the problem of AI hallucinations.
- FredPret 3y ago"obscene" This is race-to-the-bottom thinking. All forms of civilization needs energy. More is better. Characterizing it as "obscene" smacks of anti-humanism and is completely wrong-headed. We need to use more energy - a billion times more. We just need it to be clean.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoUnfortunately our current culture is significantly infected with the anti-humanism. If we have a future where governments decide what is good energy vs bad energy use instead of clean or dirty energy production, then we will really enter a deep new dark age of human civilization.
- neglesaks 3y agoNot "naked government", but government bureaucracy that's targeted by tailored ESG efforts, where the hordes of ESG consultants and influencers and activists largely get their ideas from the same uniform pool of ideas.
- didntcheck 3y agoAnd hordes of useful idiots (who somehow claim to be anticapitalist) claim that it's a good thing that unaccountable bourgeois corporations are socially engineering society from the top down. Well, once they pivot from "that's not happening" to "don't you dare say that shouldn't be happening!"
- Phiwise_ 3y agoI assume that french word must translate to "federal government" in english, right? What you've written makes no sense otherwise.
- didntcheck 3y agoNo. "Bourgeois/ie" is such a widely known word in English that I didn't realise it wouldn't be understood. It can be read as "[capitalist] elite"/"ruling class"/"1%"/etc It's possible I used the word slightly wrong as the definitions I've now looked up often refer to the "middle class", though as I understand that could historically refer to people who we'd think of now as very upper class, just not actual nobles. Nevertheless, the above reading is what I intended
- leroman 3y agoWell we finally have motivation to move upwards in the Kardashev Scale
- epistasis 3y agoIMHO the comparisons in this article--liters, countries, "billions" of kWh--obscure rather than enlighten. Let's say that AI is a massive massive success and increases energy demand and ends up consuming 10% of electricity. I don't know if that's realistic, it's probable high, but let's assume it's correct within 10x. Then, if that ramps up energy demand a lot, what happens? We deploy far more energy generation. Is that a problem? No, actually that will accelerate our energy transition to zero carbon. Already, nearly all of the new energy added in 2024 will be solar, batteries, and wind, because that's what's cheapest. Solar and battery will be 81% of the power capacity added (comparing different techs by power instead of energy has limitations, but assume a 20% capacity factor for solar to get to energy, 50% for gas, and 90% for nuclear): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 Further, since solar, batteries, and wind are all on technology learning curves, the more we build of them, the cheaper they become. So if we accelerate building and deployment, the faster they get cheaper. That means, the faster we build more renewable tech, the quicker it gets to replacing carbon-based energy, on the merits of cost. Some natural gas plants, right now, cost more in fuel to run than it would cost to build a solar farm next to them, and use the solar when the sun is shining, and gas at night. The cheaper it gets, the sooner solar can economically replace more and more existing natural gas generation sites Similarly for storage, right now it's an extra $90/MWh or so to store a MWh, and the sooner that drops in price, the more existing carbon sources can be replaced. Data centers that need their own backup power, and run on a combo of solar plus batteries, are a perfect application for this tech. Meanwhile, existing energy infrastructure is loooong lived. Unlike computer tech, which depreciates quickly, you will have generations equipment in place for decades. So that means that the replacement rate for electricity generation is low, unless there is a big increase in demand. Fortunately electrification of many industries is increasing electricity demand, and accelerating solar/battery/wind deployment and tech curves, but accelerating this with even more demand from AI would likely have positive effects rather than negative effects.
- ssnri 3y ago10% is within 10x of all percentages, lol.
- serial_dev 3y agoIt's like these news outlets have only one script that they apply to everything they see. Having AI consume some energy is, in my opinion, very different than people speculating on bitcoin burning coal faster than most countries.
- dale_glass 3y agoIt all highly depends on what you're doing. For image generation, AI is quite cheap. Here's an estimation: Video card uses 200W for around 8-10 seconds to generate an image. Let's say 10. That's 6 images/minute, 360 images/hour, 1800 images per kwh. At 0.20 Euro/kwh in Europe (so not really cheap), an image costs 0.00011 Euro to generate. Let's say we're further doing a boring brute force approach of choosing the best image out of 100. This puts our costs at 1 cent per final image. This IMO compares extremely favorably to almost all alternatives. Drawing by hand for hours, using paints or inks, using good paper, etc, will easily cost more than 1 cent per picture. And AI can be done purely on renewables, while inks, paints and paper have ecological costs.
- kevmo314 3y agoInduced demand though. I've never painted but I sure have generated a bunch of images.
- sandspar 3y agoCulture has been trending visual for a while. There's been growing demand, this is just a cheaper supply.
- xnx 3y agoComparison is the key part. What were people doing with their time and money before they were generating images? Sitting quietly in nature? Hiring illustrators and photographers?
- Palomides 3y agoit's a bit questionable to claim that AI can be done purely on renewables but painting can't, I think you're forgetting costs (of production, and of eco-friendly disposal (hah!)) embodied in the computing hardware
- dale_glass 3y agoAt 360 images/hour, you can generate 8640 images/day, 3153600/year. Realistically, no reason why the card shouldn't last at least 3 years, so that brings us to at least 10 million pictures. Anecdotally, 10K sheets of paper per tree, so almost a thousand trees worth in just paper, before accounting for the other materials, the impacts of their extraction and logging and so on. I think hardware wins there as well, and the more tech advances the more uneven it gets. Making paper and pigments is a purely physical thing, we're already about as good at that as we can be. And probably getting worse with time, as the most convenient mines of materials are exhausted.
- nottorp 3y agoSo the next logical step is to turn the humans into batteries and let the AI handle the Earth, right?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy? This is the entirely wrong question to ask. We will not be able to conserve our way to net zero. Billions of people in the developing world want to improve their life style. They want cars, air conditioning, and other conveniences that the developed world enjoys. The energy demand will go up. We need to build massive amounts of zero carbon energy production, storage, and distribution facilities. The question is not if humanity will find more uses for energy. We will. The question is will we be able to meet the demands without increasing CO2 and if we are realistic and plan on increased energy usage, we will.
- estreeper 3y agoEnergy use should be a concern, but it’s important to understand the magnitude of the problems and not simply conflate crypto and AI. To compare the technologies against each other: Bitcoin: 145B = 145,000M kWh/year ChatGPT: 0.5M * 365 = 182M kWh/year Based on the numbers from the article, ChatGPT is using 3 orders of magnitude less electricity for something that provides high utility for vastly more people. There are of course many other uses of AI aside from ChatGPT and more cryptocurrencies aside from BTC, but these are very different power consumptions.
- Mistletoe 3y agoIt’s important to not conflate all crypto with BTC. Ethereum moved to Proof of Stake and uses drastically less energy now. >Ethereum will consume 6.56 GWh of electricity annually. To put that into perspective, the annual electricity consumption of the Eiffel Tower is 6.70 GWh There is no need to hate all crypto because you hate the energy consumption. It’s as easy as people buying and using coin #2 instead of #1 and the problem all goes away. The only reason Bitcoin continues to be mined is that it is profitable. If the coin value goes down, mining goes down.
- goatmeal 3y agoit's important to understand that most crypto doesn't even use proof of work. out of the top ten, only two are mined and they have less actual usage combined than the other eight.
- ffsm8 3y agoIsn't it pointless to keep that in mind considering that Bitcoin remains the defacto standard and dwarfs any other coin combined wrt value?
- wyager 3y ago> something that provides high utility for vastly more people We have a really nice mechanism of distributed utility measurement called "prices" which suggests otherwise.
- xnx 3y agoDon't all these articles boil down to "I don't like what you like"? I think diamond rings, the NFL, beef, and McMansions have "obscene energy demands".
- didntcheck 3y agoYes. It smells very much of motivated reasoning. A lot of people have clearly set their minds to opposing AI for a long while now, and will jump on any possible reason to prop that up. And a lot of journalists are motivated by the click-through statistics on sensationally-negative articles on the latest popular thing
- wyager 3y agoYes. This is all just the latest guise for the human instinct to suppress déclassé consumption. Any time you have people advocating for sumptuary laws there's always some grand moral excuse: it's for the sake of religious decency, for the benefit of the proletariat, for the sake of the environment, etc.
- vb-8448 3y agoBold prediction: AI will tell us how to solve the energy problem! /s
- gmuslera 3y agoEstimations of maybe future adoption of AI vs actual usage of crypto. And putting the focus in the evils of AI instead of the obvious present crypto usage. And the problem, specially when we are talking about the future, it is not so much energy usage but fossil fuel based energy generation. AI may eventually, by the time it gets within an order or two below crypto usage, be fueled by clean energy. Or not, but it still is the elephant in the room vs the little mouse you try to scare about.
- sys_64738 3y agoThe problem with AI is when those energy demands collapse. Right now they prevent a real tsunami of AI garbage from destroying the internet as we know it. Think USENET epic proportions.
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- smitty1e 3y agoThe godz of the market will not be mocked. If AI hoovers up too much juice supporting Rule 34[1] then prices are going to rise no matter which direction the finger points. This is a self-correcting "problem". [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"AI" is taking water from the desert https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/ai-water-climate-microsoft/677602/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/ai-wa...
- fennecbutt 3y agoWhat's that sound? Oh it's the sound of voters and governments not having made green energy a priority a long time ago, and still not making it a priority.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoAs use of A.I. soars, so does the energy and water it requires https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-clima...
- janandonly 3y agoSpeaking of academic frauds: the fact that bitcoin energy hater in chief De vVries has pivoted to hating on AI energy use – and continues to trick journalists with his made up metrics – is absolutely hilarious.