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Bad title, and incorrect characterization. > electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. > The IEA esti

Bad title, and incorrect characterization. > electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. > The IEA estimates that, added together, this usage represented almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 First, Bitcoin by itself uses about 0.5% of work electricity. This is purely wasted on proof-of-work, which could be proof-of-stake instead. Second, grouping all datacenters with AI models is disingenuous. I don't think anyone argues training LLMs is very costly in energy, but it's also a fraction of the energy costs of "literally all compute". It's just the hot thing to write clickbait on.

yieldcrv 3y ago
that and there are a subset of mining sites that reduce emissions and sell energy to the grid and another subset that only reduce emissions and are using energy that is still isolated from the grid, has always been there otherwise unused, and is still too expensive to transport to other use cases - except maybe AI training now data centers never showed up because they needed fast internet. bitcoin mining needs minimal over the last decade and a half, and now training a model only needs minimal too.