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I've read somewhere that half of googles datacenter energy consumption is ai. So I think the real numbers are probably somewhere else. Its not just about one qu

by hexo 2y ago

I've read somewhere that half of googles datacenter energy consumption is ai. So I think the real numbers are probably somewhere else. Its not just about one query - its about everything that come with it, including production of hw including price manipulation (that means we [better say companies] have to produce more money [ie. make some more CO2] to even afford the hw in the first place) and soon also energy plants construction - and we can only hope thats not a coal one. Also, there's that pesky training that is hugely expensive on electricity. Oh dont get me wrong - there are good uses of neural networks, but the stuff that pushed so much is not that. An example of good one was nvidias sw (rtx voice) to clear up voice during calls, dunno if it exists or not.

Ukv 2y ago
> I've read somewhere that half of googles datacenter energy consumption is ai I can't find that figure, or what's being included in it: major Google products like Search and Translate are AI (since at least ~2018, depending on your definition of AI) and have huge numbers of users - I think it'd be hard to deny their utility. > Its not just about one query [...] To be clear, I didn't calculate that "one query" was equivalent to a cup of coffee - it was a year's worth of someone's LLM usage. > Also, there's that pesky training that is hugely expensive on electricity. I don't believe the coffee comparison took into consideration the one-off costs either, like manufacturing of your coffee machine, but let's consider the amortized emissions of training anyway: 500 tons of CO2[0] over 200,000,000 users[1] means 0.0025kg of CO2 per user, barely shifting from the figure of inference alone. Again, rough calculation - would be lower per-user if taking into account API/3rd-party users, but then higher taking into account more model versions. Realistically, I don't think someone's CO2 emissions on the order of 0.4kg, whether that's coffee, video streaming/rendering, LLM usage, or so on, should take so much of the focus while we have, for instance, celebrities emitting 8,000,000kg a year[2] from private jets. [0]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-footprint/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-fo... [1]: https://a16z.com/how-are-consumers-using-generative-ai/ https://a16z.com/how-are-consumers-using-generative-ai/ [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EP0Gbtk.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/EP0Gbtk.jpeg

by hexo 2y ago

Ukv 2y ago

> I've read somewhere that half of googles datacenter energy consumption is ai I can't find that figure, or what's being included in it: major Google products like Search and Translate are AI (since at least ~2018, depending on your definition of AI) and have huge numbers of users - I think it'd be hard to deny their utility. > Its not just about one query [...] To be clear, I didn't calculate that "one query" was equivalent to a cup of coffee - it was a year's worth of someone's LLM usage. > Also, there's that pesky training that is hugely expensive on electricity. I don't believe the coffee comparison took into consideration the one-off costs either, like manufacturing of your coffee machine, but let's consider the amortized emissions of training anyway: 500 tons of CO2[0] over 200,000,000 users[1] means 0.0025kg of CO2 per user, barely shifting from the figure of inference alone. Again, rough calculation - would be lower per-user if taking into account API/3rd-party users, but then higher taking into account more model versions. Realistically, I don't think someone's CO2 emissions on the order of 0.4kg, whether that's coffee, video streaming/rendering, LLM usage, or so on, should take so much of the focus while we have, for instance, celebrities emitting 8,000,000kg a year[2] from private jets. [0]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-footprint/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-fo... [1]: https://a16z.com/how-are-consumers-using-generative-ai/ https://a16z.com/how-are-consumers-using-generative-ai/ [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EP0Gbtk.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/EP0Gbtk.jpeg