5 ms·

Is AI eating all the energy?

29 points by lr0 2y ago

ellellem 2y ago
[flagged]
- pookybear223 2y ago
  I’m feeling the upside with being given the opportunity to talk to chatbots on every site possible. I didn’t think we’d be here in my lifetime to see the AI uprising, so I would give all of the energy possible to talk to Amazon Rufus to better learn about myself and products.
- batch12 2y ago
  This is just a hook to advertise their product. Hopefully I've saved a few clicks.
monero-xmr 2y ago
Energy use is only bad if the user is doing something you disagree with. When crypto miners were in the news, it was terrible because crypto mining "provides no value" (to the people doing the criticizing). Now that AI is using massive energy and the usual nags are coming out to criticize it, suddenly HN is promulgating the glorious benefits of such excess energy use. Pot meet kettle. Human nature never changes
- whatever1 2y ago
  At least some of cpu cycles in llms result to useful computation. That is in stark contrast to crypto mining where computation is done for the sake of computation scarcity.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    Well if you truly believe Bitcoin provides safety against money printing, then the CPU cycles aren’t “wasted” but extremely valuable. Luckily we have a market for energy and we can all decide for ourselves what is useful energy use
    - smt88 2y ago
      The energy market doesn't price in externalities and is deeply broken. It is subsidized heavily by the public and by future generations.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - burnished 2y ago
      It is a little funny that you're talking about 'safety against money printing' from a technology where you effectively print money. I know its called 'mining' but its really more like printing - low risk, repeatable process, expectable output. I know its not exactly that simple but still gave me a chuckle.
- batch12 2y ago
  I seem to hear less about reducing carbon footprints nowadays, but maybe it's just being drowned out by ai hype.
  - rembicilious 2y ago
    You trigger an idea of AI evolution in my brain. AI needs power to proliferate. AI that encouraged power consumption and de-emphasised climate issues naturally thrived. Like a successful virus; no thought required. Survival of the fittest.
- nuforia 2y ago
  [dead]
- simonw 2y ago
  There's a crucial difference between AI energy usage and Bitcoin proof-of-work energy usage. Proof-of-work is set up as a competition. To earn coins, you need to burn more energy than anyone else (in order to win the hashing lottery). This means that energy usage trends upwards - if someone else builds a bigger coin farm than you, your incentive is to increase the size of yours even more. With AI models, everyone is interested in finding and deploying new efficiencies. Have you noticed how the prices for hosted LLMs (OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini, Google's Gemini Flash, Anthropic's Haiku) keep dropping? That's because they keep finding new ways to optimize those models, serving useful results while using less energy to do it. The AI space still has its competitive pressure: Google, Meta, Microsoft are all making huge speculative investments in GPUs and new data centers right now. But it's still not in the same class of waste as the proof-of-work competition used by Bitcoin.
- wmf 2y ago
  PoW is bad because PoS can do the same thing with 99% less energy yet some people refuse to switch. AI is already as efficient as we know how to make it. Energy is good because it allows people to do things they care about. As long as the externalities are internalized [1] and the energy is paid for, the rest will mostly take care of itself. [1] they aren't of course, but that's not crypto's fault and it's not AI's fault either
samstave 2y ago
I wrote up a thing on this: HNer @externedguy "..built interactive map of active & decommissioned nuclear stations/reactors" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41189056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41189056 --- So I wrote the following in response: (I correlated the Nuclear reactor locations with DataCenters, undersea cable endpints (which will be near both nukes and datacenters) As they could be layers - and we track shipments and we can see where AI consumes: --- ...if we add the layers of the SubmarinCableMap [0] DataCenterMap [1] - and we begin to track shipments And https://i.imgur.com/zO0yz6J.png https://i.imgur.com/zO0yz6J.png -- Left is nuke, top = cables, bottom = datacenters. I went to ImportYeti to look into the NVIDIA shipments: https://i.imgur.com/k9018EC.png https://i.imgur.com/k9018EC.png And you look at the suppliers that are coming from Taiwan, such as the water-coolers and power cables to sus out where they may be shipping to, https://i.imgur.com/B5iWFQ1.png https://i.imgur.com/B5iWFQ1.png -- but instead, it would be better to find shipping lables for datacenters that are receiving containers from Taiwain, and the same suppliers as NVIDIA for things such as power cables. While the free data is out of date on ImportYeti - it gives a good supply line idea for NVIDIA... with the goal to find out which datacenters that are getting such shipments, you can begin to measure the footprint of AI as it grows, and which nuke plants they are likely powered from. Then, looking into whatever reporting one may access for the consumption/util of the nuke's capacity in various regions, we can estimate the power footprint of growing Global Compute. DataCenterNews and all sorts of datasets are available - and now the ability to create this crawler/tracker is likely full implementable https://i.imgur.com/gsM75dz.png https://i.imgur.com/gsM75dz.png https://i.imgur.com/a7nGGKh.png https://i.imgur.com/a7nGGKh.png [0] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ [1] https://www.datacentermap.com/ https://www.datacentermap.com/ ---- And a while back I posted: In the increasingly interconnected global economy, the reliance on Cloud Services raises questions about the national security implications of data centers. As these critical economic infrastructure sites, often strategically located underground, underwater, or in remote-cold locales, play a pivotal role, considerations arise regarding the role of military forces in safeguarding their security. While physical security measures and location obscurity provide some protection, the integration of AI into various aspects of daily life and the pervasive influence of cloud-based technologies on devices, as evident in CES GPT-enabled products, further accentuates the importance of these infrastructure sites. Notably, instances such as the seizure of a college thesis mapping communication lines in the U.S. underscore the sensitivity of disclosing key communications infrastructure. Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?
readyplayernull 2y ago
Isn't it disconcerting that brains consume so little energy doing continuous high complexity tasks like visual processing and even resting produce vivid simulations, while numeric calculations require so much effort for advanced brains? It's like the energy usage pattern is completely opposite between brains and computers. That should tell something about our approach to intelligence by using, maybe, the wrong tool?
- drdaeman 2y ago
  > brains consume so little energy doing continuous high complexity tasks Do they? While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem (not sure if true, though - haven't really dug to verify), thinking is thinking, so I guess that makes sense. But when e.g. a reaction time is important, I suspect, it could be quite energy-hungry. I mean, my watch sends me that I have elevated heart rate when I'm playing any fast-paced videogames, and I guess all that blood pumping surely has some biological reason (supplying more oxygen or something) and isn't just for funsies. I'm not a biologist, so this is purely based on my own observations and stuff I've heard somewhere.
  - eric-hu 2y ago
    > While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem I find that difficult to reconcile with chess grandmaster calorie consumption. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmasters-diet https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmast... > Polard, this company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found out that this 21-year-old Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, had burned 560 calories in two hours, which we found out was roughly what Roger Federer would burn in one hour of singles tennis.
    - caseyy 2y ago
      I notice this in software engineering, too. Challenging problems drain brainpower quicker. I was working on difficult SOTA stuff for the last few months, half of it was reading articles and half was implementing them in software. I’d crash by 3.30-4 pm every day unless I had an extra meal around then. Lost 5 kilos, too. So it wasn’t all going into my waistline. You can observe this, I think. Drivers too tend to make more mistakes if they don’t eat well on long drives.
pants2 2y ago
Bitcoin only uses huge amounts of energy because the bitcoin community likes it that way. Nearly all other blockchains use some form of Proof of Stake model and their energy use isn't much more than a typical cloud service.
- toenail 2y ago
  And all proof of stake blockchains require trust in some entity. Proof of work solves that problem, it's not just a matter of preference.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    PoW creates the illusion of solving trust, but it is only an illusion because all things one may purchase with a transaction also require trust. At best, there's also smart contracts, which do have real uses, but they also have limited domain — you can't meaningfully digitally verify the correct delivery of a pizza, or that the pizza is correct as ordered, or that it's even safe to eat. Legal system does all that, but if you've already got a legal system then you don't need to worry too much about trusting the bank either.
mjfl 2y ago
AI is not useful enough to use all this energy. Sounds like capital destruction.
synicalx 2y ago
I've often wondered if we're focusing on the wrong things with lines of thinking like "does X use too much power?". It's not like our demand for electricity is ever going to be lower than it is right now, so trying to use less of it seems futile. We can generate immense quantities of electricity given enough time and money, we've obviously fallen well behind if electricity is considered a limiting factor. Disclaimer; I'm not talking specifically about AI here, just production and consumption of electricity in all it's forms.
- alanbernstein 2y ago
  But if the growth rate of usage in a certain sector seems to outpace everything else, that can give us clues about how those trends may have to change in the future.
  - synicalx 2y ago
    From a capacity planning perspective that's very useful information for sure.
- totallymike 2y ago
  Do you ever wonder where that electricity comes from? It might be worth checking out if you’re not convinced that finding ways to stay efficient in the face of enormous technological growth is worthwhile.
  - synicalx 2y ago
    I'm not really talking about the electricity we (global 'we') are generating right now, because we're still talking about curtailing our usage of it so it's obviously not enough. I'm talking more about electricity we could be generating in future so that demand is met - that should, and can be from clean sources like solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind etc. Efficiency should be an implicit goal with everything, but that's only ever going to blunt the demand not stop it entirely. We still need massive growth in generation in the coming decades, or we have to accept that the pace of everything is going to slow down.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
We live in interesting times. Data centers are starting to use a lot of energy. But in the grand scheme of the energy market rapidly trending towards using renewable energy, that's actually OK. Energy usage is bad for our planet when you use things like coal and gas plants to generate the energy. But the vast majority of installed new capacity is actually a mix of wind and solar supplemented with battery. That mix is growing at a rate measured in TW/year of added capacity. It's well over 80% now. A lot of new gas and coal capacity is increasingly reserved for use rather than actually used. Shiny new gas plants designed to run 24x7 are actually now being pushed into a role as peaker plants. Which means they are rapidly becoming financial basket cases. Some relatively new plants have actually been closed already for this reason. More coal gets decommissioned than built at this point (China and India are still adding capacity, the rest of the world mostly isn't). For the world, peak coal was last decade. And even in China, peak coal seems near. In terms of overall fossil fuel usage, things are about to peak and then decline in terms of fossil resources used. What that means is that from now on the amount of fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) used for electricity production should start to decline not just in relative terms but in absolute terms. Don't get me wrong, it's still pretty bad and short term the decline is maybe not yet quite happening or that easy to observe. But in a few years there should be some measurable steady decline. Experts seem to disagree whether that's right now or by something like 2028. But the point is that we're at or close to the peak here. Cloud computing and AI are one of the big drivers for all this. They create demand for more energy. This causes the energy market to grow. But as it grows, fossil fuel usage is starting to shrink. That's a trend that accelerates as renewable energy and batteries get cheaper (learning effects, technology improvements, etc.). There are some pretty interesting economics at play here that boil down that doing more of a thing causes that thing to become cheaper. Not just a little bit but actually by quite a lot. So, there's value in creating new demand: it speeds all this up. Cost per mwh is an interesting number to track. That has been dropping steadily over the last decade and a half. Anyone using a lot of energy, e.g. data centers, is going to be looking for the most cost effective way to source that energy. And renewables are at this point the cheapest source by far. The main premise of this article seems to suggest that we should slow down things like AI because it uses too much energy. But by creating a need to grow the energy market, we're actually speeding up the demise of fossil fuel generation; not slowing it down. So, I'm not so convinced that putting a lot of energy (pun intended) into attempting to slow this down is that productive. It's probably futile and the effects are debatable (I would argue negative even). Besides, computing resources are enabling a few things that are actually causing behavioral changes. For example, we travel a lot less for work. And we can work remotely. Also a lot of work is getting automated entirely removing the need to move humans around to do the work. AI is projected to be a big part of that. It has an energy cost. But it also has upsides. And that cost can met sustainably. So, it's not all that bad.
lokimedes 2y ago
Progress (empowerment) always costs more energy, that is thermodynamics. We may be surprised in what form the expended energy takes, or skeptical about the benefits (think whale oil lamps), but that is the general pattern. That we (and especially eco-dreamers in Europe) saw the stagnating energy consumption per capita over the last 3 decades as evidence that we can save energy to reduce climate change is a fiction that can only be held by people who haven’t witnessed true progress (or cared for it).
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I don't that its fair to assume that progress alwaysalqays requires more energy. Many innovations that we would consider progress offer more efficiency than what they replace. The challenge is that we continue to consume as much as possible. New innovations often have the potential to decrease energy use through efficiency, instead we choose to use more of the thing. I.e. "progress" often offers a decrease energy consumption per unit, but we end up with a total energy use increase when we drastically increase the unit count.
zekrioca 2y ago
I think the comparisons to images are a bit misleading, where the author implies that generating images are somehow more energy-efficient than taking the photos yourself. It basically ignores the fact that the very data these large models use came from real photos taken from real cameras etc. and that used real energy, which in the end should be included in the total training cost, i.e., in addition to the electricity consumed by the GPUs. This would have an impact in how the total cost can be amortised with usage. Of course the impact might be just to slow down a little the amortisation with use, but it still should be included for a fair comparison. Same applies to some of the other examples they give.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don't actually want." "While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes - cryptocurrency, "the metaverse", artificial intelligence... - all seem to be comically expensive boondoggles that only really benefit the salesmen." But acccording to sentence #1, some people do want these things, e.g., salespeople, investors, etc. But as sentence #2 implies, this is not a majority of people. Over the years, when people complain on HN about software and the web, other commenters, presumably software/web developers, respond that these complainers do not matter because they are only a minority: the majority of people do not complain. Failure to complain apparently means the silent majority "wants" what they get. What rule can we derive from this developer "reasoning/argument". Sometimes it makes sense to cater to a minority, other times it doesn't? "If you're not familiar, data centers are dedicated facilities for running servers. Data centers are "the cloud": instead of running your own servers, you can rent computer power from experts who are very good at keeping computers from turning off." "The problem we immediately run into if we try to think about the proportional cost of AI is that there is no consensus on whether it's ultimately useful." I think it is safe to say that only a minority of people are speculating that "AI" is useful. The majority are silent. Does that mean the majority want it. We know what salespeople, investors and developers will say. "As I mentioned earlier, the AI boom feels a lot like the blockchain cryptocurrency push of a few years ago. Like cryptocurrency, AI is a tech fad, it requires data centers, it consumes more energy than a webserver... the comparison is extremely natural." If these things were truly useful, then it stands to reason the majority of people would be asking for them. Instead we see indifference. To developers, this indifference equates to "Yes, we want it". A fundamental problem with paying atteniton to the speculation of developers and other pundits who advocate expensive, unnecessary uses of computers, e.g., "AI", besides the obvious conflict of interest, is that these folks do not have a good track record of being honest. To start MicroSoft in the 1970s Bill Gates had to lie that he had software that did not yet exist. This "vapourware" tactic might seem quaint but this culture of dishonesty now involves much higher stakes. Developers are still faking demos. Putting Elizabeth Holmes in prison has not stopped the Silicon Valley culture of fraud.

29 points by lr0 2y ago

ellellem 2y ago

[flagged]

pookybear223 2y ago
I’m feeling the upside with being given the opportunity to talk to chatbots on every site possible. I didn’t think we’d be here in my lifetime to see the AI uprising, so I would give all of the energy possible to talk to Amazon Rufus to better learn about myself and products.
batch12 2y ago
This is just a hook to advertise their product. Hopefully I've saved a few clicks.

monero-xmr 2y ago

Energy use is only bad if the user is doing something you disagree with. When crypto miners were in the news, it was terrible because crypto mining "provides no value" (to the people doing the criticizing). Now that AI is using massive energy and the usual nags are coming out to criticize it, suddenly HN is promulgating the glorious benefits of such excess energy use. Pot meet kettle. Human nature never changes

whatever1 2y ago
At least some of cpu cycles in llms result to useful computation. That is in stark contrast to crypto mining where computation is done for the sake of computation scarcity.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  Well if you truly believe Bitcoin provides safety against money printing, then the CPU cycles aren’t “wasted” but extremely valuable. Luckily we have a market for energy and we can all decide for ourselves what is useful energy use
  - smt88 2y ago
    The energy market doesn't price in externalities and is deeply broken. It is subsidized heavily by the public and by future generations.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - burnished 2y ago
    It is a little funny that you're talking about 'safety against money printing' from a technology where you effectively print money. I know its called 'mining' but its really more like printing - low risk, repeatable process, expectable output. I know its not exactly that simple but still gave me a chuckle.
batch12 2y ago
I seem to hear less about reducing carbon footprints nowadays, but maybe it's just being drowned out by ai hype.
- rembicilious 2y ago
  You trigger an idea of AI evolution in my brain. AI needs power to proliferate. AI that encouraged power consumption and de-emphasised climate issues naturally thrived. Like a successful virus; no thought required. Survival of the fittest.
nuforia 2y ago
[dead]
simonw 2y ago
There's a crucial difference between AI energy usage and Bitcoin proof-of-work energy usage. Proof-of-work is set up as a competition. To earn coins, you need to burn more energy than anyone else (in order to win the hashing lottery). This means that energy usage trends upwards - if someone else builds a bigger coin farm than you, your incentive is to increase the size of yours even more. With AI models, everyone is interested in finding and deploying new efficiencies. Have you noticed how the prices for hosted LLMs (OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini, Google's Gemini Flash, Anthropic's Haiku) keep dropping? That's because they keep finding new ways to optimize those models, serving useful results while using less energy to do it. The AI space still has its competitive pressure: Google, Meta, Microsoft are all making huge speculative investments in GPUs and new data centers right now. But it's still not in the same class of waste as the proof-of-work competition used by Bitcoin.
wmf 2y ago
PoW is bad because PoS can do the same thing with 99% less energy yet some people refuse to switch. AI is already as efficient as we know how to make it. Energy is good because it allows people to do things they care about. As long as the externalities are internalized [1] and the energy is paid for, the rest will mostly take care of itself. [1] they aren't of course, but that's not crypto's fault and it's not AI's fault either

samstave 2y ago

I wrote up a thing on this: HNer @externedguy "..built interactive map of active & decommissioned nuclear stations/reactors" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41189056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41189056 --- So I wrote the following in response: (I correlated the Nuclear reactor locations with DataCenters, undersea cable endpints (which will be near both nukes and datacenters) As they could be layers - and we track shipments and we can see where AI consumes: --- ...if we add the layers of the SubmarinCableMap [0] DataCenterMap [1] - and we begin to track shipments And https://i.imgur.com/zO0yz6J.png https://i.imgur.com/zO0yz6J.png -- Left is nuke, top = cables, bottom = datacenters. I went to ImportYeti to look into the NVIDIA shipments: https://i.imgur.com/k9018EC.png https://i.imgur.com/k9018EC.png And you look at the suppliers that are coming from Taiwan, such as the water-coolers and power cables to sus out where they may be shipping to, https://i.imgur.com/B5iWFQ1.png https://i.imgur.com/B5iWFQ1.png -- but instead, it would be better to find shipping lables for datacenters that are receiving containers from Taiwain, and the same suppliers as NVIDIA for things such as power cables. While the free data is out of date on ImportYeti - it gives a good supply line idea for NVIDIA... with the goal to find out which datacenters that are getting such shipments, you can begin to measure the footprint of AI as it grows, and which nuke plants they are likely powered from. Then, looking into whatever reporting one may access for the consumption/util of the nuke's capacity in various regions, we can estimate the power footprint of growing Global Compute. DataCenterNews and all sorts of datasets are available - and now the ability to create this crawler/tracker is likely full implementable https://i.imgur.com/gsM75dz.png https://i.imgur.com/gsM75dz.png https://i.imgur.com/a7nGGKh.png https://i.imgur.com/a7nGGKh.png [0] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ [1] https://www.datacentermap.com/ https://www.datacentermap.com/ ---- And a while back I posted: In the increasingly interconnected global economy, the reliance on Cloud Services raises questions about the national security implications of data centers. As these critical economic infrastructure sites, often strategically located underground, underwater, or in remote-cold locales, play a pivotal role, considerations arise regarding the role of military forces in safeguarding their security. While physical security measures and location obscurity provide some protection, the integration of AI into various aspects of daily life and the pervasive influence of cloud-based technologies on devices, as evident in CES GPT-enabled products, further accentuates the importance of these infrastructure sites. Notably, instances such as the seizure of a college thesis mapping communication lines in the U.S. underscore the sensitivity of disclosing key communications infrastructure. Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?

readyplayernull 2y ago

Isn't it disconcerting that brains consume so little energy doing continuous high complexity tasks like visual processing and even resting produce vivid simulations, while numeric calculations require so much effort for advanced brains? It's like the energy usage pattern is completely opposite between brains and computers. That should tell something about our approach to intelligence by using, maybe, the wrong tool?

drdaeman 2y ago
> brains consume so little energy doing continuous high complexity tasks Do they? While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem (not sure if true, though - haven't really dug to verify), thinking is thinking, so I guess that makes sense. But when e.g. a reaction time is important, I suspect, it could be quite energy-hungry. I mean, my watch sends me that I have elevated heart rate when I'm playing any fast-paced videogames, and I guess all that blood pumping surely has some biological reason (supplying more oxygen or something) and isn't just for funsies. I'm not a biologist, so this is purely based on my own observations and stuff I've heard somewhere.
- eric-hu 2y ago
  > While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem I find that difficult to reconcile with chess grandmaster calorie consumption. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmasters-diet https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmast... > Polard, this company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found out that this 21-year-old Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, had burned 560 calories in two hours, which we found out was roughly what Roger Federer would burn in one hour of singles tennis.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    I notice this in software engineering, too. Challenging problems drain brainpower quicker. I was working on difficult SOTA stuff for the last few months, half of it was reading articles and half was implementing them in software. I’d crash by 3.30-4 pm every day unless I had an extra meal around then. Lost 5 kilos, too. So it wasn’t all going into my waistline. You can observe this, I think. Drivers too tend to make more mistakes if they don’t eat well on long drives.

pants2 2y ago

Bitcoin only uses huge amounts of energy because the bitcoin community likes it that way. Nearly all other blockchains use some form of Proof of Stake model and their energy use isn't much more than a typical cloud service.

toenail 2y ago
And all proof of stake blockchains require trust in some entity. Proof of work solves that problem, it's not just a matter of preference.
- ben_w 2y ago
  PoW creates the illusion of solving trust, but it is only an illusion because all things one may purchase with a transaction also require trust. At best, there's also smart contracts, which do have real uses, but they also have limited domain — you can't meaningfully digitally verify the correct delivery of a pizza, or that the pizza is correct as ordered, or that it's even safe to eat. Legal system does all that, but if you've already got a legal system then you don't need to worry too much about trusting the bank either.

mjfl 2y ago

AI is not useful enough to use all this energy. Sounds like capital destruction.

synicalx 2y ago

I've often wondered if we're focusing on the wrong things with lines of thinking like "does X use too much power?". It's not like our demand for electricity is ever going to be lower than it is right now, so trying to use less of it seems futile. We can generate immense quantities of electricity given enough time and money, we've obviously fallen well behind if electricity is considered a limiting factor. Disclaimer; I'm not talking specifically about AI here, just production and consumption of electricity in all it's forms.

alanbernstein 2y ago
But if the growth rate of usage in a certain sector seems to outpace everything else, that can give us clues about how those trends may have to change in the future.
- synicalx 2y ago
  From a capacity planning perspective that's very useful information for sure.
totallymike 2y ago
Do you ever wonder where that electricity comes from? It might be worth checking out if you’re not convinced that finding ways to stay efficient in the face of enormous technological growth is worthwhile.
- synicalx 2y ago
  I'm not really talking about the electricity we (global 'we') are generating right now, because we're still talking about curtailing our usage of it so it's obviously not enough. I'm talking more about electricity we could be generating in future so that demand is met - that should, and can be from clean sources like solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind etc. Efficiency should be an implicit goal with everything, but that's only ever going to blunt the demand not stop it entirely. We still need massive growth in generation in the coming decades, or we have to accept that the pace of everything is going to slow down.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

We live in interesting times. Data centers are starting to use a lot of energy. But in the grand scheme of the energy market rapidly trending towards using renewable energy, that's actually OK. Energy usage is bad for our planet when you use things like coal and gas plants to generate the energy. But the vast majority of installed new capacity is actually a mix of wind and solar supplemented with battery. That mix is growing at a rate measured in TW/year of added capacity. It's well over 80% now. A lot of new gas and coal capacity is increasingly reserved for use rather than actually used. Shiny new gas plants designed to run 24x7 are actually now being pushed into a role as peaker plants. Which means they are rapidly becoming financial basket cases. Some relatively new plants have actually been closed already for this reason. More coal gets decommissioned than built at this point (China and India are still adding capacity, the rest of the world mostly isn't). For the world, peak coal was last decade. And even in China, peak coal seems near. In terms of overall fossil fuel usage, things are about to peak and then decline in terms of fossil resources used. What that means is that from now on the amount of fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) used for electricity production should start to decline not just in relative terms but in absolute terms. Don't get me wrong, it's still pretty bad and short term the decline is maybe not yet quite happening or that easy to observe. But in a few years there should be some measurable steady decline. Experts seem to disagree whether that's right now or by something like 2028. But the point is that we're at or close to the peak here. Cloud computing and AI are one of the big drivers for all this. They create demand for more energy. This causes the energy market to grow. But as it grows, fossil fuel usage is starting to shrink. That's a trend that accelerates as renewable energy and batteries get cheaper (learning effects, technology improvements, etc.). There are some pretty interesting economics at play here that boil down that doing more of a thing causes that thing to become cheaper. Not just a little bit but actually by quite a lot. So, there's value in creating new demand: it speeds all this up. Cost per mwh is an interesting number to track. That has been dropping steadily over the last decade and a half. Anyone using a lot of energy, e.g. data centers, is going to be looking for the most cost effective way to source that energy. And renewables are at this point the cheapest source by far. The main premise of this article seems to suggest that we should slow down things like AI because it uses too much energy. But by creating a need to grow the energy market, we're actually speeding up the demise of fossil fuel generation; not slowing it down. So, I'm not so convinced that putting a lot of energy (pun intended) into attempting to slow this down is that productive. It's probably futile and the effects are debatable (I would argue negative even). Besides, computing resources are enabling a few things that are actually causing behavioral changes. For example, we travel a lot less for work. And we can work remotely. Also a lot of work is getting automated entirely removing the need to move humans around to do the work. AI is projected to be a big part of that. It has an energy cost. But it also has upsides. And that cost can met sustainably. So, it's not all that bad.

lokimedes 2y ago

Progress (empowerment) always costs more energy, that is thermodynamics. We may be surprised in what form the expended energy takes, or skeptical about the benefits (think whale oil lamps), but that is the general pattern. That we (and especially eco-dreamers in Europe) saw the stagnating energy consumption per capita over the last 3 decades as evidence that we can save energy to reduce climate change is a fiction that can only be held by people who haven’t witnessed true progress (or cared for it).

_heimdall 2y ago
I don't that its fair to assume that progress alwaysalqays requires more energy. Many innovations that we would consider progress offer more efficiency than what they replace. The challenge is that we continue to consume as much as possible. New innovations often have the potential to decrease energy use through efficiency, instead we choose to use more of the thing. I.e. "progress" often offers a decrease energy consumption per unit, but we end up with a total energy use increase when we drastically increase the unit count.

zekrioca 2y ago

I think the comparisons to images are a bit misleading, where the author implies that generating images are somehow more energy-efficient than taking the photos yourself. It basically ignores the fact that the very data these large models use came from real photos taken from real cameras etc. and that used real energy, which in the end should be included in the total training cost, i.e., in addition to the electricity consumed by the GPUs. This would have an impact in how the total cost can be amortised with usage. Of course the impact might be just to slow down a little the amortisation with use, but it still should be included for a fair comparison. Same applies to some of the other examples they give.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don't actually want." "While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes - cryptocurrency, "the metaverse", artificial intelligence... - all seem to be comically expensive boondoggles that only really benefit the salesmen." But acccording to sentence #1, some people do want these things, e.g., salespeople, investors, etc. But as sentence #2 implies, this is not a majority of people. Over the years, when people complain on HN about software and the web, other commenters, presumably software/web developers, respond that these complainers do not matter because they are only a minority: the majority of people do not complain. Failure to complain apparently means the silent majority "wants" what they get. What rule can we derive from this developer "reasoning/argument". Sometimes it makes sense to cater to a minority, other times it doesn't? "If you're not familiar, data centers are dedicated facilities for running servers. Data centers are "the cloud": instead of running your own servers, you can rent computer power from experts who are very good at keeping computers from turning off." "The problem we immediately run into if we try to think about the proportional cost of AI is that there is no consensus on whether it's ultimately useful." I think it is safe to say that only a minority of people are speculating that "AI" is useful. The majority are silent. Does that mean the majority want it. We know what salespeople, investors and developers will say. "As I mentioned earlier, the AI boom feels a lot like the blockchain cryptocurrency push of a few years ago. Like cryptocurrency, AI is a tech fad, it requires data centers, it consumes more energy than a webserver... the comparison is extremely natural." If these things were truly useful, then it stands to reason the majority of people would be asking for them. Instead we see indifference. To developers, this indifference equates to "Yes, we want it". A fundamental problem with paying atteniton to the speculation of developers and other pundits who advocate expensive, unnecessary uses of computers, e.g., "AI", besides the obvious conflict of interest, is that these folks do not have a good track record of being honest. To start MicroSoft in the 1970s Bill Gates had to lie that he had software that did not yet exist. This "vapourware" tactic might seem quaint but this culture of dishonesty now involves much higher stakes. Developers are still faking demos. Putting Elizabeth Holmes in prison has not stopped the Silicon Valley culture of fraud.