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Not sure if that' more than a person sitting in the office writing this when you take into account all electricity used by the building, maintenance, other peop
by comboy 2y ago
Not sure if that' more than a person sitting in the office writing this when you take into account all electricity used by the building, maintenance, other people (catering cleaning etc.)
And I think this energy-shaming whether that's AI crypto or something else is just a wrong approach. If somebody buys energy he can use it for mindless entertainment if he so pleases, why focus on datacenters and not Disneyland?
- lambdaba 2y agoClaude estimates the average American consumes about 3800 liters of water per day counting all the food inputs (Claude only drank half a cup for this answer).
- MrMcCall 2y agoYou did not count the gathering of data and then training the LLM.
- lambdaba 2y agoInference consumes far more total compute than training the model.
- MrMcCall 2y agoBy 'inference', do you mean using the model to compute a specific series of results?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MrMcCall 2y agoChatGPT is not housing anyone, nor is it providing office space. Even Disneyland is at least providing joy for children and adults.
- exe34 2y agochat gpt doesn't enjoy anything for itself, it provides value to people. i don't use it much, but on occasion it's been helpful to me.
- MrMcCall 2y agoSo do coal-fired power plants. So does our endless production of plastic waste and our ever-growing landfills. So does all our fossil-fuel use. Where is it all taking us, friend? Most people are not honest enough with themself to understand the bigger picture, nor are they selfless enough to give a darn to sacrifice something of their own benefit to help the whole.
- stavros 2y agoYes, let's all kill ourselves and save resources!
- MrMcCall 2y agoYeah, having less data centers will cost lives; it won't be lack of drinking water or living in an overheated environment! My mistake is mistaking high karma for intelligence. Wrong again!
- soulofmischief 2y agoThis anti-compute crusade you're on is very strange. Data centers are not why the planet is burning up. Maybe you should be less patronizing of others' intelligence and do a little research of your own so that your arguments will be more rooted in fact and not feelings. ~1-3% of global energy consumption is a paltry price to pay for what digital technology can offer us. Do we waste a lot of it clicking ads and watching Netflix? Yeah, a lot of people do, and I take issue with that, not... data centers.
- ziaowang 2y agoAgreed. If it's useful, why not scale up the electricity and water supply, and make the latter sustainable.
- ttyprintk 2y agoSometimes the reactionary rules make sense to try scaling down: electronics on standby can’t use more than 1W, by law in EU and UK. Consumers were right to wonder: what was my TV doing that needed more than 1W?
- MezzoDelCammin 2y agoI think the idea behind energy shaming is that energy price rarely includes its externalities (probably resources depletion and pollution). "If You buy it, You do what You want with it" is of course legally correct. But I think the argument they're trying to make subconsciously in is that there's someone else who will have to pay part of the price for it.
- modeless 2y agoWater use is not an externality. All water used is paid for.
- atoav 2y ago[citation needed] Nuclear Power plants who use river water in their cooling cycle and pump the (now heated) water back to the river don't pay for that.
- modeless 2y agoThat's not the kind of water use the article is complaining about.
- atoav 2y agoAll water use includes that one right?
- grues-dinner 2y agoThe cooling system illustrated in the article is very very similar to a typical nuclear power station cooling system. From the heat exchanger onwards, the secondary loop is functionally identical, the main difference is the primary loop working fluid (and that loop operates at a far lower temperature and pressure).
- groestl 2y agoThe argument is I think that all unnecessary energy expense should be shamed equally, or not at all.
- mort96 2y agoThat's a great argument! Assuming every word generated by ChatGPT is a word which would otherwise have been typed by a human writer. Is every word generated by ChatGPT a word which would otherwise have been typed by a human writer?
- jstummbillig 2y agoWhy would that matter? Every system has inefficiencies. For example: Person sitting in office, trained for years, kept alive and breathing, being paid for by their employer — that is not writing that mail their boss is waiting for, but instead arguing about the resources used by ChatGPT.
- mort96 2y agoWhy wouldn't it matter? If ChatGPT produces words at roughly the same energy efficiency as human writers, but most of those words are unnecessary and would not have been produced if it wasn't for ChatGPT, it's worthwhile to discuss the energy cost.
- mossTechnician 2y agoIf "energy-shaming" is a bad practice, why start by mentioning energy consumed by the author of the article? I think we can leave Disneyland aside and talk about the content of the article, and whether AI companies should receive the gentle treatment they have received: premium access to water, power, and money. Sure, they can buy it, but what about the people who have to absorb the externalities?
- atoav 2y agoSo how do you suggest we act in a world where energy usage ultimately has to be limited? Just let the market regulate that? Then you end up with luxury villas with swimming pools in the desert while farm land dries out and people die of thirst. If you grow a system against stiff bounds you will get hard saturation effects. And that means you can't have it all in such an environment. Now using that drought-example I think it is reasonable to say your pools have to stay empty, priority 1 is drinking water and priority 2 is farm land. And if you are the type that would like to fill a pool in that hypothetical situation you probably deserve to be shamed.