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This is kinda meaningless without knowing how much data goes through a given data center, and ultimately how many people-hours it ends up serving. A data center
by solardev 2y ago
This is kinda meaningless without knowing how much data goes through a given data center, and ultimately how many people-hours it ends up serving. A data center is just a concentrated processing center for many people's computing needs, so of course it's going to use a lot of power. If you removed the centralized data center and spread it out all over the world, that same amount of computing will be even less efficient, and use even more power, especially accounting for heating and cooling.
If the argument is that AI training is wasteful, well, yes it is, but it's also valuable enough that many people and billions of dollars want to keep doing it. And if they bring back enough nuclear, power won't really be an issue anyway. But whether it's concentrated in a data center, and whether a particular data center may end up using more energy than some random city, is completely irrelevant and really misleading as an absolute number instead of a ratio of energy consumption divided by usage.
- alwayslikethis 2y agoA data center is also easier to place near a source of renewable/non emitting power generation. Harder to move entire cities around.
- kiba 2y agoThere's a lot of hype and now virtually every company is claiming to do AI something. Is it valuable, more than just a novelty, enough to pay for all the training and usage? Dunno.
- solardev 2y agoIn the context of the article, that just means "a lot of companies put together are using more energy than some cities". OK, so what? There are a lot of wasteful companies and industries in the world.
- zekrioca 2y agoIt is interesting how you ignore the implications of what has been going on.
- solardev 2y agoGo on? I'm interested in your point, but not completely sure what you mean. That AI is using a lot of energy? Yes, I think it is too. What are the implications of that? Or did you mean something else?
- dghlsakjg 2y agoWe spend absurd amounts of resources on novelties and other completely unnecessary industries. I’m currently writing this from an airplane on my way to an international vacation. I would be surprised if my entire lifetime future use of AI comes anywhere close to the energy needed to do this novelty trip, with all of the unnecessary things involved.
- zekrioca 2y agoIt is not only that these things are wasteful and totally bloated (as with most things in datacenters). The patterns in AI workloads are very different from any other, and nuclear by itself won’t be enough.
- solardev 2y agoWhy not?