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How much energy will AI consume? The good, the bad and the unknown
- jeffbee 2y agoThis whole branch of research seems to rely on the weird idea that the cloud industry is not already transparent, so we have to take seriously these erroneous estimates by outside researchers. Which is weird, since literally no other industry on Earth is as transparent about energy consumption as cloud providers. This article for example oddly claims that data center cooling is a big mystery term in their equations, yet Google and Facebook have engaged in a public competition to outdo each other in PUE and have published detailed annual PUE metrics for years. I, for one, think we should take the first-party claims of energy consumption at face value. I don't know why these researchers are entrenched in the idea that we have to estimate it instead. Strubell, one of the researchers in the article, was fired by Google for insisting on using an outside estimate instead of the exact first-party data to which they had privileged access. Why is it their inclination to overstate energy usage, or make it sound uncertain?