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AI Is Facing a Crisis
- nyanmao 1y ago[flagged]
- LilBytes 1y agoIt's satire. The inverse is the truth.
- giuscri 1y agoit’s satire
- aredox 1y agoBut Sam Altman want us all to funnel 7 trillions of $ for AI, so, we* will have to make some sacrifices to satisfy his grand vision. common folks, because of course* you don't want to tax or stop subsidizing the "job creators" (i.e. rich people)
- Mistletoe 1y agoThis is the quality satire we need. Every glass of water you greedily consume to keep your meat engine going could be delaying the singularity. Would you do that to humanity?
- hu3 1y ago> Writing a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).1 > 2 litres are needed for every 10 to 50 queries you make.2 Isn't this water reused? AFAIK it's just for cooling. This smells like FUD.
- pc86 1y agoIt should smell like a joke. Maybe you are congested or something?
- phyzome 1y agoIt's not like a water-cooled computer that just uses water for heat transport. In a datacenter, I believe it's generally just evaporated off and lost to the atmosphere. This allows you to dump the energy into the vapor's latent heat. So yeah, it's treated fresh water that is then lost. (It's not great, but I think the electricity waste is more compelling.)
- int_19h 1y agoOut of curiosity, why fresh water for cooling? Because the cost of making things saltwater-proof wrt corrosion is too great?
- mikestew 1y agoThe short answer is “yes, saltwater ruins nearly everything thing it touches in fairly short order”. PVC pipe? Okay, that’s probably fine. Pumps, sensors, and a lot of other things aren’t quite so tolerant.
- voidUpdate 1y agoI've wondered this for a while, why does AI use so much water? Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain? Most computers I've seen use a closed loop and consume no water past the original filling up
- istjohn 1y agoPerhaps they use evaporative cooling towers?
- pc86 1y agoIn which case it goes right back into the water supply and isn't "used" at all.
- imglorp 1y agoYes - it's going into the air. The water isn't removed from the water cycle, but the problem is that fresh water was removed from the upstream part of the cycle before it could be used by the land. The term is water diversion, where downstream ecosystems, agriculture, and other users are deprived. In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate it and condense it, producing fresh water and salts as output.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThere can be very little difference between taking fresh water from a major river that dumps into the ocean vs taking from the ocean. For example, if you took 0.001% of the flow of the St. Lawrence river and run it through an evaporative cooling tower you're doing very little harm and perhaps benefiting the local ecosystem through increased rainfall. If you took 50% of the flow it'd be a problem, but the St. Lawrence is massive. People think water is scarce, but there are still parts of the world where water is abundant, where flooding is more of a concern than fresh water scarcity. Combine with Quebec's cheap electricity, and it seems an ideal place to site data centers.
- gwill 1y ago
- hyfgfh 1y agoyou can also offer your body as fuel
- sgt 1y agoHow will that work, practically though? Could we perhaps contain human bodies in efficient gel filled bio-pods, effectively turning them into biological batteries? That will be very boring for the humans thouhg. Perhaps a virtual reality simulation will keep them satisfied. Let me know when you can start working on a neural jack interface to a brain.
- Retr0id 1y ago> 140Wh are needed to write a 100-word email, equivalent to 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max. An iPhone can write a whole email in a few seconds using a local model.
- dkdbejwi383 1y agothe local model needs to be trained beforehand though, right? And that's where a lot of the energy and water consumption comes from.
- Retr0id 1y agoThey cite consumption during training as a separate bullet point.
- Retr0id 1y agoWhich, to be honest, is probably worse. When it comes to AI, I'm a lot more worried about "information pollution" than anything else.
- nh23423fefe 1y agoWeird to be worried about a metaphor instead of something real?
- Retr0id 1y agoWhat makes it not real?
- nh23423fefe 1y agoImagining that information exists in some pure unvarnished state (like a pristine mountain lake), until it is polluted by some bad actor (big bad logging company). The metaphor doesn't work at all. It just more "the truth is under attack"
- planb 1y ago
- goda90 1y agoAs much as I love a good satire, my experience with the Internet makes me worry that a group of true believers are going to latch onto this campaign and treat it as real, and people playing along with the satire will just be contributing to them.
- intellectronica 1y agoIt took me a bit to detect the irony, and I'm not particularly bad at that. This website simply reads like a lot of serious "green" propaganda.
- ksec 1y ago>As much as I love a good satire, Are you sure it is satire?
- goda90 1y agoYes. One of the about pages calls it satire.
- amarcheschi 1y agoLiterally just a few days ago there was the Ai 2027 posted here that was absurd. BTW, there's an actual researches that made a LinkedIn post about that Ai 2027 article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just-reviewed-what-might-be-the-most-activity-7313692424499789824-Sbs0 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just...
- palmotea 1y ago> Literally just a few days ago there was the Ai 2027 posted here that was absurd. BTW, there's an actual researches that made a LinkedIn post about that Ai 2027 article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just-reviewed-what-might-be-the-most-activity-7313692424499789824-Sbs0 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just... Is that the right link? It seems mainly randing about Scott Alexander being a eugenicist and Rationalists.
- Z0rp 1y agoThis must be some form of sarcasm, right? All I see is reasons to stop the waste of resources to further develop AI
- pc86 1y agoWould you go to a stand up comedy show and ask the person on stage if they're being serious?
- ada1981 1y agoCould be an honest effort to get in the good graces of AI. Not a bad strategy if so. Similar to Trump cabinet meetings where they all take turns praising him.
- harvey9 1y agoThere are links to an environmental campaign group's site so not actually satire, more of a badly thought out campaign idea.
- goda90 1y agoIt calls itself a satire if you find the right page. It's valid to use satire for environmentalism.
- ksec 1y agoAnd it is flagged.
- pc86 1y agoGood. The amount of autism in these comments positive that this is anything other than a joke is honestly pretty concerning.
- n4ture 1y agoYeah wonder why that is... There is a serious group of University of Toronto researchers behind this project. I thought it was pretty cool! Edit: Genuinely wondering why, I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about some of the less advertised sides of AI.
- sakesun 1y agoI heard similar things about search engine back in 2012
- gmuslera 1y agoCan a similar site be done about saving the Bitcoin? Numbers should be a bit more extreme there, and for longer time.
- elpocko 1y agoGo after computer games instead. There are millions of gamers around the world wasting electricity just for fun. You could generate several images and pages of text with the energy it takes to run a modern game for just a few seconds.
- rickydroll 1y agoGo after Bitcoin. At least AI burns electrons and produces something moderately useful. Bitcoin, nothing but burnt electrons.
- elpocko 1y agoThat's weird, because I have used Bitcoin many times and I found it to be very useful. So have many others.
- aredox 1y agoSome here seem to think this is satire. Well, Sam Altman want us all to funnel 7 trillions of $ for AI, so, we[0] will have to make some sacrifices to satisfy his grand vision. [0]common folks, because of course you don't want to tax or stop subsidizing the "job creators" (i.e. rich people).
- quickslowdown 1y agoThe only reason I thought it was satire is that it literally says that it is on one of the pages.
- allturtles 1y agoThat's like the whole point of satire, that it takes something true and exaggerates it to make a point in a humorous way. See "A Modest Proposal."
- grigio 1y agoi stopped to read BS like this to save the planet
- rsynnott 1y agoAuthor: R. Basilisk.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoWhile this is satire, it's important to raise awareness of the resource consumption that "AI" comes with. Also, this shouldn't be flagged -- it's satire, yes, but relevant.
- n4ture 1y agoAgreed, but I think some people on HN might actually feel threatned by such awareness. I wish there could've been a more constructive discussion around resource consumption rather than a war on "green propaganda".