6 ms·

Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

84 points by doener 1y ago

djoldman 1y ago
> Greenpeace calls for the following measures to minimize the environmental impacts of Artificial Intelligence: > 1. An energy-efficient AI infrastructure powered 100% by renewable energy. This green power must be additionally generated. > 2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used in operating their AI. b. How much power is consumed by users during their use of AI. c. The goals under which their models were trained, and which environmental parameters were considered. > 3. AI developers must take responsibility for their supply chains. They must contribute to the expansion of renewable energy in line with their growth and ensure that local communities do not suffer negative consequences (e.g., lack of drinking water, higher electricity prices). Is there a term for "energy neutrality," the cousin of "net neutrality"? Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for? If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.
- doener 1y ago
  > 2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used in operating their AI. Doesn't training the model consume the most energy in most cases?
  - gruez 1y ago
    Depends. For CoT models inference is significantly more costly (compared to regular models). Also, >Brent Thill of Jefferies, an analyst, estimates that [inference] accounts for 96% of the overall energy consumed in data centres used by the AI industry. https://archive.is/GJs5n https://archive.is/GJs5n
    - jnieswl 1y ago
      Foreword Author here. I agree, even early estimates e.g. from Meta (2022) suggested 20% Training, 10% Experiments, 70% inference. And adoption is rising from month to month.
      - Zacharias030 1y ago
        Those must have been about other things than LLMs though. Meta has huge inference loads for other types of models.
  - Zacharias030 1y ago
    This is changing rapidly. Google announced they are serving 500T tokens per month. State of the art models are currently trained with less than 30T tokens. Even if training tokens are more costly to run (eg, a factor of 3x for forward, backward, and weight updates, and take another factor of 2x for missing quantization), you end up in a situation where inference compute dominates training after a very short time of amortization.
    - doener 1y ago
      Thank you!
    - jillesvangurp 1y ago
      This is a good point. Another point is that the better models get, the less wasted tokens there will be on unproductive token generation for answers that are wrong in some way. Better answers might lead to increased demand of course. But less waste is not a bad thing in itself. And improved quality of the answers has other economical advantages. My view is that increased energy demand is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. First, it's by no means the dominant source of such demand, other things (transport, shipping, heating, etc.) outrank it; so a little bit of pressure from AI won't move the needle too much. Our main problem remains the same: too much CO2 being emitted. Second, meeting increased demand is typically done with renewables these days. Not because it's nice to do so but because it's cheap to do so. That's why renewables are popular in places like Texas. They don't care about the planet there. But they love cheap energy. And the more cheap, clean power we bring online, the worse expensive dirty power actually looks. Increased demand leads to mostly new clean generation and increased pressure to deprecate dirty expensive generation. That's why coal is all but gone from most energy markets. That has nothing to do with how dirty it is and everything to do with how expensive it is. Gas based generation is heading the same direction. Any investment in such generation should be considered as very risky. Short term of course you get some weird behavior like data centers being powered by gas turbines. Not because it's cheap but because it's easy and quick. Long term, a cost optimization would be getting rid of the gas generators. And with inference increasingly becoming the main thing in terms of energy and tokens, energy also becomes the main differentiator for profitability of AI services. Which again points at using cheap renewables to maximize profit. The winners in this market will be working on efficiency. And part of that is energy efficiency. Because that and the hardware is the main cost involved here.
- Uehreka 1y ago
  Net Neutrality is a really bad awkward term that constantly confuses laypeople. I get what you’re saying, but don’t lean on the term Net Neutrality in the hopes it will help people understand by building off something else they understand: People don’t understand Net Neutrality.
- mbgerring 1y ago
  As long as energy production and consumption has severe downstream impacts, yes, we do need to wade into this territory. All serious, viable plans for decarbonization include a massive increase in electricity consumption, due to electrification of transportation, industrial processes, etc, along with an increase in renewable energy production. This isn't new, but AI datacenters are a very large net new single user of electricity. If the amount of money already poured into AI had gone into the rollout of clean energy infrastructure, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, but here we are. It makes perfect sense from a policy perspective, given that there are a small number of players in this space with more resources than most governments, to piggyback on this wave of infrastructure buildout. It also makes plenty of financial sense. Initial capex for adding clean energy generation is high, but given both the high electricity usage of AI datacenters, and the long-term impact on the grid that someone will eventually have to pay for, companies deploying AI infrastructure would be smart to use the huge amount of capital at their disposal to generate their own electricity. It's also, from a deployment standpoint, pretty straightforward — we're talking about massive, rectangular, warehouse-like buildings with flat roofs. We should have already mandated that all such buildings be covered in solar panels with on-site storage, at a minimum.
  - nico_h 1y ago
    Sadly we’re already in the long term impact of the previous energy revolution, so we’d better get starting now instead of when we’ll feel the impact of this next compute evolution.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- phillipcarter 1y ago
  > If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks. I agree that in general, if the goal is to limit CO2 emissions and use renewable sources of energy, we ought not to focus on AI first, because it is dwarfed by many other things that we take for granted today. My canonical example I give folks is that the latte they order every day from Starbucks involves substantially more energy and water use than most uses of ChatGPT on a daily basis. But as we move to digitize more and more of this world, and now create automated cognitive labor, we should start with the right foundations. I'd rather we not try to disentangle critical AI infrastructure from coal power plants, and I'd rather we try to limit the compute available to workloads in ways that encourage people to use the tech actually befitting of their use case rather than throw it all into the most expensive model every time.
  - nico_h 1y ago
    Oh wow, growing, drying, transporting, roasting, transporting, brewing something takes more energy and physical resources than a single query in a computer? Physical goods are amazing like that. I wonder how margins on software stuff are so high!??! More seriously, i’m not too sure about the energy cost and IP infringed during the training and the value added to society by providing generic and mostly accurate but sometimes wildly wrong answers. Or from generating text or pretty pictures for a few milli-cents in cooling and electricity vs asking a human to do the same for a few kilo-cents. It’s a lot of ladder kicking in the software industry these days.
  - TimPC 1y ago
    How about the silly treadmill where we waste billions of compute to compute useless proof of work type behaviours and whenever more compute gets thrown at the problem we just make it harder to ensure there isn't better output. I believe it was called buttcoin or something silly like that.
    - phillipcarter 1y ago
      And whose biggest claim to fame is allowing for large-scale fraud!
- atonse 1y ago
  Technically, if it's all clean energy, does it matter if it's "energy-efficient"? So it seems like the better goal is to just aim for more clean energy.
  - mcv 1y ago
    Once we've got abundant clean energy, it might not matter so much anymore, but as long as we're still burning carbon, it matters a lot. And until we get there, we should probably do both.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  We should probably just do a carbon tax and not wade into that morass. There’s a lot of focus on the carbon cost of various digital goods. I get it. Destroying the environment is a big problem. But like, maybe we also should not make a bunch of plastic crap and ship it around the world a bunch of times.
  - jnieswl 1y ago
    Disclaimer:Foreword Author here. I agree that there are may things one could change, however for many other services or objects you buy, you are able to estimate the env. footprint or you can change your consumer behaviour. However for the top AI-models one has no clue how much energy is used. Therefore the demands are among others for transparency from the ai companies.
    - mumbisChungo 1y ago
      I have no idea what the carbon footprint of the coffee I drink or chair I sit in or netflix program I watch is. I can control my consumption of LLMs just as easily as those things.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Well, you almost certainly know more than me about it, since you are working in the area. From a layman’s point of view it seems like knowing that things are very carbon producing has not provoked mass behavior changes. I’d have more faith in moves that add a measurable cost. But maybe knowing how much LLMs produce could be part of motivating us to include an actual cost.
- bbor 1y ago
  Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for? I mean, yeah, that's just basic civil regulation. Energy generation has massive negative externalities, and preventing waste is a worthy cause. I don't agree that AI must be singled out in that sense, but even it were, I imagine a modest push for efficiency would only help us in the long run. If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Well put, but I think it's important to bring the analysis one level up, and look at emissions. In that paradigm, meat eating and non-essential travel (yes, including vacations to Rome, business meetings, scientific conferences, and other perceived-to-be-unalienable rights) are punching way above their weight class. For anyone who's curious on specifics re:AI emissions, the recent MIT article is the gold standard in terms of specificity, neutrality, and nuance: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... . I also did some napkin math here in 2024.12: https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t TL;DR: Eating one less burger affords you ~300 chatbot inferences, and avoiding a flight from ATL to SFO affords you ~16,000.
  - TimPC 1y ago
    I think if we do want to do this then banning bitcoin proof of work behaviours seems far more important.
- jcynix 1y ago
  > If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks. Air conditioning for example would be a good place to save energy, as the world wide energy consumption is a multiple of AI's consumption. But climate change will push the need (not luxury) for air conditioning up, which is the Catch-22 in this case. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that 10% of the globally generated energy is used for sir conditioning. But it would nevertheless be a good idea to require AI companies to care for renewable energy before they reach similar consumption levels. Regarding the "morass" … we tell people how fast they can drive, or companies to limit air pollution (at least in some countries) so no problem here.
- masswerk 1y ago
  > Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for? This really applies to any application which consumes high percentages of the resources available. (Compare, data centers are responsible for almost 80% of the electricity consumption in the Dublin area according to the paper.) The rational of purpose and resource demand and expected effects is secondary to this. The primary question is about (significant) quantities.
lenerdenator 1y ago
We didn't care about the environmental impacts of all of the other stuff that made a few people obscenely rich; we're not gonna start now. I mean, should we? Yeah. But we're not gonna.
- FredPret 1y ago
  Everything you say is valid, but you left out the part where, in addition to new tech making a few "obscenely" rich, it also makes a layer of very many people under them extremely rich, and almost everyone else a lot better off in the long run. Here's some stats showing the growth of the millionaire class, now up to 7% of the population: https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-and-share-of-the-population/ https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-... At the same time, here's some stats showing extreme poverty falling off a cliff: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-world/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor... Such a thing was completely unthinkable before disruptive tech and the associated mega-rich became the new normal 200 years ago. Having said that, you're correct to point out that negative externalities haven't really entered our minds until about 50-75 years ago, but it seems tech progress has even made clean, green living at scale possible at least in principle.
  - coliveira 1y ago
    > poverty falling off a cliff This is 80% due to the Chinese government, if it was for billionaires they would all be as poor as before.
    - FredPret 1y ago
      Amazing feat by the Chinese government to boost the whole planet like that. Do you have numbers for that, or are you just a committed tankie? Also, ~100% of China's growth started when they embraced market economics in 1990. Read US business books from the 80's. It's rare to even see China mentioned at all until the late 90's. Everybody was worried about Japan overtaking the US and nobody talked about the Chinese economy, because it barely existed.
sergiotapia 1y ago
As long as India and China are dumping obscene amounts of plastics into the ocean, I don't really wanna hear it. AI drop in the bucket. The measures imposed on Americans and worse Europeans is an insult.
- mbgerring 1y ago
  China is going to beat the U.S. to decarbonization. This excuse never made sense, and by the end of this decade it will be unintelligible.
- FredPret 1y ago
  They pollute because they've turned into the West's industrial zone. They only make a bunch of stuff because we buy it
  - _0ffh 1y ago
    Do you know the CO2 footprint of the untold megatons of concrete poured into ghost cities? Germany is still manufacturing stuff, and would easily beat China in CO2/capita if they hadn't shut down the nuclear power plants.
    - FredPret 1y ago
      That's a fair point, I hadn't considered it. But it's a tough analysis to make regardless, because every widget I buy here in the West that comes from China (and that's pretty much 100% of the widgets) spits out CO2 in China. Now I look cleaner and they look dirtier than the case would be if the widget was made here.
SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
[flagged]
- blef 1y ago
  your pseudo makes sense—tho what's the issue with Greenpeace.de?
  - FredPret 1y ago
    Greenpeace is not known exactly for their even-handed, logical approach to solving real problems
imnotlost 1y ago
Just build a bunch of nuclear power plants around the world. If we can spend a trillion or two bombing the taliban back into power we can afford some energy projects.
- melling 1y ago
  Greenpeace is likely opposed to that.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    > Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/
- mcv 1y ago
  Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build, though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand, contributes to that.
  - melling 1y ago
    We’ve had 40 years and we’re still burning all the coal Carl Sagan warned us about. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M So, after 40 years I’m a little tired of hearing it takes too long to build nuclear power plants. On the bright side, we’ve almost reached peak coal: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to-reach-new-peak-and-remain-at-near-record-levels-for-years https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...
    - exiguus 1y ago
      We had it 40 years and we will have it the next N-Thousand years because of the waste they produce. Also, Nuclear-Power was massive subvention by the gov. Actually a business-case that can not exist without subvention. So we all paid it with the taxes and we still pay because of the nuclear-wast. The idea to build new nuclear-plants, is a new subvention-scam by some lobbyists or tech-giants who want to pass on their costs to the general public.
elpocko 1y ago
There are many more millions of GPUs in computers and game consoles around the world burning electricity for your entertainment, for decades. The same class of devices. The environmental impact of having pretty pixels on your screens is at least an order of magnitude higher than what it is for AI, for inference and training. I don't see anyone being up in arms about that.
- coliveira 1y ago
  Your calculations must be severely off, because I never heard anyone advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors to power game consoles around the world. However, we hear everyday that we need to build these reactors right now if we want to have AI.
  - mulmen 1y ago
    Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. Data centers are …centralized. Dedicated power plants for large data center installations are not new.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. This is irrelevant because most "Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers" are powered by centralized fossil fuel power plants that could plausibly be replaced with nuclear reactors, just like the power plant for a datacenter can be replaced with nuclear reactors.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - Kudos 1y ago
        My Xbox is powered by solar. I can't say the same for my use of Claude, and I do not have the same agency to change that.
narrator 1y ago
Wait till the mining gets automated, the transportation gets automated, the manufacturing and construction gets automated. There won't be that much labor and we will run into our ecological limits to growth at meteoric speed since that will be the limiting factor on the AI/robot genie. The only job at the government will be who gets to use the AI/robot genie and frantically running about trying to play whack-a-mole with paperclip maximizers that will appear everywhere. The whole economy will collapse to that. Basically, central planning all over again. This is why we need Free Market Ecology. I'll post a link if anyone's interested.
- astariul 1y ago
  Please share
  - narrator 1y ago
    https://botsfordism.substack.com/p/the-economic-math-behind-free-market https://botsfordism.substack.com/p/the-economic-math-behind-...
yomismoaqui 1y ago
Is Greenpeace still a thing? I thought that Greta Thunberg and Just Stop Oil stole their thunder.
- sien 1y ago
  100 M Euro budget , 3.4 K staff, 34 K volunteers. They are a big thing. Old people still donate to them. They are a big reason Africans don't grow GMOs that can help children avoid blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
MoonGhost 1y ago
Realistic calculations should include both sides. New way vs old. In this case AI assisted vs manual. Here intentionally only one side considered. Because comparison does not produce desirable result. Which makes in attention attracting BS.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
platevoltage 1y ago
It is kind of weird to see the same people who have been saying "Our grid can't support electric cars" also not seeing any issue with the injection of AI into everything we see and do.
- klysm 1y ago
  I don’t think this argument applies because AI workloads can be centralized
grej 1y ago
Linking energy use to the environment is a political choice, and Greenpeace are some of the worst offenders for making the situation worse by opposing nuclear power at every turn.
dydghks2033 1y ago
Interesting point about energy cost. If GPT inference keeps scaling, latency + watt efficiency might become central to AGI deployment.
option 1y ago
What is the environmental impacts of Greenpeace lobbying against nuclear power?
Zaylan 1y ago
We talk a lot about AI’s potential, but its energy footprint is often underestimated. As model sizes grow, the environmental impact of both training and inference may show up faster than expected. It's an issue worth more attention.
whiplash451 1y ago
Let's try to ground the discussion into data. Headcounts: - Gaming GPUs: Installed base 700-900M GPUs + active gaming rigs (100-200M). Assumption of 250M active gamers worldwide. - AI GPUs: ~3 million high-performance AI GPUs currently in active use globally Average power usage: Gaming: 3 hours gaming at 300W → 37.5W average over 24h AI: 16h×600W+8h×100Widle=10400Wh→ 433W average over 24h Total Global GPU Power Consumption: Gaming: 250M GPUs × 37.5W avg = ~9.4 GW -> 9.4GW×24h×365=82.4 TWh/year AI: 3M GPUs × 433W avg = ~1.3 GW -> 1.3GW×24h×365=11.4 TWh/year Even taking into account that data centers also require power for cooling, which doubles AI GPU energy impact, gaming >> AI by a wide margin.

84 points by doener 1y ago

> Greenpeace calls for the following measures to minimize the environmental impacts of Artificial Intelligence: > 1. An energy-efficient AI infrastructure powered 100% by renewable energy. This green power must be additionally generated. > 2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used in operating their AI. b. How much power is consumed by users during their use of AI. c. The goals under which their models were trained, and which environmental parameters were considered. > 3. AI developers must take responsibility for their supply chains. They must contribute to the expansion of renewable energy in line with their growth and ensure that local communities do not suffer negative consequences (e.g., lack of drinking water, higher electricity prices). Is there a term for "energy neutrality," the cousin of "net neutrality"? Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for? If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.

doener 1y ago
> 2. AI companies must disclose: a. How much electricity is used in operating their AI. Doesn't training the model consume the most energy in most cases?
- gruez 1y ago
  Depends. For CoT models inference is significantly more costly (compared to regular models). Also, >Brent Thill of Jefferies, an analyst, estimates that [inference] accounts for 96% of the overall energy consumed in data centres used by the AI industry. https://archive.is/GJs5n https://archive.is/GJs5n
  - jnieswl 1y ago
    Foreword Author here. I agree, even early estimates e.g. from Meta (2022) suggested 20% Training, 10% Experiments, 70% inference. And adoption is rising from month to month.
    - Zacharias030 1y ago
      Those must have been about other things than LLMs though. Meta has huge inference loads for other types of models.
- Zacharias030 1y ago
  This is changing rapidly. Google announced they are serving 500T tokens per month. State of the art models are currently trained with less than 30T tokens. Even if training tokens are more costly to run (eg, a factor of 3x for forward, backward, and weight updates, and take another factor of 2x for missing quantization), you end up in a situation where inference compute dominates training after a very short time of amortization.
  - doener 1y ago
    Thank you!
  - jillesvangurp 1y ago
    This is a good point. Another point is that the better models get, the less wasted tokens there will be on unproductive token generation for answers that are wrong in some way. Better answers might lead to increased demand of course. But less waste is not a bad thing in itself. And improved quality of the answers has other economical advantages. My view is that increased energy demand is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. First, it's by no means the dominant source of such demand, other things (transport, shipping, heating, etc.) outrank it; so a little bit of pressure from AI won't move the needle too much. Our main problem remains the same: too much CO2 being emitted. Second, meeting increased demand is typically done with renewables these days. Not because it's nice to do so but because it's cheap to do so. That's why renewables are popular in places like Texas. They don't care about the planet there. But they love cheap energy. And the more cheap, clean power we bring online, the worse expensive dirty power actually looks. Increased demand leads to mostly new clean generation and increased pressure to deprecate dirty expensive generation. That's why coal is all but gone from most energy markets. That has nothing to do with how dirty it is and everything to do with how expensive it is. Gas based generation is heading the same direction. Any investment in such generation should be considered as very risky. Short term of course you get some weird behavior like data centers being powered by gas turbines. Not because it's cheap but because it's easy and quick. Long term, a cost optimization would be getting rid of the gas generators. And with inference increasingly becoming the main thing in terms of energy and tokens, energy also becomes the main differentiator for profitability of AI services. Which again points at using cheap renewables to maximize profit. The winners in this market will be working on efficiency. And part of that is energy efficiency. Because that and the hardware is the main cost involved here.
Uehreka 1y ago
Net Neutrality is a really bad awkward term that constantly confuses laypeople. I get what you’re saying, but don’t lean on the term Net Neutrality in the hopes it will help people understand by building off something else they understand: People don’t understand Net Neutrality.
mbgerring 1y ago
As long as energy production and consumption has severe downstream impacts, yes, we do need to wade into this territory. All serious, viable plans for decarbonization include a massive increase in electricity consumption, due to electrification of transportation, industrial processes, etc, along with an increase in renewable energy production. This isn't new, but AI datacenters are a very large net new single user of electricity. If the amount of money already poured into AI had gone into the rollout of clean energy infrastructure, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, but here we are. It makes perfect sense from a policy perspective, given that there are a small number of players in this space with more resources than most governments, to piggyback on this wave of infrastructure buildout. It also makes plenty of financial sense. Initial capex for adding clean energy generation is high, but given both the high electricity usage of AI datacenters, and the long-term impact on the grid that someone will eventually have to pay for, companies deploying AI infrastructure would be smart to use the huge amount of capital at their disposal to generate their own electricity. It's also, from a deployment standpoint, pretty straightforward — we're talking about massive, rectangular, warehouse-like buildings with flat roofs. We should have already mandated that all such buildings be covered in solar panels with on-site storage, at a minimum.
- nico_h 1y ago
  Sadly we’re already in the long term impact of the previous energy revolution, so we’d better get starting now instead of when we’ll feel the impact of this next compute evolution.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
phillipcarter 1y ago
> If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks. I agree that in general, if the goal is to limit CO2 emissions and use renewable sources of energy, we ought not to focus on AI first, because it is dwarfed by many other things that we take for granted today. My canonical example I give folks is that the latte they order every day from Starbucks involves substantially more energy and water use than most uses of ChatGPT on a daily basis. But as we move to digitize more and more of this world, and now create automated cognitive labor, we should start with the right foundations. I'd rather we not try to disentangle critical AI infrastructure from coal power plants, and I'd rather we try to limit the compute available to workloads in ways that encourage people to use the tech actually befitting of their use case rather than throw it all into the most expensive model every time.
- nico_h 1y ago
  Oh wow, growing, drying, transporting, roasting, transporting, brewing something takes more energy and physical resources than a single query in a computer? Physical goods are amazing like that. I wonder how margins on software stuff are so high!??! More seriously, i’m not too sure about the energy cost and IP infringed during the training and the value added to society by providing generic and mostly accurate but sometimes wildly wrong answers. Or from generating text or pretty pictures for a few milli-cents in cooling and electricity vs asking a human to do the same for a few kilo-cents. It’s a lot of ladder kicking in the software industry these days.
- TimPC 1y ago
  How about the silly treadmill where we waste billions of compute to compute useless proof of work type behaviours and whenever more compute gets thrown at the problem we just make it harder to ensure there isn't better output. I believe it was called buttcoin or something silly like that.
  - phillipcarter 1y ago
    And whose biggest claim to fame is allowing for large-scale fraud!
atonse 1y ago
Technically, if it's all clean energy, does it matter if it's "energy-efficient"? So it seems like the better goal is to just aim for more clean energy.
- mcv 1y ago
  Once we've got abundant clean energy, it might not matter so much anymore, but as long as we're still burning carbon, it matters a lot. And until we get there, we should probably do both.
bee_rider 1y ago
We should probably just do a carbon tax and not wade into that morass. There’s a lot of focus on the carbon cost of various digital goods. I get it. Destroying the environment is a big problem. But like, maybe we also should not make a bunch of plastic crap and ship it around the world a bunch of times.
- jnieswl 1y ago
  Disclaimer:Foreword Author here. I agree that there are may things one could change, however for many other services or objects you buy, you are able to estimate the env. footprint or you can change your consumer behaviour. However for the top AI-models one has no clue how much energy is used. Therefore the demands are among others for transparency from the ai companies.
  - mumbisChungo 1y ago
    I have no idea what the carbon footprint of the coffee I drink or chair I sit in or netflix program I watch is. I can control my consumption of LLMs just as easily as those things.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Well, you almost certainly know more than me about it, since you are working in the area. From a layman’s point of view it seems like knowing that things are very carbon producing has not provoked mass behavior changes. I’d have more faith in moves that add a measurable cost. But maybe knowing how much LLMs produce could be part of motivating us to include an actual cost.
bbor 1y ago
Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for? I mean, yeah, that's just basic civil regulation. Energy generation has massive negative externalities, and preventing waste is a worthy cause. I don't agree that AI must be singled out in that sense, but even it were, I imagine a modest push for efficiency would only help us in the long run. If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Well put, but I think it's important to bring the analysis one level up, and look at emissions. In that paradigm, meat eating and non-essential travel (yes, including vacations to Rome, business meetings, scientific conferences, and other perceived-to-be-unalienable rights) are punching way above their weight class. For anyone who's curious on specifics re:AI emissions, the recent MIT article is the gold standard in terms of specificity, neutrality, and nuance: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... . I also did some napkin math here in 2024.12: https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t TL;DR: Eating one less burger affords you ~300 chatbot inferences, and avoiding a flight from ATL to SFO affords you ~16,000.
- TimPC 1y ago
  I think if we do want to do this then banning bitcoin proof of work behaviours seems far more important.
jcynix 1y ago
> If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks. Air conditioning for example would be a good place to save energy, as the world wide energy consumption is a multiple of AI's consumption. But climate change will push the need (not luxury) for air conditioning up, which is the Catch-22 in this case. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that 10% of the globally generated energy is used for sir conditioning. But it would nevertheless be a good idea to require AI companies to care for renewable energy before they reach similar consumption levels. Regarding the "morass" … we tell people how fast they can drive, or companies to limit air pollution (at least in some countries) so no problem here.
masswerk 1y ago
> Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for? This really applies to any application which consumes high percentages of the resources available. (Compare, data centers are responsible for almost 80% of the electricity consumption in the Dublin area according to the paper.) The rational of purpose and resource demand and expected effects is secondary to this. The primary question is about (significant) quantities.

lenerdenator 1y ago

We didn't care about the environmental impacts of all of the other stuff that made a few people obscenely rich; we're not gonna start now. I mean, should we? Yeah. But we're not gonna.

FredPret 1y ago
Everything you say is valid, but you left out the part where, in addition to new tech making a few "obscenely" rich, it also makes a layer of very many people under them extremely rich, and almost everyone else a lot better off in the long run. Here's some stats showing the growth of the millionaire class, now up to 7% of the population: https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-and-share-of-the-population/ https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-... At the same time, here's some stats showing extreme poverty falling off a cliff: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-world/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor... Such a thing was completely unthinkable before disruptive tech and the associated mega-rich became the new normal 200 years ago. Having said that, you're correct to point out that negative externalities haven't really entered our minds until about 50-75 years ago, but it seems tech progress has even made clean, green living at scale possible at least in principle.
- coliveira 1y ago
  > poverty falling off a cliff This is 80% due to the Chinese government, if it was for billionaires they would all be as poor as before.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    Amazing feat by the Chinese government to boost the whole planet like that. Do you have numbers for that, or are you just a committed tankie? Also, ~100% of China's growth started when they embraced market economics in 1990. Read US business books from the 80's. It's rare to even see China mentioned at all until the late 90's. Everybody was worried about Japan overtaking the US and nobody talked about the Chinese economy, because it barely existed.

sergiotapia 1y ago

As long as India and China are dumping obscene amounts of plastics into the ocean, I don't really wanna hear it. AI drop in the bucket. The measures imposed on Americans and worse Europeans is an insult.

mbgerring 1y ago
China is going to beat the U.S. to decarbonization. This excuse never made sense, and by the end of this decade it will be unintelligible.
FredPret 1y ago
They pollute because they've turned into the West's industrial zone. They only make a bunch of stuff because we buy it
- _0ffh 1y ago
  Do you know the CO2 footprint of the untold megatons of concrete poured into ghost cities? Germany is still manufacturing stuff, and would easily beat China in CO2/capita if they hadn't shut down the nuclear power plants.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    That's a fair point, I hadn't considered it. But it's a tough analysis to make regardless, because every widget I buy here in the West that comes from China (and that's pretty much 100% of the widgets) spits out CO2 in China. Now I look cleaner and they look dirtier than the case would be if the widget was made here.

SV_BubbleTime 1y ago

[flagged]

blef 1y ago
your pseudo makes sense—tho what's the issue with Greenpeace.de?
- FredPret 1y ago
  Greenpeace is not known exactly for their even-handed, logical approach to solving real problems

imnotlost 1y ago

Just build a bunch of nuclear power plants around the world. If we can spend a trillion or two bombing the taliban back into power we can afford some energy projects.

melling 1y ago
Greenpeace is likely opposed to that.
- fragmede 1y ago
  > Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/
mcv 1y ago
Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build, though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand, contributes to that.
- melling 1y ago
  We’ve had 40 years and we’re still burning all the coal Carl Sagan warned us about. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=3uhneUSoiZaUKS9M So, after 40 years I’m a little tired of hearing it takes too long to build nuclear power plants. On the bright side, we’ve almost reached peak coal: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to-reach-new-peak-and-remain-at-near-record-levels-for-years https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...
  - exiguus 1y ago
    We had it 40 years and we will have it the next N-Thousand years because of the waste they produce. Also, Nuclear-Power was massive subvention by the gov. Actually a business-case that can not exist without subvention. So we all paid it with the taxes and we still pay because of the nuclear-wast. The idea to build new nuclear-plants, is a new subvention-scam by some lobbyists or tech-giants who want to pass on their costs to the general public.

elpocko 1y ago

There are many more millions of GPUs in computers and game consoles around the world burning electricity for your entertainment, for decades. The same class of devices. The environmental impact of having pretty pixels on your screens is at least an order of magnitude higher than what it is for AI, for inference and training. I don't see anyone being up in arms about that.

coliveira 1y ago
Your calculations must be severely off, because I never heard anyone advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors to power game consoles around the world. However, we hear everyday that we need to build these reactors right now if we want to have AI.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. Data centers are …centralized. Dedicated power plants for large data center installations are not new.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. This is irrelevant because most "Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers" are powered by centralized fossil fuel power plants that could plausibly be replaced with nuclear reactors, just like the power plant for a datacenter can be replaced with nuclear reactors.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kudos 1y ago
      My Xbox is powered by solar. I can't say the same for my use of Claude, and I do not have the same agency to change that.

narrator 1y ago

Wait till the mining gets automated, the transportation gets automated, the manufacturing and construction gets automated. There won't be that much labor and we will run into our ecological limits to growth at meteoric speed since that will be the limiting factor on the AI/robot genie. The only job at the government will be who gets to use the AI/robot genie and frantically running about trying to play whack-a-mole with paperclip maximizers that will appear everywhere. The whole economy will collapse to that. Basically, central planning all over again. This is why we need Free Market Ecology. I'll post a link if anyone's interested.

astariul 1y ago
Please share
- narrator 1y ago
  https://botsfordism.substack.com/p/the-economic-math-behind-free-market https://botsfordism.substack.com/p/the-economic-math-behind-...

yomismoaqui 1y ago

Is Greenpeace still a thing? I thought that Greta Thunberg and Just Stop Oil stole their thunder.

sien 1y ago
100 M Euro budget , 3.4 K staff, 34 K volunteers. They are a big thing. Old people still donate to them. They are a big reason Africans don't grow GMOs that can help children avoid blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace

MoonGhost 1y ago

Realistic calculations should include both sides. New way vs old. In this case AI assisted vs manual. Here intentionally only one side considered. Because comparison does not produce desirable result. Which makes in attention attracting BS.

aaron695 1y ago

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platevoltage 1y ago

It is kind of weird to see the same people who have been saying "Our grid can't support electric cars" also not seeing any issue with the injection of AI into everything we see and do.

klysm 1y ago
I don’t think this argument applies because AI workloads can be centralized

grej 1y ago

Linking energy use to the environment is a political choice, and Greenpeace are some of the worst offenders for making the situation worse by opposing nuclear power at every turn.

dydghks2033 1y ago

Interesting point about energy cost. If GPT inference keeps scaling, latency + watt efficiency might become central to AGI deployment.

option 1y ago

What is the environmental impacts of Greenpeace lobbying against nuclear power?

Zaylan 1y ago

We talk a lot about AI’s potential, but its energy footprint is often underestimated. As model sizes grow, the environmental impact of both training and inference may show up faster than expected. It's an issue worth more attention.

whiplash451 1y ago

Let's try to ground the discussion into data. Headcounts: - Gaming GPUs: Installed base 700-900M GPUs + active gaming rigs (100-200M). Assumption of 250M active gamers worldwide. - AI GPUs: ~3 million high-performance AI GPUs currently in active use globally Average power usage: Gaming: 3 hours gaming at 300W → 37.5W average over 24h AI: 16h×600W+8h×100Widle=10400Wh→ 433W average over 24h Total Global GPU Power Consumption: Gaming: 250M GPUs × 37.5W avg = ~9.4 GW -> 9.4GW×24h×365=82.4 TWh/year AI: 3M GPUs × 433W avg = ~1.3 GW -> 1.3GW×24h×365=11.4 TWh/year Even taking into account that data centers also require power for cooling, which doubles AI GPU energy impact, gaming >> AI by a wide margin.