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AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

65 points by hirpslop 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
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JohnFen 1y ago
> By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions. Oh, that's not a good example of the point they're trying to make. The emissions from concrete are a point of major concern and are frequently discussed. A ton of effort is being put into trying to reduce the problem, and there are widespread calls to reduce the use of the material as much as possible.
- dsr_ 1y ago
  The only useful point that they make is that predictions about unending growth are always wrong in detail. Every actual hockey stick turns into a sigmoid, then falls. Meanwhile, a new hockey stick comes along.
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    But AI training has been behaving like Bitcoin mining, which constantly increases the difficulty. AI companies so far have been having to release costlier and costlier models to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t want the final iteration to be a Dyson sphere around the sun or the black hole at the center of our galaxy so Gemini 10,000 Pro can tell us “Let there be light.” Or maybe we do, I don’t know.
    - timschmidt 1y ago
      DeepSeek has shown that significantly less costly training is possible when incentivized. Even for SOTA models.
    - Kye 1y ago
      The previous 9,999 Geminis promised they'd solved entropy and said the words with no real effect so people stopped listening to it. It's very lonely now.
- nerdponx 1y ago
  Also modern infrastructure is literally built on concrete. Whereas the broad benefits of AI are dubious by comparison.
- beepbooptheory 1y ago
  In general there seems to be a big given in the argument that I don't think is obvious: > At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century. This seems to imply we all must agree that the industrial economy of the 20th century was sustainable, and that strikes me as an odd point of agreement to try to make. Isn't it just sidestepping the whole point?
- PTOB 1y ago
  Has he considered exactly how much concrete is needed to build a datacenter campus?
  - Diggsey 1y ago
    Essentially zero as a fraction of global concrete usage...
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    A 6” concrete slab (excluding footings) has ~18,500 cubic yards of concrete per million sqft (54 sqft of 6” slab is one cubic yard of concrete)
altcognito 1y ago
Many "new" expenditures replace existing stuff. The initial versions are often the worst iterations we'll see so even though the capability is going up, the energy usage will go down over time. It isn't universal (as we've seen a lot of new true growth), but it is common.
vikramkr 1y ago
And what about the predictions of energy use that did pan out, like air conditioning and stuff? Also in 1999 how many personal computer companies were restarting nuclear power plants to fuel their projected energy consumption? Feels like a weird argument to make when the investments into AI I fra are literally measured in gigawatts. Feels like a weird argument in general - ai consuming lots of energy isn't some weird degrowth conspiracy theory
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Let’s not forget Sam Altman tried to raise $7 trillion dollars for it somehow as well.
palata 1y ago
> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot more of it, and therefore we use more electricity. It's called the rebound effect.
- bicepjai 1y ago
  Sounds similar to Jevons Paradox
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy. It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste. You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient. If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped. It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google. While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone. Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet. Not everything is Bitcoin.
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace
pwarner 1y ago
Hopefully the panic continues and we get a lot of extra electricity, ideally via nuclear, wind, solar - and then if AI is a flop at least we get big progress on global warming.
- blain 1y ago
  I thought you will say a cheaper energy but global warming works too. Also its called climate change now.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  How does an urgent need for more energy use lead to overall cleaner energy? Won’t it also accelerate unclean energy use to saturation, even if additional clean sources are needed for capacity?
- thatguy0900 1y ago
  Notably this comes during a US administration with open, unironic hatred of all forms of clean energy for ideological reasons
newsclues 1y ago
For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  At the risk of being called a luddite or a carriage driver, does the current iteration of AI actually increase quality of life that much?
- bilekas 1y ago
  > For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required I'm not 100% sure that's strictly true.. We naturally assume for the moment that more energy = more quality. It's like the Kardashev scale which basically says you can't advance without more and more energy consuptions to progress. Is this a proven thing ? Does the line need to always go up indefinitely ?
sollewitt 1y ago
“You may not know about the issue but I bet you reckon something, so why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon” - David Mitchell.
- cph123 1y ago
  "Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon, by going to bbc.co.uk… clicking on ‘what I reckon’ and then simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head."
bobbyraduloff 1y ago
> But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste. If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market makers with their trading bots in Python. Many banks in my country have excel macros on top of SQL extensions on top of COBOL. We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite. I don’t think this is super relevant to the articles point but I think it’s an under discussed topic.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  Excel has already added a =COPILOT() function. Imagine the waste of all those formulas that probably amount to some basic mathematical formula that could be run on a 386.
- whiplash451 1y ago
  > We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite. Indeed. But that is because we optimized (and are still optimizing) for speed of development, not much else.
timeon 1y ago
Sorry for off-topic - is Substack competing with Medium on amount of pop-ups?
dheera 1y ago
Even if AI doesn't use more electricity, electric cars and clean energy flight will need it.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  That's my current, probably misguided hope. They couldn't justify getting the grid ready for electrical vehicles, but frame it as a way to make a bunch of money and everyone's going to jump on board. Of course, the fact that xAI is throwing up gas turbines at their data centres seems to indicate that clean energy isn't a given.
maerF0x0 1y ago
AI helped me fix my own car, no new parts, no driving to the stealership, no comfy lobby to light, no extra building to heat, no IT system to book me into... It's my opinion AI, like many technologies since the 1950s, will lead to more dematerialization of the economy meaning it will net net save electricity and be "greener". This is an extension of what steven pinker says in Enlightenment now.
jerf 1y ago
It's been a while, but I don't recall any of the dotcom startups making deals with nuclear energy companies to buy out entire nuclear power stations: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla... And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude. The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told this not on the basis of hypothetical speculation, but on the basis of billions of real dollars being spent on real power capacity for real data centers by real people who'd really rather keep the money in question. Previous hypotheses not backed by billions of dollars are not comparable predictions.
- wheelerwj 1y ago
  100% this.
- kyledrake 1y ago
  > The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. The same could be said of dark fiber laid during the dot com boom, or unused railroads, etc. Spending during a boom is not indicative of properly recognized future demand of resources.
  - jerf 1y ago
    It's not future demand, it's current demand. Microsoft has already said they're power blocked rather than chip blocked. Please note how I say current demand, and don't over project as to what my opinion about future demand is. I think there's a small, but reasonable chance that demand will sink for some reason or another in the next few years, and I think there's a pretty decent chance that in the next five years someone will come up with some way to make these things an order of magnitude or more more efficient, which would crash their electricity demands. But it's not a hypothetical "we need power in two years", or at least, not just that... it's we need more power now. There's a big difference between "I may hypothetically need some more capacity later, I'd better go buy it now" and "I concretely need more capacity right now".
afavour 1y ago
That's an awful amount of certainty for something that isn't backed by very much certainty at all. Just "previous claims about inefficiency in tech have ended up being incorrect". As a counterpoint: look at crypto. The amount of power used by cryptocurrency has _not_ gone down, in fact it's increased.
- patapong 1y ago
  While I don't disagree with your overall point, I don't think crypto is a good counterpoint here. Crypto is conditioned on using more and more energy to secure the network. As the value increases, more mining hardware can be thrown at it, which increases security adn thus value - there is no upper bound. AI on the other hand aims at both increased quality but also reduced energy consumption. While there are certainly developments that favour the latter at the cost of the latter (e.g. reasoning models), there are also indications that companies are finding ways to make the models more efficient while maintaining quality. For example, the moves from GPT-4 -> GPT-4-turbo and 4o -> 5 were speculated to be in the service of efficiency. Hopefully the market forces that make computing cheaper and more energy effective will also push AI to become more energy effective over time.
more_corn 1y ago
I don’t believe it
skybrian 1y ago
There are contrary trends: LLM’s are getting lots of efficiency improvements, but they’re being used more. Which is more important? Understanding what happened so far is impossible without data, and those trends can change. It depends on what new technologies people invent, and there are lots of smart researchers out there. Armchair reasoning isn’t going tell us which trend is more important in the long term. We can imagine scenarios, but we shouldn’t be very confident about such predictions, and distrust other people’s confidence.
stevenjgarner 1y ago
> Most of the increase could be fully offset if the world put an end to the incredible waste of electricity on cryptocurrency mining (currently 0.5 to 1 per cent of total world electricity consumption, and not normally counted in estimates of IT use). I do not accept this. It was once true under Proof-of-Work (typically ~1,000–2,000 kWh per transaction), not so much under Proof-of-Stake (typically 0.03–0.05 kWh per transaction). Note that proof-of-stake may actually have a lower energy footprint than credit card or fiat banking transactions. An IMF analysis [1] pegged core processing for credit card companies at ~0.04 kWh per transaction (based on data centers and settlement systems), but noted that including user payment means like physical cards and terminals could increase this by about two orders of magnitude—though even then, it doesn't extend to bank branches or employee overhead - an overhead not implicit in decentralized finance. [1] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/063/2022/006/article-A001-en.xml https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/063/2022/006/arti...
catlikesshrimp 1y ago
Datacenters didn't need water cooling before the AI explosion. (Air cooling was still possible) At first, DW's estimate was one drop of potable water was consumed for each query (normal queries, not more expensive ones) The Google, I don't know who allowed the sincerity, God bless him, released a first hand analysis of their water consumption, and it is higher that the one drop estimate: 5 drops https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_environmental_impact_of_delivering_ai_at_google_scale.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
- deleted 1y ago
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josefritzishere 1y ago
This claim is based on the idea that the use of AI will plateau. I hope that is true. The alternatives are ominous.
runako 1y ago
OpenAI yesterday announced[1] a partnership to deploy computer chips, but chose to denominate the size of the deal in gigawatts (instead of dollars, or some measure of computing capacity, or some measure of capability). They certainly seem to think about this in terms of electricity requirements, and seem to think they require a lot of it. (I may have the units off a bit, but it looks like OpenAI's recent announcement would consume a bit more than the total residential electricity usage of Seattle.) 1 - https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/
Tycho 1y ago
What’s the energy profile of running inference in a typical ChatGPT prompt compared to: - doing a google search and loading a linked webpage - taking a photo with your smartphone and uploading it to social media for sharing - playing Fortnite for 20 minutes - hosting a Zoom conference with 15 people - sending an email to a hundred colleagues I’d be curious. AI inference is massively centralised, so of course the data centres will be using a lot of energy, but less centralised use cases may be less power efficient from a wholistic perspective.
- slfnflctd 1y ago
  These are the kinds of questions we need pursued to develop better insight into the overall societal impact of current and near-future LLMs. Energy usage is a critical measure of any technology. The tradeoffs between alternate use cases should be modeled as accurately as possible, including all significant externalities.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009. AI energy use is negligible compared with other everyday activities. This is a great article on the subject: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... The same author has published a series of articles that go into a lot of depth when it comes to AI energy and water use: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment
  - danans 1y ago
    > A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009. That's the number their CEO put out, but AFAIK it is completely unverified (they did not provide any background as to how it was calculated). To believe it is an article of faith at this point. What is concrete and verifiable are the large deals being struck between AI model providers and energy providers - often to be supplied via fossil fuels.
js8 1y ago
I found this video https://youtu.be/IQvREfKsVXM https://youtu.be/IQvREfKsVXM interesting, especially because it mentions couple of AI studies/papers that argue in favor of much smaller (and more efficient) models. (And I have never heard of them.) I suspect that yes, for AGI much smaller models will eventually prove to be sufficient. I think in 20 years everyone will have an AI agent in their phone, busily exchanging helpful information with other AI agents of people who you trust. I think the biggest problem with tech companies is they effectively enclosed and privatized the social graph. I think it should be public, i.e. one shouldn't have to go through a 3rd party to make an inquiry for how much someone trusts a given source of information, or where the given piece of information originated. (There is more to be written about that topic but it's only marginally related to AI.)
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cratermoon 1y ago
This article was written over a year ago. How has the author's assessments worked out?
bob1029 1y ago
I'd be very interested in seeing some kind of aggregated daily demand curve for AI workloads. It seems like a lot of the hyperbolic angles are looking at this as a constant draw of power over time. There is no reason for a GPU inference farm to be ramped up to 100% clock speed when all of its users are in bed. The 5700XT in my computer is probably pulling a mere 8~12W right now since it is just sitting on an idle desktop. A hyperscaler could easily power down entire racks based upon anticipated demand and turn that into 0W.
- pixl97 1y ago
  With the current demand for GPU time it makes no sense to have your units idle. If you're not selling infrence to customers you'll batch out training to whoever will rent the excess time from you. Maybe in the future there will be idle time.
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    The point is that training activity has cost more than the marginal cost of running the hardware, if not, it's better to keep it idle.
deleted 1y ago
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newscombinatorY 1y ago
Similar concerns were raised regarding the energy used to mine cryptocurrencies. It's basically wasted energy - no doubt about that. But this is different. Crypto's potential has been very limited all along, whereas generative AI has numerous potential uses, and we are seeing more and more companies, as well as ordinary people, utilising it.
- thatguy0900 1y ago
  Great potential uses like the upheaval of the jobs market during a time of political crises lol. Great time to destroy the energy market for the common citizen as well
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
(2024) Isn't this space a bit too fast moving to be submitting year old posts on it? Plenty of grid-draining articles since: Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763 Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595 The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562 And nuclear ambitions: Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172609 Google to back three new nuclear projects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43925982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43925982 Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769 Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 Amazon buys stake in nuclear energy developer in push to power data centres https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858863
wrs 1y ago
I skimmed down as far as the Y2K bug being “obviously false” and closed the tab.
danans 1y ago
> Looking the other side of the market, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is bringing in around $3 billion a year in sales revenue, and has spent around $7 billion developing its model. Even if every penny of that was spent on electricity, the effect would be little more than a blip. The electricity spend on AI datacenters won't be uniformly distributed. It will probably concentrate in areas that currently have cheaper (and dirtier) electricity, like what xAI is doing in Tennessee. That will likely drive up local energy prices in those places, which will be further exacerbated by the US's disinvestment in renewable energy and resulting increased reliance on high cost fossil fuels.
chakat 1y ago
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xbmcuser 1y ago
Personally I don't get some of the power investments by US tech companies. UAE last year signed a project agreement where it would get 1 GWH 24 hours a day from solar and battery project for around $6 billion . Prices for batteries are down a lot further now. So even with adding more battery and solar from more reliability they could build out solar and battery plants with where cost for electricity can be under $0.10/kwh
grmnygrmny2 1y ago
The electricity aspect has always been one I wish AI skeptics/critics wouldn’t lean on so much, because it seems like the one most likely to be solveable. I think we should be focusing on the economic aspects instead - if all this pans out as boosters promise, how does our economy exist when all white collar jobs go away? Who buys all the stuff, with what money?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  I'm less concerned about the economy more concerned about social stability When people can't buy the stuff because they have no money, how do we stop the bloodbath that follows?
abosley 1y ago
As someone who has worked in hypercloud data center expansion and planning - I can confidently say this analysis is um, incomplete. W/out violating NDAs...I'd refer everone to multiple public articles talking about the situation in Ireland, where the hyperclouds are consuming well north of 22% of total energy production.
NoPicklez 1y ago
Not the greatest article, computing power consumption has absolutely increased and muddying it with greenhouse emissions isn't the point. It's still an increase in electricity, the way in which we supply it doesn't change that. The average desktop computer uses much more power than mentioned, you only need to look at premium desktop components to see how much extra power those components require than compared to previous years. High end graphics cards decades ago required only around 155w, nowadays the average GPU is pulling 300w and upwards of 400-500w. Data centers command significantly more power than they used to and will only increase with AI usage. The International Energy Agency shows that global data center electricity usage has almost doubled since 2020 and is projected to double again.

65 points by hirpslop 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

> By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions. Oh, that's not a good example of the point they're trying to make. The emissions from concrete are a point of major concern and are frequently discussed. A ton of effort is being put into trying to reduce the problem, and there are widespread calls to reduce the use of the material as much as possible.

dsr_ 1y ago
The only useful point that they make is that predictions about unending growth are always wrong in detail. Every actual hockey stick turns into a sigmoid, then falls. Meanwhile, a new hockey stick comes along.
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  But AI training has been behaving like Bitcoin mining, which constantly increases the difficulty. AI companies so far have been having to release costlier and costlier models to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t want the final iteration to be a Dyson sphere around the sun or the black hole at the center of our galaxy so Gemini 10,000 Pro can tell us “Let there be light.” Or maybe we do, I don’t know.
  - timschmidt 1y ago
    DeepSeek has shown that significantly less costly training is possible when incentivized. Even for SOTA models.
  - Kye 1y ago
    The previous 9,999 Geminis promised they'd solved entropy and said the words with no real effect so people stopped listening to it. It's very lonely now.
nerdponx 1y ago
Also modern infrastructure is literally built on concrete. Whereas the broad benefits of AI are dubious by comparison.
beepbooptheory 1y ago
In general there seems to be a big given in the argument that I don't think is obvious: > At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century. This seems to imply we all must agree that the industrial economy of the 20th century was sustainable, and that strikes me as an odd point of agreement to try to make. Isn't it just sidestepping the whole point?
PTOB 1y ago
Has he considered exactly how much concrete is needed to build a datacenter campus?
- Diggsey 1y ago
  Essentially zero as a fraction of global concrete usage...
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  A 6” concrete slab (excluding footings) has ~18,500 cubic yards of concrete per million sqft (54 sqft of 6” slab is one cubic yard of concrete)

altcognito 1y ago

Many "new" expenditures replace existing stuff. The initial versions are often the worst iterations we'll see so even though the capability is going up, the energy usage will go down over time. It isn't universal (as we've seen a lot of new true growth), but it is common.

vikramkr 1y ago

And what about the predictions of energy use that did pan out, like air conditioning and stuff? Also in 1999 how many personal computer companies were restarting nuclear power plants to fuel their projected energy consumption? Feels like a weird argument to make when the investments into AI I fra are literally measured in gigawatts. Feels like a weird argument in general - ai consuming lots of energy isn't some weird degrowth conspiracy theory

Mistletoe 1y ago
Let’s not forget Sam Altman tried to raise $7 trillion dollars for it somehow as well.

palata 1y ago

> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot more of it, and therefore we use more electricity. It's called the rebound effect.

bicepjai 1y ago
Sounds similar to Jevons Paradox
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy. It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste. You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient. If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped. It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google. While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone. Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet. Not everything is Bitcoin.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace

pwarner 1y ago

Hopefully the panic continues and we get a lot of extra electricity, ideally via nuclear, wind, solar - and then if AI is a flop at least we get big progress on global warming.

blain 1y ago
I thought you will say a cheaper energy but global warming works too. Also its called climate change now.
wahnfrieden 1y ago
How does an urgent need for more energy use lead to overall cleaner energy? Won’t it also accelerate unclean energy use to saturation, even if additional clean sources are needed for capacity?
thatguy0900 1y ago
Notably this comes during a US administration with open, unironic hatred of all forms of clean energy for ideological reasons

newsclues 1y ago

For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required.

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
At the risk of being called a luddite or a carriage driver, does the current iteration of AI actually increase quality of life that much?
bilekas 1y ago
> For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required I'm not 100% sure that's strictly true.. We naturally assume for the moment that more energy = more quality. It's like the Kardashev scale which basically says you can't advance without more and more energy consuptions to progress. Is this a proven thing ? Does the line need to always go up indefinitely ?

sollewitt 1y ago

“You may not know about the issue but I bet you reckon something, so why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon” - David Mitchell.

cph123 1y ago
"Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon, by going to bbc.co.uk… clicking on ‘what I reckon’ and then simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head."

bobbyraduloff 1y ago

> But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste. If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market makers with their trading bots in Python. Many banks in my country have excel macros on top of SQL extensions on top of COBOL. We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite. I don’t think this is super relevant to the articles point but I think it’s an under discussed topic.

kalleboo 1y ago
Excel has already added a =COPILOT() function. Imagine the waste of all those formulas that probably amount to some basic mathematical formula that could be run on a 386.
whiplash451 1y ago
> We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite. Indeed. But that is because we optimized (and are still optimizing) for speed of development, not much else.

timeon 1y ago

Sorry for off-topic - is Substack competing with Medium on amount of pop-ups?

dheera 1y ago

Even if AI doesn't use more electricity, electric cars and clean energy flight will need it.

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
That's my current, probably misguided hope. They couldn't justify getting the grid ready for electrical vehicles, but frame it as a way to make a bunch of money and everyone's going to jump on board. Of course, the fact that xAI is throwing up gas turbines at their data centres seems to indicate that clean energy isn't a given.

maerF0x0 1y ago

AI helped me fix my own car, no new parts, no driving to the stealership, no comfy lobby to light, no extra building to heat, no IT system to book me into... It's my opinion AI, like many technologies since the 1950s, will lead to more dematerialization of the economy meaning it will net net save electricity and be "greener". This is an extension of what steven pinker says in Enlightenment now.

jerf 1y ago

It's been a while, but I don't recall any of the dotcom startups making deals with nuclear energy companies to buy out entire nuclear power stations: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla... And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude. The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told this not on the basis of hypothetical speculation, but on the basis of billions of real dollars being spent on real power capacity for real data centers by real people who'd really rather keep the money in question. Previous hypotheses not backed by billions of dollars are not comparable predictions.

wheelerwj 1y ago
100% this.
kyledrake 1y ago
> The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. The same could be said of dark fiber laid during the dot com boom, or unused railroads, etc. Spending during a boom is not indicative of properly recognized future demand of resources.
- jerf 1y ago
  It's not future demand, it's current demand. Microsoft has already said they're power blocked rather than chip blocked. Please note how I say current demand, and don't over project as to what my opinion about future demand is. I think there's a small, but reasonable chance that demand will sink for some reason or another in the next few years, and I think there's a pretty decent chance that in the next five years someone will come up with some way to make these things an order of magnitude or more more efficient, which would crash their electricity demands. But it's not a hypothetical "we need power in two years", or at least, not just that... it's we need more power now. There's a big difference between "I may hypothetically need some more capacity later, I'd better go buy it now" and "I concretely need more capacity right now".

afavour 1y ago

That's an awful amount of certainty for something that isn't backed by very much certainty at all. Just "previous claims about inefficiency in tech have ended up being incorrect". As a counterpoint: look at crypto. The amount of power used by cryptocurrency has _not_ gone down, in fact it's increased.

patapong 1y ago
While I don't disagree with your overall point, I don't think crypto is a good counterpoint here. Crypto is conditioned on using more and more energy to secure the network. As the value increases, more mining hardware can be thrown at it, which increases security adn thus value - there is no upper bound. AI on the other hand aims at both increased quality but also reduced energy consumption. While there are certainly developments that favour the latter at the cost of the latter (e.g. reasoning models), there are also indications that companies are finding ways to make the models more efficient while maintaining quality. For example, the moves from GPT-4 -> GPT-4-turbo and 4o -> 5 were speculated to be in the service of efficiency. Hopefully the market forces that make computing cheaper and more energy effective will also push AI to become more energy effective over time.

more_corn 1y ago

I don’t believe it

skybrian 1y ago

There are contrary trends: LLM’s are getting lots of efficiency improvements, but they’re being used more. Which is more important? Understanding what happened so far is impossible without data, and those trends can change. It depends on what new technologies people invent, and there are lots of smart researchers out there. Armchair reasoning isn’t going tell us which trend is more important in the long term. We can imagine scenarios, but we shouldn’t be very confident about such predictions, and distrust other people’s confidence.

stevenjgarner 1y ago

> Most of the increase could be fully offset if the world put an end to the incredible waste of electricity on cryptocurrency mining (currently 0.5 to 1 per cent of total world electricity consumption, and not normally counted in estimates of IT use). I do not accept this. It was once true under Proof-of-Work (typically ~1,000–2,000 kWh per transaction), not so much under Proof-of-Stake (typically 0.03–0.05 kWh per transaction). Note that proof-of-stake may actually have a lower energy footprint than credit card or fiat banking transactions. An IMF analysis [1] pegged core processing for credit card companies at ~0.04 kWh per transaction (based on data centers and settlement systems), but noted that including user payment means like physical cards and terminals could increase this by about two orders of magnitude—though even then, it doesn't extend to bank branches or employee overhead - an overhead not implicit in decentralized finance. [1] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/063/2022/006/article-A001-en.xml https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/063/2022/006/arti...

catlikesshrimp 1y ago

Datacenters didn't need water cooling before the AI explosion. (Air cooling was still possible) At first, DW's estimate was one drop of potable water was consumed for each query (normal queries, not more expensive ones) The Google, I don't know who allowed the sincerity, God bless him, released a first hand analysis of their water consumption, and it is higher that the one drop estimate: 5 drops https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_environmental_impact_of_delivering_ai_at_google_scale.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...

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josefritzishere 1y ago

This claim is based on the idea that the use of AI will plateau. I hope that is true. The alternatives are ominous.

runako 1y ago

OpenAI yesterday announced[1] a partnership to deploy computer chips, but chose to denominate the size of the deal in gigawatts (instead of dollars, or some measure of computing capacity, or some measure of capability). They certainly seem to think about this in terms of electricity requirements, and seem to think they require a lot of it. (I may have the units off a bit, but it looks like OpenAI's recent announcement would consume a bit more than the total residential electricity usage of Seattle.) 1 - https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/

Tycho 1y ago

What’s the energy profile of running inference in a typical ChatGPT prompt compared to: - doing a google search and loading a linked webpage - taking a photo with your smartphone and uploading it to social media for sharing - playing Fortnite for 20 minutes - hosting a Zoom conference with 15 people - sending an email to a hundred colleagues I’d be curious. AI inference is massively centralised, so of course the data centres will be using a lot of energy, but less centralised use cases may be less power efficient from a wholistic perspective.

slfnflctd 1y ago
These are the kinds of questions we need pursued to develop better insight into the overall societal impact of current and near-future LLMs. Energy usage is a critical measure of any technology. The tradeoffs between alternate use cases should be modeled as accurately as possible, including all significant externalities.
JimDabell 1y ago
A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009. AI energy use is negligible compared with other everyday activities. This is a great article on the subject: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... The same author has published a series of articles that go into a lot of depth when it comes to AI energy and water use: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment
- danans 1y ago
  > A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009. That's the number their CEO put out, but AFAIK it is completely unverified (they did not provide any background as to how it was calculated). To believe it is an article of faith at this point. What is concrete and verifiable are the large deals being struck between AI model providers and energy providers - often to be supplied via fossil fuels.

js8 1y ago

I found this video https://youtu.be/IQvREfKsVXM https://youtu.be/IQvREfKsVXM interesting, especially because it mentions couple of AI studies/papers that argue in favor of much smaller (and more efficient) models. (And I have never heard of them.) I suspect that yes, for AGI much smaller models will eventually prove to be sufficient. I think in 20 years everyone will have an AI agent in their phone, busily exchanging helpful information with other AI agents of people who you trust. I think the biggest problem with tech companies is they effectively enclosed and privatized the social graph. I think it should be public, i.e. one shouldn't have to go through a 3rd party to make an inquiry for how much someone trusts a given source of information, or where the given piece of information originated. (There is more to be written about that topic but it's only marginally related to AI.)

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cratermoon 1y ago

This article was written over a year ago. How has the author's assessments worked out?

bob1029 1y ago

I'd be very interested in seeing some kind of aggregated daily demand curve for AI workloads. It seems like a lot of the hyperbolic angles are looking at this as a constant draw of power over time. There is no reason for a GPU inference farm to be ramped up to 100% clock speed when all of its users are in bed. The 5700XT in my computer is probably pulling a mere 8~12W right now since it is just sitting on an idle desktop. A hyperscaler could easily power down entire racks based upon anticipated demand and turn that into 0W.

pixl97 1y ago
With the current demand for GPU time it makes no sense to have your units idle. If you're not selling infrence to customers you'll batch out training to whoever will rent the excess time from you. Maybe in the future there will be idle time.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  The point is that training activity has cost more than the marginal cost of running the hardware, if not, it's better to keep it idle.

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newscombinatorY 1y ago

Similar concerns were raised regarding the energy used to mine cryptocurrencies. It's basically wasted energy - no doubt about that. But this is different. Crypto's potential has been very limited all along, whereas generative AI has numerous potential uses, and we are seeing more and more companies, as well as ordinary people, utilising it.

thatguy0900 1y ago
Great potential uses like the upheaval of the jobs market during a time of political crises lol. Great time to destroy the energy market for the common citizen as well

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

(2024) Isn't this space a bit too fast moving to be submitting year old posts on it? Plenty of grid-draining articles since: Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763 Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595 The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562 And nuclear ambitions: Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172609 Google to back three new nuclear projects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43925982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43925982 Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769 Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 Amazon buys stake in nuclear energy developer in push to power data centres https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858863

wrs 1y ago

I skimmed down as far as the Y2K bug being “obviously false” and closed the tab.

danans 1y ago

> Looking the other side of the market, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is bringing in around $3 billion a year in sales revenue, and has spent around $7 billion developing its model. Even if every penny of that was spent on electricity, the effect would be little more than a blip. The electricity spend on AI datacenters won't be uniformly distributed. It will probably concentrate in areas that currently have cheaper (and dirtier) electricity, like what xAI is doing in Tennessee. That will likely drive up local energy prices in those places, which will be further exacerbated by the US's disinvestment in renewable energy and resulting increased reliance on high cost fossil fuels.

chakat 1y ago

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xbmcuser 1y ago

Personally I don't get some of the power investments by US tech companies. UAE last year signed a project agreement where it would get 1 GWH 24 hours a day from solar and battery project for around $6 billion . Prices for batteries are down a lot further now. So even with adding more battery and solar from more reliability they could build out solar and battery plants with where cost for electricity can be under $0.10/kwh

grmnygrmny2 1y ago

The electricity aspect has always been one I wish AI skeptics/critics wouldn’t lean on so much, because it seems like the one most likely to be solveable. I think we should be focusing on the economic aspects instead - if all this pans out as boosters promise, how does our economy exist when all white collar jobs go away? Who buys all the stuff, with what money?

bluefirebrand 1y ago
I'm less concerned about the economy more concerned about social stability When people can't buy the stuff because they have no money, how do we stop the bloodbath that follows?

abosley 1y ago

As someone who has worked in hypercloud data center expansion and planning - I can confidently say this analysis is um, incomplete. W/out violating NDAs...I'd refer everone to multiple public articles talking about the situation in Ireland, where the hyperclouds are consuming well north of 22% of total energy production.

NoPicklez 1y ago

Not the greatest article, computing power consumption has absolutely increased and muddying it with greenhouse emissions isn't the point. It's still an increase in electricity, the way in which we supply it doesn't change that. The average desktop computer uses much more power than mentioned, you only need to look at premium desktop components to see how much extra power those components require than compared to previous years. High end graphics cards decades ago required only around 155w, nowadays the average GPU is pulling 300w and upwards of 400-500w. Data centers command significantly more power than they used to and will only increase with AI usage. The International Energy Agency shows that global data center electricity usage has almost doubled since 2020 and is projected to double again.