5 ms·

Is that worth the cost of this technology? Both in terms of financial shenanigans and its environmental cost?

vrc 6mo ago
Depends on if you believe it will ever become cheaper. Either hardware, inspiring more efficient smaller models, or energy itself. The techno optimist believes that that is the inevitable and investable future. But on what horizon and will it get “zip drived” before then?
Legend2440 6mo ago
The environmental cost is significantly overblown, especially water usage.
- bayindirh 6mo ago
  I work with direct liquid cooled systems. If the datacenter is working with open DLC systems (most AI datacenters in the US in fact do), there's a lot of water is being wasted, 7/24/365. A mid-tier top-500 system (think about #250-#325) consumes about a 0.75MW of energy. AI data centers consume magnitudes more. To cool that behemoth you need to pump tons of water per minute in the inner loop. Outer loop might be slower, but it's a lot of heated water at the end of the day. To prevent water wastage, you can go closed loop (for both inner and outer loops), but you can't escape the heat you generate and pump to the atmosphere. So, the environmental cost is overblown, as in Chernobyl or fallout from a nuclear bomb is overblown. So, it's not.
  - Legend2440 6mo ago
    It's not that it doesn't use water; it's that water is not scarce unless you live in a desert. As a country, we use 322 billion gallons of water per day. A few million gallons for a datacenter is nothing.
    - bayindirh 6mo ago
      The problem is you don't just use that water and give it back. The water gets contaminated and heated, making it unsuitable for organisms to live in, or to be processed and used again. In short, when you pump back that water to the river, you're both poisoning and cooking the river at the same time, destroying the ecosystem at the same time too. Talk about multi-threaded destruction.
      - Legend2440 6mo ago
        No, you're making that up. Datacenters do not poison rivers.
        bayindirh 6mo ago
        To reiterate, I work in a closed loop DLC datacenter. Pipes rust, you can't stop that. That rust seeps to the water. That's inevitable. Moreover, if moss or other stuff starts to take over your pipes, you may need to inject chemicals to your outer loop to clean them. Inner loops already use biocides and other chemicals to keep them clean. Look how nuclear power plants fight with organism contamination in their outer cooling loops where they circulate lake/river water. Same thing.
        camillomiller 6mo ago
        Dude you can’t fight Dunning Krueger. They all think they’re experts in everything now.
    - jll29 6mo ago
      Just because some countries waste a lot at present time does not mean it's available as a resource indefinitely.
  - lxgr 6mo ago
    The environmental cost of Chernobyl is indeed often overblown. Nature in the exclusion zone is arguably off much better now than before! The cost to humans living in affected areas was massive and high profile, but it’s very questionable if it was higher than that of an equivalent amount of coal-burning plants. Fortunately not a tradeoff we have to debate anymore, since there are renewables with much fewer downsides and externalities still. Nuclear bombs (at least those being actually used) by design kill people, so I’m not sure what the externalities even are if the main utility is already to intentionally cause harm.
subroutine 6mo ago
Are you asking if the 10 seconds it takes AI to generate an image is more costly to the environment than a commissioned graphics artist using a laptop for 5-6 hours, or a painter who uses physical media sourced from all over the world?
- dilDDoS 6mo ago
  Cheaper/faster tech increases overall consumption though. Without the friction of commissioning a graphics artist to design something, a user can generate thousands of images (and iterate on those images multiple times to achieve what they want), resulting in way more images overall. I'm not really well versed on the environmental cost, more just (neutrally) pointing out that comparing a single 10s image to a 5-6 hour commission ignores the fact that the majority of these images probably would never have existed in the first place without AI.
  - runarberg 6mo ago
    Also, ignoring training when talking about the environmental costs is bad faith. Without training this image would not exist, and if nobody generating images like these, the training would not happen. So we should really ask, the 10 seconds it took for inference, plus the weeks or months of high intensity compute it took to train the model.
    - ToValueFunfetti 6mo ago
      You'd want to compare against the fraction of training attributable to the image
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
- bayindirh 6mo ago
  In short, yes. A modern laptop is running almost fanless, like a 486 from the days of yore. A single H200 pumps out 700W continuously in a data center, and you run thousands of them. Also, don't forget the training and fine tuning runs required for the models. Mass transportation / global logistics can be very efficient and cheap. Before the pandemic, it was cheaper to import fresh tomatoes from half-world away rather than growing them locally in some cases. A single container of painting supplies is nothing in the grand scheme of things, esp. when compared with what data centers are consuming and emitting.
3dsnano 6mo ago
absolutely without a doubt it is
- bayindirh 6mo ago
  If that energy is used for research, maybe. If used to answer customer questions or generate Studio Ghibli knock-offs, it's not worth it, even a bit.
  - 3dsnano 6mo ago
    what’s the difference between those two? how can you say one has more value than the other?
    - bayindirh 6mo ago
      One is trying to save the future of the planet and the humanity with science, the other one is mocking a man who devoted his whole life to his art, even if it means spending years to perfect a three-second sequence for kicks and monies. If you see no difference between them, I can't continue to discuss this with you, sorry.
  - lxgr 6mo ago
    To you. Fortunately nobody elected you chief resource allocator of the planet. And I say that as somebody that also finds Ghibli knock-off avatars used by AI bros in incredibly bad taste (or, arguably an even worse crime against taste, a dated 2025 vibe).
    - bayindirh 6mo ago
      Thanks for your personal jab. Another nice comment to frame and hang to my wall. I like your discussion style.
      - lxgr 6mo ago
        Passing moral judgement about other people's value preferences seems pretty preposterous to me as well, so I was being a bit glib, but to be clear: I don't want to live in a world in which people get to decide what others can and can't do with their share of resources (after properly accounting for all externalities, including pollution, the potential future value of non-renewable present resources etc. – this is where today's reality often and massively misses that ideal) based on their subjective moral criteria. Not even just for ethical/moral reasons, but also for practical ones: It’s infinitely harder to get everybody to additionally agree on value of use than on fairness of allocation alone. After thoroughly mixing these two quite distinct concerns, you'll also have a very hard time convincing me that your concerns for river pollution etc. (which I take very seriously as potentially unaccounted negative externalities, if they exist) are completely free from motivated reasoning about "immoral usage".

vrc 6mo ago

Depends on if you believe it will ever become cheaper. Either hardware, inspiring more efficient smaller models, or energy itself. The techno optimist believes that that is the inevitable and investable future. But on what horizon and will it get “zip drived” before then?

Legend2440 6mo ago

The environmental cost is significantly overblown, especially water usage.

bayindirh 6mo ago
I work with direct liquid cooled systems. If the datacenter is working with open DLC systems (most AI datacenters in the US in fact do), there's a lot of water is being wasted, 7/24/365. A mid-tier top-500 system (think about #250-#325) consumes about a 0.75MW of energy. AI data centers consume magnitudes more. To cool that behemoth you need to pump tons of water per minute in the inner loop. Outer loop might be slower, but it's a lot of heated water at the end of the day. To prevent water wastage, you can go closed loop (for both inner and outer loops), but you can't escape the heat you generate and pump to the atmosphere. So, the environmental cost is overblown, as in Chernobyl or fallout from a nuclear bomb is overblown. So, it's not.
- Legend2440 6mo ago
  It's not that it doesn't use water; it's that water is not scarce unless you live in a desert. As a country, we use 322 billion gallons of water per day. A few million gallons for a datacenter is nothing.
  - bayindirh 6mo ago
    The problem is you don't just use that water and give it back. The water gets contaminated and heated, making it unsuitable for organisms to live in, or to be processed and used again. In short, when you pump back that water to the river, you're both poisoning and cooking the river at the same time, destroying the ecosystem at the same time too. Talk about multi-threaded destruction.
    - Legend2440 6mo ago
      No, you're making that up. Datacenters do not poison rivers.
      - bayindirh 6mo ago
        To reiterate, I work in a closed loop DLC datacenter. Pipes rust, you can't stop that. That rust seeps to the water. That's inevitable. Moreover, if moss or other stuff starts to take over your pipes, you may need to inject chemicals to your outer loop to clean them. Inner loops already use biocides and other chemicals to keep them clean. Look how nuclear power plants fight with organism contamination in their outer cooling loops where they circulate lake/river water. Same thing.
        camillomiller 6mo ago
        Dude you can’t fight Dunning Krueger. They all think they’re experts in everything now.
  - jll29 6mo ago
    Just because some countries waste a lot at present time does not mean it's available as a resource indefinitely.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  The environmental cost of Chernobyl is indeed often overblown. Nature in the exclusion zone is arguably off much better now than before! The cost to humans living in affected areas was massive and high profile, but it’s very questionable if it was higher than that of an equivalent amount of coal-burning plants. Fortunately not a tradeoff we have to debate anymore, since there are renewables with much fewer downsides and externalities still. Nuclear bombs (at least those being actually used) by design kill people, so I’m not sure what the externalities even are if the main utility is already to intentionally cause harm.

subroutine 6mo ago

Are you asking if the 10 seconds it takes AI to generate an image is more costly to the environment than a commissioned graphics artist using a laptop for 5-6 hours, or a painter who uses physical media sourced from all over the world?

dilDDoS 6mo ago
Cheaper/faster tech increases overall consumption though. Without the friction of commissioning a graphics artist to design something, a user can generate thousands of images (and iterate on those images multiple times to achieve what they want), resulting in way more images overall. I'm not really well versed on the environmental cost, more just (neutrally) pointing out that comparing a single 10s image to a 5-6 hour commission ignores the fact that the majority of these images probably would never have existed in the first place without AI.
- runarberg 6mo ago
  Also, ignoring training when talking about the environmental costs is bad faith. Without training this image would not exist, and if nobody generating images like these, the training would not happen. So we should really ask, the 10 seconds it took for inference, plus the weeks or months of high intensity compute it took to train the model.
  - ToValueFunfetti 6mo ago
    You'd want to compare against the fraction of training attributable to the image
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
bayindirh 6mo ago
In short, yes. A modern laptop is running almost fanless, like a 486 from the days of yore. A single H200 pumps out 700W continuously in a data center, and you run thousands of them. Also, don't forget the training and fine tuning runs required for the models. Mass transportation / global logistics can be very efficient and cheap. Before the pandemic, it was cheaper to import fresh tomatoes from half-world away rather than growing them locally in some cases. A single container of painting supplies is nothing in the grand scheme of things, esp. when compared with what data centers are consuming and emitting.

3dsnano 6mo ago

absolutely without a doubt it is

bayindirh 6mo ago
If that energy is used for research, maybe. If used to answer customer questions or generate Studio Ghibli knock-offs, it's not worth it, even a bit.
- 3dsnano 6mo ago
  what’s the difference between those two? how can you say one has more value than the other?
  - bayindirh 6mo ago
    One is trying to save the future of the planet and the humanity with science, the other one is mocking a man who devoted his whole life to his art, even if it means spending years to perfect a three-second sequence for kicks and monies. If you see no difference between them, I can't continue to discuss this with you, sorry.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  To you. Fortunately nobody elected you chief resource allocator of the planet. And I say that as somebody that also finds Ghibli knock-off avatars used by AI bros in incredibly bad taste (or, arguably an even worse crime against taste, a dated 2025 vibe).
  - bayindirh 6mo ago
    Thanks for your personal jab. Another nice comment to frame and hang to my wall. I like your discussion style.
    - lxgr 6mo ago
      Passing moral judgement about other people's value preferences seems pretty preposterous to me as well, so I was being a bit glib, but to be clear: I don't want to live in a world in which people get to decide what others can and can't do with their share of resources (after properly accounting for all externalities, including pollution, the potential future value of non-renewable present resources etc. – this is where today's reality often and massively misses that ideal) based on their subjective moral criteria. Not even just for ethical/moral reasons, but also for practical ones: It’s infinitely harder to get everybody to additionally agree on value of use than on fairness of allocation alone. After thoroughly mixing these two quite distinct concerns, you'll also have a very hard time convincing me that your concerns for river pollution etc. (which I take very seriously as potentially unaccounted negative externalities, if they exist) are completely free from motivated reasoning about "immoral usage".