4 ms·
One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almon
by zachwill 3mo ago
One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water.
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
- shimman 3mo agoIf you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs? Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
- tester756 3mo ago>Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. Let's do not act as if there wasnt other food, a lot of it actually. Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace, they're biggest human achievement up to date.
- deaton 3mo agoAre they? What has gotten better because of LLMs?
- tester756 3mo agoSearch e.g
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo agoStrongly disagree. Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites. LLMs have degraded the internet and search.
- H4cks0r1337 3mo agoTrue, you need extra UBO filters nowadays to block LLM results in search.
- tester756 3mo agoI'm talking about searching via LLM, not about experience of using Google.
- lightedman 3mo ago"Meanwhile LLMs aren't that easy to replace" A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words. So, uh, yea, chatbots are very, VERY easy to replace.
- tester756 3mo ago>A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words. Of course, because it's not like whole world went crazy after ChatGPT and hundreds of billions of dollars are being constantly invested into many of technology stacks - software, hardware, semiconductor engineering in order to push this technology even further, lol.
- Marha01 3mo ago> A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words. Lol. This is what anti-AIs actually believe!
- sokoloff 3mo agoAs a reference, one gallon of cow milk requires about 250 gallons of water.
- j4mie 3mo agoI feel like we need some citations for these figures. Our World In Data [1] disagrees. I've not seen any analysis that puts any plant milk at a higher water use figure than dairy. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- stonogo 3mo agoIt's really weird to me that datacenter fans all have detailed knowledge of almond farming, but never seem to notice that the nutritional value of ChatGPT is not on par with your average box of almond milk.
- naasking 3mo agoBecause nutritional value is not the only thing of value. We invented this clever way of uniformly valuing things called "money" that abstracts over all of those differences though.
- stonogo 3mo agoIndeed! Especially relevant because almond milk is sold at a profit, which is something the LLM industry has yet to achieve.
- WarmWash 3mo agoToo late.