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Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.
Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.
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I think we’ll improve this a lot. Now it’s a race to be first, later it will be a race to be profitable and keep costs low.
Plus the sun outputs a lot more energy than earth can ever consume so we just need to get better at collecting it without creating waste on the side.
We’re already going to have to deploy wind and solar at a breakneck pace to solve global warming. Why do we need a technology that would force us to install even more?
Oh no let’s build more gigantic server farms about it
This is horrible article. The only number given related to LLM is 700,000 liters of water used, which is honestly minuscule in impact on environment. And then there are speculations of “what if water used in aria where there is no water”. It is on the level of “if cats had wings, why don’t they fly”.
Everything we do in modern would consumes energy. Air conditioners, public transport, watching TV, getting food, making elections… exactly the same article (without numbers and with lots of hand waving) could have written. “What if we start having elections in Sahara? Think about all the scorpions we disturb!”
Yeah is sounds like some anti-AI person looked for a reason to be mad
Yeah was gonna say this, seems like someone stopped a couple of steps away from discovering that basically the entire modern world is built on top of unsustainable consumption.
deleted by creator
More likely someone who knows how to properly use ChatGPT took their previous job
I have an overall good opinion of the guardian as a news source, but almost every time I see an opinion piece on their site, it’s utter dogshit. It’s as if they go out of their way to find the absolute worst articles.
But they do get shared a lot, which I guess is what they were going for?
They are really left leaning, not balanced, and it shows in their opinions, but also in news selection. Since fediverse is also left or even significantly left leaning, it gets shared a lot here.
Straight up misleading. Mentioning AI in the headline and then sneakily switching to “the cloud” (i.e. most of the internet) when discussing figures. They say it uses a similar amount to commercial flights? Fine. Ground the flights, I’d rather have the internet a million times over.
It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned
ITT hella denialism.
It is a little scary. Machine learning / LLMs consumes insane amounts of power, and it’s under everyone’s eyes.
I was shocked a few months ago to learn that the Internet, including infrastructure and end-user devices, already consumed 30% of world energy production in 2018. We are not only digging our grave, but doing it ever faster.
The Sam Altman fans also say that AI would solve climate change in a jiffy. Problem is, we already have all the tech we need to solve it. We lack the political will to do it. AI might be able to improve our tech further, but if we lack the political will now, then AI’s suggestions aren’t going to fix it. Not unless we’re willing to subsume our governmental structures to AI. Frankly, I do not trust Sam Altman or any other techbro to create an AI that I would want to be governed by.
What we end up with is that while AI might improve things, it almost certainly isn’t worth the energy being dumped into it.
Edit: Yes, Sam Altman does actually believe this. That’s clear from his public statements about climate change and AI. Please don’t get into endless “he didn’t say exactly those words” debates, because that’s bullshit. He justifies massive AI energy usage by saying it will totally solve climate change. Totally.
I agree that these arguments are stupid, but is anyone actually saying we should do those things?
Yes, Sam Altman himself.
Seems he didn’t say what you said he did. Why did you lie?
Why do you keep embarrassing yourself?
Posioning the well. You can admit your lies btw
No one is.
You know I have never once heard anyone saying what you are saying that they are. I personally think it would be better for us to address bad arguments that are being made instead of ones we wish existed solely so we can argue with them.
You mean the ones Sam Altman is actually saying?
Claim:
"The Sam Altman fans also say that AI would solve climate change in a jiffy. "
What he said:
"If we spend 1% of the world’s electricity training powerful AI, and that AI does figure out how to get (to carbon goals) that would be a massive win, (especially) if that 1% lets people live their lives better.”
Were you just assuming I would take you at your word?
Check my edit in the post above, made over an hour before you posted this.
Actually made after I posted that. Why do you keep lying? It’s messed up. This is low stakes internet comments.
And no he didn’t say what you swore he said.
Frankly, I do not trust Sam Altman or any other techbro to create an AI that I would want to be governed by.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
~ Frank Herbert, Dune
Thing is, I could maybe be convinced that a sufficiently advanced AI would run society in a more egalitarian and equitable way than any existing government. It’s not going to come from techbros, though. They will 100% make an AI that favors techbros.
Edit: almost forgot this part. Frank Herbert built a world ruled by a highly stratified feudal empire. The end result of that no thinking machine rule isn’t that good, either. He also based it on a lot of 1960s/70s ideas about drugs expanding the human mind that are just bullshit. Great novel, but its ideas shouldn’t be taken at face value.
we already have all the tech we need to solve it
And we already know “how to get to carbon goals” that Altman mentioned we need AI to figure out.
Now look into animal farming!
Seriously, though, our population growth rates are unsustainable, and we really better start getting in with nuclear power soon.
I already look into it, I choose to be vegetarian.
Nuclear power plants are a patch to the bigger issue, the idea of infinite progress. We need to reduce consumption.
Yeah but as long as our population keeps growing than I’m not sure how else we get to a sustainable world. Obviously it has to be an intentional, consensual cultural shift, I’m not suggesting forcing people to not have kids. But I didn’t know how the earth doesn’t just collapse at some point as long as people keep having more and more kids and our population keeps growing.
ETA: oh and I’m vegan btw
Nothing like the good old magical-thinking-from-guys-who-love-logic.
Believing oneself to be the rational one in life continues to sadly be the origin of so many blind spots in people’s thinking.
New technologies will sometimes need more energy. Thats hardly news. If we continue yo switch to renewables the impact will also be small. AI isnt even listed as its own point, heck it is not even listed in most energy budgets, yet it sounds like there will be no energy left for the rest, which is laughable, since it likely uses around 1% of the energy needed (its estimated at 2% for it in general)
Not unlike the species of it’s creators, go figure.
Me: ChatGPT, can you create a system that’s capable of powering your systems in a environmentally sustainable way?
ChatGPT: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
I mean ChatGPT can’t do it but humans can and are… Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
The new ARM powered surface laptops that consume like 30W of power are more capable of running an AI model than my gaming PC from 2 years ago that consumes ~300W of power.
I’m referencing the short story, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?
Because they’re all part of a technocult trying to make a digital god.
Of course it would… lmao are you kidding me? Have you never seen a server farm? Hell NSA has huge warehouses of servers.
Last year, before I joined this organization, IT decided to get off Microsoft’s cloud service because after some calculations they realize that on-prem hosting was significantly cheaper than cloud hosting. Now I believe more and more organizations small and large/enterprise are getting off cloud or doing a mixture / hybrid because the costs are not justifiable.
And for AI? Requiring GPUs? Huge energy consumers.
What is this even? Batteries for UPS in a datacenter wouldn’t be a patch on even a few days of production of EVs, water isn’t being shipped from “drier parts of the world” to cool datacenters, and even if it were, it’s not gone forever once it’s used to cool server rooms.
Absolutely, AI and crypto are a blight on the energy usage of the world and that needs to be addressed, but things like above just detract from the real problem.
The water is because datacenters have been switching to evaporative cooling to save energy. It does save energy, but at the cost of water. It doesn’t go away forever, but a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can’t use it again without desalination and using even more energy.
a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can’t use it again without desalination
Where do you think rain comes from? Why do hurricanes form over the ocean?
Rainforests. Like the Amazon that is being deforested obscenely in some areas
Dude, please. If things just worked out like that, we wouldn’t have water issues piling up with the rest of our climate catastrophe.
No no they’ve got a point. Everyone knows that the invisible hand of the free market and the invisible hand of the replenishing water table just reach out, shake hands, and agree to work it all out.
That may all be true, but the amount of water used by these data centers is miniscule, and it seems odd to focus on it. The article cites Microsoft using 700,000 liters for ChatGPT. In comparison, a single fracking well in the same state might use 350,000,000 liters, and this water is much more contaminated. There are so many other, more substantive, issues with LLMs, why even bring water use up?
Edit: If evaporative cooling uses less energy it might even be reducing total industrial water use, considering just how much water is used in the energy industry.
AI companies*
I know this is probably way off topic, but it made me think of Friendship is Optimal, especially the ending.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
This metric doesn’t say anything.
So… Absolutely need to be aware of the impact of what we do in the tech sphere, but there’s a few things in the article that give me pause:
Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
- “Could”. More likely it was closed loop.
- Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
Can you say non sequitur ?
The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn’t go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there’s no power left. To use a simily, there’s plenty of water but the pipes aren’t in place.
This article is well intentioned FUD, but FUD none the less.
“Could”. More likely it was closed loop.
Nope. Here’s how data centres use water.
It boils down to two things - cooling and humidification. Humidification is clearly not a closed loop, so I’ll focus on the cooling:
- cold water runs through tubes, chilling the air inside the data centre
- the water is now hot
- hot water is exposed to outside air, some evaporates, the leftover is colder and reused.
Since some evaporates you’ll need to put more water into the system. And there’s an additional problem: salts don’t evaporate, they concentrate over time, precipitate, and clog your pipes. Since you don’t want this you’ll eventually need to flush it all out. And it also means that you can’t simply use seawater for that, it needs to be freshwater.
Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
Freshwater renews at a limited rate.
What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?
Mostly to the air, as promoting the evaporation of the water.
Can you say non sequitur ?
More like non sequere than non sequitur. Read the whole paragraph:
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects. This will only get worse as households move away from using fossil fuels and rely more on electricity, putting even more pressure on the National Grid. In Bicester, for instance, plans to build 7,000 new homes were paused because the electricity network didn’t have enough capacity.
The author is highlighting that electrical security is already bad for you Brits, for structural reasons; it’ll probably get worse due to increased household consumption; and with big tech consuming it, it’ll get even worse.
Data center cooling towers can be closed- or open-loop, and even operate in a hybrid mode depending on demand and air temps/humidity. Problem is, the places where open-loop evaporative cooling works best are arid, low-humidity regions where water is a scarce resource to start.
On the other hand, several of the FAANGS are building datacenters right now in my area, where we’re in the watershed of the largest river in the country, it’s regularly humid and rainy, any water used in a given process is either treated and released back into the river, or fairly quickly condenses back out of the atmosphere in the form of rain somewhere a few hundred miles further east (where it will eventually collect back into the same river). The only way that water is “wasted” in this environment has to do with the resources used to treat and distribute it. However, because it’s often hot and humid around here, open loop cooling isn’t as effective, and it’s more common to see closed-loop systems.
Bottom line, though, I think the siting of water-intensive industries in water-poor parts of the country is a governmental failure, first and foremost. States like Arizona in particular have a long history of planning as though they aren’t in a dry desert that has to share its only renewable water resource with two other states, and offering utility incentives to potential employers that treat that resource as if it’s infinite. A government that was focused on the long-term viability of the state as a place to live rather than on short-term wins that politicians can campaign on wouldn’t be making those concessions.
They can be closed-loop as in your region but they usually aren’t - besides the problem that you mentioned, a closed loop increases electricity consumption (as you’ll need a heat pump instead), and electricity consumption is also a concern. Not for the environmental impact (corporations DGAF), but price.
“Could”. More likely it was closed loop. As I understand it this is an estimate, thus the word “could”. This has nothing to do with using closed or open look water cooling. Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.
The point they are trying to make is that fresh water is not a limitless resource and increasing usage has various impacts, for example on market prices.
The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn’t go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there’s no power left. To use a simily, there’s plenty of water but the pipes aren’t in place.
The point being made is that resources are allocated to increase network capacity for hyped tech and not for current, more pressing needs.
Is there a reason it needs to be fresh water? Is sea water less effective?
A lot of industry does use grey water or untreated water for cooling as it’s substantially cheaper to filter it and add chemicals to it yourself. What’s even cheaper is to have a cooling tower and reuse your water, in the volumes it’s used at industrial scales it’s really expensive to just dump down the drain (which you also get charged for), when I worked as a maintenance engineer I recall saving something like 1m cad minimum a year by changing the fill level in our cooling tower as it would drop to a level where it’d trigger city water backups to top up the levels to avoid running dry, and that was a single processing line.
corrosion
Oh makes sense.
Not just corrosion, but also to prevent precipitation in evaporative cooling systems (the most common ones).
Evaporative systems require constant input of new water; if you’re adding saltwater the salt will concentrate and it’ll become a saturated brine, and once the brine evaporates a bit the salt precipitates. It’ll happen mostly on the cooling fills (that will need to be replaced more constantly), but the main issue is that some precipitate does get carried by the brine and clogs the pipes.
700.000 litres also sounds like much more than 700 m³. The average German citizen consumed 129 litres per day or roughly 47 m³ annually. The water consumption of 15 people is less than most blocks.
Energy consumption might be a real problem, but I don’t see how water consumption is that big of a problem or priority here.
Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.
Water “consumption” is also a pretty easy to abuse term since water isn’t really consumed, it can be recycled endlessly. Whether some particular water use is problematic depends very much on the local demands on the water system, and that can be accounted for quite simply by market means - charge data centers money for their water usage and they’ll naturally move to where there’s plenty of cheap water.
Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.
That just means you have no intuitive sense of how large a litre is. If they’d written it as “2000 quarts” (which is close enough to being the same volume at that level of rounding) would it have painted a clearer picture in your head?
I’m Canadian. Milk comes in liters.
If you’re saying that 2 cubic meters can’t fit in the back of a pickup truck, here’s some truck capacities. A cubic yard is 0.764555 cubic meters, so a full sized pickup can hold 3.4 cubic meters of cargo.
Oil is different because 1 ppm can ruin a whole litre or something in that direction.
Assuming that’s true, most of the oil tends to clump together. 2000L doesn’t just perfectly disperse out across billions of litres of water, contaminating everything.
The average German citizen consumed 129 litres per day
That seems like a lot. Where are you getting that number?
Edit: consumes = uses not drinks
A quick search says 3.7L is the recommended intake for men, and 2.7L for women. Forget AI, Germans appear to be the real resource guzzlers!
Here “consume” means far more than just “drank”. If you take a shower at home, you are consuming water. Wash your car? Consume water. Water your garden? Consume water.
Aha! That makes a lot more sense with that framing.
EDIT: In 2019 in Canada the daily residential average was 215L per day. 129L seems like a dream in contrast.
I imagine the number goes up considerably when you account for showering, washing clothes and dishes, and water used while cooking. It would go up even more if you account for the water used to produce the food consumed by the individual.
I would assume that includes stuff like toilets,baths,showers,dishes and hand washing etc as fresh water uses. Either that or Germans are the ultimate hydrohommie.
The EPA states that each American uses an average of 82 gallons or 310.4 litres a day (study from 2015). Source: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts
It’s usually not the water itself but the energy used to “systemize” water from out-of-system sources
Pumping, pressurization, filtering, purifying all take additional energy.
All that for glorified autocomplete
That is an absurd reduction of reality, blatant illustration of dunning-kruger in relation to LLMs
Or is it? Dun-dun-DUNNN!
LLMs are just predictive text but bigger
I mean, that’s also all you or I am.
Speak for yourself, loser. Repeating shit you heard an influencer say on Twitch is cringe.
Explain to me how we’re not or kindly go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself.
I’m calling it now: you’ll end up poor and unhappy
That’s cool, free will doesn’t exist, whats going to happen is going to happen. I’ve accepted that, so I might die poor, but you’re the only one here with a chance of dying truly unhappy.
You know what’s funny? What negative prompts you’d have to give an LLM to get it to respond the way you do.
You were more entertaining when you just repeated dumb lines from your favourite influencers
You are insulting someone simply because they didn’t go along with your strawman? Intelligence is in short supply these days.
But now I know that I can jump off the Golden Gate bridge to cure my depression.
The golden gate bridge is so far away from me. I don’t know what to do to cure depression. :(
I plan on building my own Golden Gate Bridge (to scale) and then jump off!
Pass a carbon tax. Oh wait that would be too easy.
Why don’t you just hand over all your income to the government just to be sure you won’t engage in any unnecessary activity.
What are you on about? A carbon tax is a way to lower the tragedy of the commons in terms of air pollution. It is the free market compromise. Allowing individuals and companies time and giving them incentive to stop doing something that hurts us as a whole. The socialist answer would be to ban it outright. You are getting the best solution the capitalist market allows. Additionally it aligns pretty well with traditional capitalist economists have argued before: a resource owned as a whole will be mismanaged.
I honestly don’t get why it isn’t a more popular idea. I would much rather live in a world where people are being gently pushed into making the right decision with adequate time to adapt vs a world that is on fire.
And on the off chance that 99% of climate science is wrong we still benefit from having a less acidic ocean, less smog, less local air pollution, and spending less money on maintenance of so many machines.
It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.
Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.
Sigh. You can hold any opinion you want about the ideal society. This is a good idea for the society we have now. If we all die it’s not going to matter if Adam Smith or Karl Marx was correct.
I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?
I think that some are allergic to any slightest notion of capitalism being good
hey i think you attracted some of those people you mentioned :)
Sometimes I just want to see online world burn
Now do I want to engage em or not? Probably not I guess, it would be tiring especially since any nuance is lost on the web in favour of black and white thinking
I’ll play some guitar or eat burgers while they produce their stuff. Maybe draw something or blender hm
The key to healthy internet is to wisely choose your keyboard battles and not get bogged down by the army of simpletons
On top of that, if you refuse to defend your vague statements implying it would be a waste of your time and beneath you, you end up being always right!
Which may be because recent history has proven beyond doubt that capitalism without regulation is catastrophical and capitalists will always push the boundaries & try to get rid of regulation, thereby it is always catastrophical, with temporary periods where it looks good on the surface.
Carbon taxes doesn’t make capitalism good, it’s still like, the cause of the problem in the first place
Adam Smith would go absolutely ballistic if he were to see our current system. Not at all his vision.
GTFO with your time-tested solution to negative externalities.
