I don’t take environmentalists seriously because they primarily act to accelerate climate change. So I’m just going to dismiss this out of hand. They’re a poor source of information.
Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
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Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#22Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse?
Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful.
Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#23Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse? Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful. Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
not sure but my money is on AI using wayyyyyy more.
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trouble I see is that new consumption matching (or even some locations where proposed DCs exceed) new green generation may not let us displace dirty generation such as coal, which we should be looking to eliminate. The other issue that comes up with green generation is how variable it is, sometimes it'll be cloudy and still air, others will be windy and sunny, and the grid needs to capable of supplying everyone i…
The solution to all of these problems is an aggressive buildout of nuclear fission plants to provide baseline power and accelerate the closure of all remaining plants which burn fossil fuel. Subsidized if necessary, as essential infrastructure.
Which is better -- subsidize what you perceive to be the solution or tax what is known to be the problem (carbon emissions)?
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.
Lithium extraction to build millions of solar panels, batteries etc is not a 0 impact operation.
This is a straw man usually used by anti electric car people.
There’s always an impact. If you had a sandwich for lunch, the wheat in the bread destroyed a grassland somewhere.
Usually in context of energy, we’re talking about carbon impact.
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#26Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse? Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful. Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
> Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
Does this claim presuppose that people will forever be content to use a circa 2026 ML model? If so, that seems unlikely to me.
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why much of the world is gradually shifting over to renewable energy usage. In a world where energy is renewable, does not generate greenhouse gas and (hopefully) does not produce other externalities, our best way of dealing with these resource allocation problems is the free market. The alternative is regulation, which, I'm not even sure how it could be used to address this particular issue. Ban AI or crypto?…
Tax data center usage
Is the problem the data center or is the problem carbon emissions?
How about tax the carbon emissions.
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.
Lithium extraction to build millions of solar panels, batteries etc is not a 0 impact operation.
Hence why I said “displacement effects are likely to dominate [...] the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.”...
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#29Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse? Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful. Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
Is crypto gone?
Otherwise it's now crypto plus AI plus the already existing rest.
More is more.
Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse
#30What I’d love to see is a rundown of new efficiencies in generative AI. With things like quantization and specialized transformer hardware, the costs will hopefully be less shocking in the future. And fwiw, I don’t find the article’s stats very shocking anyway. At least it’s a net win type of game, whereas the previous environmental bugbear, PoW crypto, was entirely premised on net-energy loss.