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Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

arstechnica.com

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Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#51

Post by wkat4242 »

renewiltord wrote: post #21

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.

First of all the summary of the article is that things aren't as bad as presented.

Second, how do environmentalists accelerate climate change? I honestly don't get that.

I'm sure some environmentalists have a high footprint sure (thinking of Al Gore private jetting all over the world). But I'm also sure my footprint is a lot smaller than my peers'

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#52

Post by nitwit005 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #48
cjk2 wrote: post #37

It's not about an energy apocalypse at all. It's about the cost versus benefit when the principal cost on large scale deployments is energy. AI stuff takes a lot of energy to run therefore costs a lot of money to run therefore requires revenue that matches the energy used. Now the problem is that if someone puts a $10/month price on the AI functionality, they will stop paying for it because it doesn't really have a $…

The energy equation can be improved dramatically with tailor-made hardware. Bitcoin has showed how much was possible, these days using even the fastest gpu is totally unviable. Of course llm inference is much more complex but there's still much optimization to be had. And 10$ isn't an awful lot of money to justify. It's like half an hour a month (and like a smoke break's worth of salary in silicon valley lol) I think…

I expect that silicon valley developers will indeed pay for some AI products long term. Some other professionals will too.

But, people are spending shocking sums on these products. They need to make a vast sum to pay back what they've spent, and that sort of income can't cover it.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#53

Post by renewiltord »

wkat4242 wrote: post #51
renewiltord wrote: post #21

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.

First of all the summary of the article is that things aren't as bad as presented. Second, how do environmentalists accelerate climate change? I honestly don't get that. I'm sure some environmentalists have a high footprint sure (thinking of Al Gore private jetting all over the world). But I'm also sure my footprint is a lot smaller than my peers'

Environmentalists have fought nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal. They have fought infill housing and push for sprawl. The Sierra Club pushes for policies that increase water use and sprawl. I’m obviously right to ignore them and history will show me as correct.

One or two private jets are irrelevant but pushing for bad policy and opposing good policy places them firmly on the other side. It’s all right. Their time is maybe another decade. Then we roll the whole thing back and get to fixing this world without the opinions of these people who want to ruin the only planet we have so far.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#54

Post by troupo »

cubefox wrote: post #38

> The important thing to remember, though, is that there are economic limits involved in the total energy use for this kind of technology. With bitcoin mining, for instance, the total energy usage has jumped up and down over time, tracking pretty closely with the price of bitcoin. When bitcoin is less valuable, miners are less willing to spend a lot of electricity chasing lower potential profits. That's why alarmist…

> I'm contrast, AI has clearly a lot of economic value

It's clear it has some economic value. It's not yet clear if it has a lot of it.

So far the only economic value it has has been inflation the valuation and stock of any company that has word AI in it

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#55

Post by VBprogrammer »

nitwit005 wrote: post #52
wkat4242 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy equation can be improved dramatically with tailor-made hardware. Bitcoin has showed how much was possible, these days using even the fastest gpu is totally unviable. Of course llm inference is much more complex but there's still much optimization to be had. And 10$ isn't an awful lot of money to justify. It's like half an hour a month (and like a smoke break's worth of salary in silicon valley lol) I think…

I expect that silicon valley developers will indeed pay for some AI products long term. Some other professionals will too. But, people are spending shocking sums on these products. They need to make a vast sum to pay back what they've spent, and that sort of income can't cover it.

I dunno. ChatGPT is still ridiculously good as a search engine. Learning a new language now is a completely different experience for me. I've recently found myself putting something into Google, realising there is nothing of value in the first page if results and taking my question to ChatGPT instead. It's answers might not be correct, and man is it confident about things it just made up, but it is still a much better experience than clicking though ad laden blogspam, forums and question boards to find the same information.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#56

Post by [deleted] »

cubefox wrote: post #38

> The important thing to remember, though, is that there are economic limits involved in the total energy use for this kind of technology. With bitcoin mining, for instance, the total energy usage has jumped up and down over time, tracking pretty closely with the price of bitcoin. When bitcoin is less valuable, miners are less willing to spend a lot of electricity chasing lower potential profits. That's why alarmist…

[deleted]

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#57

Post by amarant »

troupo wrote: post #54
cubefox wrote: post #38

> The important thing to remember, though, is that there are economic limits involved in the total energy use for this kind of technology. With bitcoin mining, for instance, the total energy usage has jumped up and down over time, tracking pretty closely with the price of bitcoin. When bitcoin is less valuable, miners are less willing to spend a lot of electricity chasing lower potential profits. That's why alarmist…

> I'm contrast, AI has clearly a lot of economic value It's clear it has some economic value. It's not yet clear if it has a lot of it. So far the only economic value it has has been inflation the valuation and stock of any company that has word AI in it

This is just plain wrong. Autonomous taxis are operating in several cities, I know of several companies that use AI to detect and fix bugs in code, and at least one that is currently experimenting with completely automating the process of updating dependencies, and using AI to do any necessary changes when new dependency versions contain breaking changes.

Those are just a few things off the top of my head, and we're already talking millions if not billions of dollars in actual value, actual services rendered to society with zero speculation involved.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#58

Post by chii »

cubefox wrote: post #38

> The important thing to remember, though, is that there are economic limits involved in the total energy use for this kind of technology. With bitcoin mining, for instance, the total energy usage has jumped up and down over time, tracking pretty closely with the price of bitcoin. When bitcoin is less valuable, miners are less willing to spend a lot of electricity chasing lower potential profits. That's why alarmist…

> Cryptocurrency was and is mainly an object of speculation, not of intrinsic economic value.

i say this is not correct.

What is "intrinsic" value? I argue that if people want it, then it has intrinsic value.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#59

Post by FerretFred »

chii wrote: post #58
cubefox wrote: post #38

> The important thing to remember, though, is that there are economic limits involved in the total energy use for this kind of technology. With bitcoin mining, for instance, the total energy usage has jumped up and down over time, tracking pretty closely with the price of bitcoin. When bitcoin is less valuable, miners are less willing to spend a lot of electricity chasing lower potential profits. That's why alarmist…

> Cryptocurrency was and is mainly an object of speculation, not of intrinsic economic value. i say this is not correct. What is "intrinsic" value? I argue that if people want it, then it has intrinsic value.

That intrinsic value recently enabled me to spend some Bitcoin on a new tablet device. Works for me!

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#60

Post by advael »

This article is a great example of a really frustrating thing people are doing, which is pretending that all this AI business started two years ago

I get it, GenAI became popular as a consumer-facing product and tech industry PR blitz in that year. But people in the tech world should know better. AI as massive industry-wide GPGPU workload took off in the 2010s, including widespread usage of smaller models like CNNs throughout both FAANG's stack and in scattered startups, as well as supermodels used as recommendation engines by everyone and their grandma. Arguably the entire business models of every irresponsibly large tech company ran on this shit. All the telemetry. Ad targeting. Social Media feeds. Hell, GPT-3 came out before 2020. It was a scandal in this world when OpenAI exclusively licensed it to Microsoft, who was already probably using it in search at that point. None of this was actually that long ago, this is way too soon to have cultural amnesia. I get that I'm in somewhat of a bubble as an AI researcher but surely tech publications should at least know these basic facts, right? Is this yet another reason to be annoyed at the 2010s lingo for calling all these pervasive neural networks "the algorithms"?

From the perspective of energy expenditure from AI workloads, the statement that it's a major driving force of the rising energy demands of datacenters is a perfectly reasonable conclusion given a graph where the TWH more than triples between 2012 and 2024. The article sometimes specifies "generative AI" (which did exist in 2012, but was in a way less interesting state for most people and businesses until 2022), but often just says "AI", which is a big umbrella term people have at least consistently been using for most neural networks for that entire span of time (and longer, and for lots of other things, and it's hopelessly overloaded to the point of being nonsensical sometimes, but regardless this is an incredibly uncontroversial usage). So someone at a data center with a graph that basically tracks the rise of GPGPU neural networks and shows a big jump in energy expenditure over that period attributing this to "AI" is very reasonable!

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