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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

#61

Post by lwranx »

amarant wrote: post #57
troupo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Detect and fix bugs? Sounds like snake oil. Even compilers analyzers are full of false positive warnings, LLMs are even worse.

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

#62

Post by dorkwood »

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 $…

> It doesn't materially improve most people's lives at all.

What about all the people here who were claiming GPT-4 had become an essential part of their developer job?

They seem to have gone quiet recently, but they must still be here.

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

#63

Post by troupo »

amarant wrote: post #57
troupo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Autonomous taxis are operating in several cities

So, some economic value. BTW are those companies profitable at all? Or are they like Uber: losing billions of dollars every year with no chance of ever turning a profit?

Though I will agree that decades-old and decades-long research into computer vision and traffic modelling is finally paying off a bit in automotive industry.

> AI to detect and fix bugs in code, and at least one that is currently experimenting

So, unverifiable claims and experiments

> Those are just a few things off the top of my head

Those "few things" are exactly two things, and are evidence of some highly disputable economic value. Not evidence of a lot of economic value.

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

#64

Post by latexr »

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.

> I argue that if people want it, then it has intrinsic value.

In other words, what you’re arguing is “if it has extrinsic value, then it has intrinsic value”. Which would break the point of the distinction.

Intrinsic value is the exact opposite of what you’re saying, it’s something having value by itself.

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

#65

Post by abenga »

FerretFred wrote: post #59
chii wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

This just means you passed something intrinsically worthless on to another person in exchange for a useful good. There is a name for this in economic theory, but it's a bit of an insult.

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

#66

Post by latexr »

renewiltord wrote: post #53
wkat4242 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> these people who want to ruin the only planet we have so far.

You’re free to disagree with the policies and results of environmentalist actions and even argue that they’re having an undesired effect, but saying environmentalists want to ruin the planet is nonsensical. Anyone who desires that is by definition not an environmentalist.

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

#67

Post by advael »

amarant wrote: post #57
troupo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean if we count autonomous taxis why not the entirety of the recommendation-engine-driven internet, including ad networks, social media feeds, streaming services? Or like object detection and tracking on cctvs? Does AI mean just LLMs and maybe image generators when we're talking about power usage, but anything with a neural network if we're talking about economic impact? Where do we stand on other ML, like clustering algorithms?

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

#68

Post by atoav »

dorkwood wrote: post #62
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 $…

> It doesn't materially improve most people's lives at all. What about all the people here who were claiming GPT-4 had become an essential part of their developer job? They seem to have gone quiet recently, but they must still be here.

These are the same "developers" who claimed their application was secure because they used multiple blockchains.

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

#69

Post by ben_w »

robnado wrote: post #2

This is an economics problem: if the cost of energy is lower or equal to the benefit of consuming it, the energy will be consumed. As more and more energy is consumed to run these datacenters, price of energy will go up, and datacenters will learn to either be more efficient, or will pass on these costs to their users who will learn to be more efficient. Of course, there might be inefficiencies like subsidies and mon…

Yes, however the economic situation develops not necessarily to most people's advantage.

A (hypothetical) AI that can perform any intellectual labour at for an energy cost of 1 kWh to produce output at the quality and quantity levels of a median human working for an hour, at $0.1/kWh is going to be a better economic choice than 50% of humans on earth even if those humans cut their wage demands to the UN abject poverty threshold.

But at the same time, there's not (currently) enough electricity for 50% of the world's people to be replaced by such AI regardless of the price.

Thus energy prices rise until the machine labour is as expensive as the human labour.

But that likely results in a lot of people even above that threshold no longer being able to afford to keep the lights on.

If we only get this AI quality/cost/generality level around 2031-ish, that may be fine, because renewables are on an exponential growth curve and around then exceed current global demand all by themselves.

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

#70

Post by wkat4242 »

renewiltord wrote: post #53
wkat4242 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not familiar with the Sierra Club. I assume it's an American-specific organisation. Here in Europe we have "green parties" in most parliaments.

But as most wide interest groups, environmentalists are not a homogeneous community. There is no general 'agenda' even though subgroups might have one. I'm sure there's subgroups that use environmentalism as a false flag to further their own goals.

I'm personally against nuclear as I feel it externalises the problems into the future (waste management) which is exactly how we got into this situation we are in now. But I'm very much in favour of really renewable energy and public transport instead of private cars.

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