Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 90 posts

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

#71

Post by renewiltord »

latexr wrote: post #66
renewiltord wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I judge people by actions not by stated claims. For instance, I don’t consider the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be democratic or a republic.

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

#72

Post by renewiltord »

wkat4242 wrote: post #70
renewiltord wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, the German Green Party has many pro-wind people who nonetheless oppose wind when it’s in their backyard. Germany’s transition from nuclear to coal under their influence is well known. Tragic that they have any power at all. But it won’t last.

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

#73

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

advael wrote: post #60

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 t…

The graph starts taking off in 2008 in fact and I'm willing to bet that coincides with companies like Amazon starting seriously scaling up.

For instance:

Visits to amazon.com grew from 615 million annual visitors in 2008,[46] to more than 2 billion per month in 2022.[47] The e-commerce platform is the 14th most visited website in the world.[48]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Products_and_...

I'm not fingering Amazon specifically as the culprit but when you say "algorithm" in that sense, as you point out, I'm thinking of recommender systems and Amazon's must be one of the er scaliest; probably together with Meta, and I guess Netflix. Doesn't have to be on GPUs either. CPUs need power too.

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

#74

Post by cubefox »

troupo wrote: post #63
amarant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> > 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?

AI taxis mean that there are no wages for the driver. The AI driver is basically a slave. The cost of developing the AI may be quite high, or the increased cost for the cars (more sensors), but those things probably scale better than wages for us humans.

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

#75

Post by cjk2 »

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.

Two reasons they went quiet:

1. At some point it generated something that cost the business money. Happened to us. Direct root-cause analysis lead to ChatGPT generated code not being aware of the correct way to handle a transaction. First this took out stuff due to leaving transactions open. Then after that was fixed by someone who didn't know what they were doing, it turned out that the scope of the transaction was wrong which caused invisible data loss when a rollback occurred.

2. The free trial ended and no one wanted to pay for it.

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

#76

Post by cjk2 »

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…

$10 a month isn't a lot. Until you have 10,000 staff like us. That's $1.2m a year.

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

#77

Post by latexr »

renewiltord wrote: post #71
latexr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I judge people by actions not by stated claims. For instance, I don’t consider the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be democratic or a republic.

You are conflating the word used for the name of an entity with the word for a concept. When you say the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is neither democratic nor a republic, you’re comparing the names “democratic” and “republic” to the concepts of what a democracy and a republic are. In other words, you're not (I hope) taking issue with either idea but with the fact that a government is misappropriating those words to make false claims.

“Environmentalism” is a concept. An organisation called The Environmentalist Society for the Betterment of Puppies and Rainbows could be a nefarious river polluter while another called The Very Bad Toxic Wastelands could be a philanthropic conversationalist which plants forests. An environmentalist is someone acts in the best interest of the environment, regardless of what they call themselves.

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

#78

Post by ben_w »

TheDudeMan wrote: post #19
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…

(people sing a different tune when the power consumer is bitcoin miners)

Bitcoin network produces exactly the same number of bitcoins over time regardless of how much power it consumes; AI, even if you are unimpressed by the quality, does actually make more stuff when more energy is consumed.

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

#79

Post by fooblaster »

GaggiX wrote: post #36
fooblaster wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All optimizations inevitably end up just being funneled into larger and larger models. The issue with AI is its seemingly endless ability to scale in size for marginal gains in model performance (log(n) scaling essentially).

>All optimizations inevitably end up just being funneled into larger and larger models. Well of course if you're trying to beat the SOTA, bigger sizes allow for better models, but not everyone is trying to use or train the latest SOTA model, maybe llama-3 8b is perfect for what you need to do and having better optimizations to run it locally is gold.

Defining "good enough" is something that rarely seems to happen.

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

#80

Post by renewiltord »

latexr wrote: post #77
renewiltord wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I judge people by actions not by stated claims. For instance, I don’t consider the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be democratic or a republic.

You are conflating the word used for the name of an entity with the word for a concept . When you say the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is neither democratic nor a republic, you’re comparing the names “democratic” and “republic” to the concepts of what a democracy and a republic are. In other words, you're not (I hope) taking issue with either idea but with the fact that a government is misappropriating those…

Sure, find and replace “environmentalists” with “those who call themselves environmentalists”.
Post reply on HN