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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

#81

Post by advael »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #73
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 f…

I mean while I agree that CPUs can be hungry, a lot of traditional beefycore proc tech in this time period has gone into energy efficiency and miniaturization whereas a lot of GPU tech has been all about more and more cores. Research and enterprise workstations I've worked with have increasingly required industrial power supply. Like yea raw scale's gonna be a factor but I'd also think that per-datacenter power might grow less quickly with scale if the per-server consumption wasn't drastically rising because company scale also predicts building more datacenters

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

#82

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #55
nitwit005 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bette…

Yep, same. It’s a different world for using latex cause i can get it to spit out example code for all sorts of things.

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

#83

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

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…

That nuclear take is bad though. We can manage the waste, but even if we fail the consequences are dramaaaaaatically less severe than those of extra warming.

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

#84

Post by chii »

abenga wrote: post #65
FerretFred wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is a name for this in economic theory, but it's a bit of an insult.

calling it money is no insult.

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

#85

Post by rldjbpin »

> And for those opposed to generative AI on principled or functional grounds, putting similar energy into millions of Nvidia AI servers probably seems like just as big of an energy waste.

while there is value and money-grifting involved in both crypto and genAI, there is a major differentiating factor between the wastage argument - artificially-adjusted proof of work, which is/was used for major cryptocurrencies.

people spend time and energy (figuratively and literally) on the internet on many ways one could define as wastefully (take scrolling down the "for you" feed for example). but for majority of cases, the "efficiencies" or their lack of are not done intentionally and are often improved on (e.g. new codecs like AV1 needing less bandwidth).

but to make crypto tokens work, the original decision of using PoW has led to a massive surge of energy consumption to achieve the same results. while there might be some work on countering its negatives (e.g. with eth network), it is still a major driving force, despite an arms race to make more efficient hardware.

while a lot of current AI has major inefficiencies (will be too long to list down here!), the root cause is often the fast-moving innovations and everyone building on someone's imperfect work.

coming back to the original argument, you should expect more dedicated hardware to do the underlying matrix multiplications to make AI work. for most people who would only care about inference, it is already becoming a reality at consumer level. but expect people to push the new stuff to its limit to stay competitive, whether you find all of this ridiculous or not.

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

#86

Post by amarant »

lwranx wrote: post #61
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…

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

I've personally verified and approved a actual bugfix made by a LLM. Wasn't the trickiest nor most severe bug I've ever seen, but it had slipped through the cracks in our testing and review process, and the LLM caught it.

Nothing snake oily here.

Also: What compiler are you using that's giving you false positive warnings?

I have never heard of a false positive warning nor error from a compiler, but perhaps you're using some weird tooling I'm not familiar with?

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

#87

Post by drusepth »

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 $…

> Literally every AI thing I've seen people use has got an interest taper off way before the free trial even ends.

Midjourney, Suno, Copilot, ChatGPT, Jasper, Luma, etc would all like a word with you.

I think the real problem here is that the barrier of entry to start a new "AI thing" is so low, you're often flooded with subpar services that give more recency bias toward "every AI thing I've seen people use has got an interest taper off way before the free trial even ends".

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

#88

Post by Litost »

api wrote: post #18
crowcroft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are environmental externalities accounted for? How do we accurately measure the 'benefit' of something when it's still largely speculative (ie. AI is not providing as much value RIGHT NOW, but we think it will in the future). Economic problems are rarely just economic problems, and saying that it will resolve itself in the long term is dismissive and offers no value to the discussion.

That's why high-carbon sources like coal and oil should be subject to carbon taxes: to price in externalities.

Not a carbon tax as such, but the supreme court in the UK recently ruled in favour of an activist lead challenge to stop Surrey County Council from ignoring the environmental cost, when granting permission to dig four new oil wells, in what is seen as a landmark case.

Emissions from burning the fuel had been ignored but will now need to be taken into account.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/2...

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

#89

Post by simonw »

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.

I'm still here. GPT-4 (and now Claude 3.5 Sonnet) are still tools I use every day to help me write better code more productively.

https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/

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

#90

Post by fulafel »

api wrote: post #18
crowcroft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are environmental externalities accounted for? How do we accurately measure the 'benefit' of something when it's still largely speculative (ie. AI is not providing as much value RIGHT NOW, but we think it will in the future). Economic problems are rarely just economic problems, and saying that it will resolve itself in the long term is dismissive and offers no value to the discussion.

That's why high-carbon sources like coal and oil should be subject to carbon taxes: to price in externalities.

We're too late for this to be the main model, we need to ramp down fossils usage way faster than can have carbon taxes happen in most of the world. (Eg when would USA realistically stop/decimate oil and gas production?)
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