meaningless stat in the grand scheme of things. eventually, it will all transition to nuclear/solar. the question is does it move the needle in a meaningful way right now. so much hand wringing about carbon emissions only for germany to end up burning coal again.
Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
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Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#22So this is why people eventual become batteries for the matrix.
Apparently, instead of batteries the original idea was to have them be part of a brain based neural net which makes a lot more sense than batteries. But this was felt to be too complicated.
Wow, it would make so much more sense. Humans could be doing processing for AI when they are asleep in virtual world and what they consider their waking hours with free will would be actually a dream so they can regenerate. AI would be syncing their dreams and providing structure to maintain illusion that it's a real world.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#23I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)
I don't think it's right to characterize this as a hit piece. They're reporting on a document Google published, using Google's numbers and framing. If Google didn't want people to talk about their carbon consumption they would presumably not have published this report.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#24I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)
It was talked about a lot when it was first opened, news massively biases towards new topics.
Bias toward new topics is why it's called news. Otherwise, we'd have to call it olds.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#25The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.
Businesses and wealthy people want AI so they can lay people off and hold onto their money, and build stuff faster to capture more marketshare / power. There wasn't demand for computers either. Or, the industrial revolution. AI is a competitive advantage for those that can leverage it.
Consumers ask for AI all the time. Their requests sound like this:
- "Google search is drowned by SEO, I can't find anything anymore"
- "Wow all these ads suck"
- "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots"
- "My job applications all go into a black hole"
- "LoL gmail can't even find emails I know are there"
- "Ffs stop autocorrecting to duck"
- "Oh wow we can't even say 'vagina' anymore because The Algorithm"
- "Support doesn't even read my message, why do I bother"
- "I can't keep up with all my inboxes"
- "This meeting should've been an email"
- "The press release makes no sense, can someone translate corporatespeak?"
- "Ecomm sites are awful why can't I just find what I'm looking for?"
We already use AI for all sorts of things. This will only accelerate. Half the things that used to be AI aren't even called AI anymore. That's because "AI" is a marketing label. When a technology becomes mundane, it ceases to be called AI and we find something new.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#26And once again a big tech company proves that as soon as their "principes" are put to the test they will abandon them almost instantly. When buying some wind energy was easy and wasn't really a trade-off they were quick to use big phrases like being "committed to the planet" and such. Commitments seem to be rather "flexible" with these companies.
They said they were an "AI-first company" :)
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#27I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business.
The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity.
There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and present) is on analyzing big chunks of data about chemical bounds, traffic-flow, astronomical observations, etc.
But all that really useful AI is not attracting the kind of investment that flashy consumer-oriented chat-bots are getting.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you describe the behavior of Character.AI's millions of users if not demand? Who's paying OpenAI their billions of revenue? You can argue about how durable the demand for AI is, but I don't see how it's tenable anymore to claim it doesn't exist.
> How would you describe the behavior of Character.AI's millions of users if not demand? "Disturbing"?
It seems to me that "I'm disturbed by consumer demand for AI" is different than and contradictory to "consumers are not demanding AI".
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#29It turns out AI will kill us, but not in the way that the billionaires were paranoid about. Who needs guns when a planet-sized gas chamber will do?
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#30I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)
What's new to me?
A couple year ramp in phrasing like "hit piece" used to describe mundane news.
Put another way: I see a ramp in use of hit piece for writing, where not writing, given you have the info, would be described as a cover up.