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Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

cnbc.com

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Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#61

Post by qeternity »

WheatMillington wrote: post #59
kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often within that document. It's directly from Google, and is significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's…

It doesn’t say “versus last year”, but it does say: “Google’s emissions also increased 13% year over year in 2023, per the report.”

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#62

Post by [deleted] »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #13
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#63

Post by darig »

Frieren wrote: post #27

I 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 pres…

[dead]

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#64

Post by sva_ »

peppertree wrote: post #16
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

Pretty sure people said the same about fiber internet in the 2000's.

> A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

- https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

asdff wrote: post #60
kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

48% increase since 2019 still sounds pretty bad to me. Not like any of their products improved in that time.

Let's not forget what happened in 2020: the world went into lockdown over COVID-19. Everyone was trying to do emergency gear-shift into remote work, and the demand for online collaboration services - and supporting infrastructure - exploded.

That IMO can easily account for majority of the increase since 2019, and it seems that this is another example of why you have to be suspicious of any average that includes pandemic years in its range. 2020-2022 was a unique period in all kinds of ways.

EDIT: Google's document even acknowledges that, in footnote 103 linked to from page 32. Quoting:

Although 2020 was the most recent emissions inventory available at the time the target was set, 2020 was deemed to not be representative of a typical year, because operations were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The next most recent year with representative data, 2019, was selected as the base year.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#66

Post by thethirdone »

qeternity wrote: post #61
WheatMillington wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often within that document. It's directly from Google, and is significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's…

It doesn’t say “versus last year”, but it does say: “Google’s emissions also increased 13% year over year in 2023, per the report.”

What is the surrounding text for "versus last year"? I cannot find "versus" or "year" in the article.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#67

Post by [deleted] »

Frieren wrote: post #27

I 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 pres…

[deleted]

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

> The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to 2019*

That's a smoking gun, alright. If you compare today to just before the pandemic, you're going to get all kinds of weird results that can mostly be attributed to the world working in emergency mode for 2020-2022.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#70

Post by [deleted] »

kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

[deleted]
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