Google's latest environmental report posted today: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024...
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
#92The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.
ChatGPT is the fastest product in history to reach 100M MAUs. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-on-track-to-surpass-1... Consumers are definitely demanding something like ChatGPT. Other companies are trying to ride the wave, and their attempts often feel forced as they’re trying to inject LLMs where they don’t really belong.
It was/is free. All that proves is people have faster access to news.
Lets see what it's DAUs are on a long term basis.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful. I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool. Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my time and I wouldn't have done much else.
Parent did not claim that LLMs are not useful. Parent also acknowledges that AI is not a temporary phenomenon.
OP does downplay them (“more dystopian and problematic than useful”). For one, it’s a nonsensical statement because dystopia and problems are not comparable to utility. A generous read of what they meant might be: LLMs are not very useful, and are dystopian and problematic in some vague way.
Do you believe parent thinks LLMs are very useful? They clearly think the real value of AI comes from limited applications of ML to science, simulations, optimizations, etc instead of general-purpose automation and capabilities that LLMs provide.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful. I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool. Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my time and I wouldn't have done much else.
So three years ago you'd spend less time with your kids in order to write a 2,000-line FOSS app for understanding Bash scripts? I'm not sure that's a good thing.
Exactly, you agree: the lack of LLMs is not good. LLMs turned a bad outcome into a good one.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#95The 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.
You ask a good question. Who is paying for AI, and is OpenAI profitable. A lot of the demand is there when cost is subsidized by investors -- will it continue when price actually must bare costs and profits?
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#96The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.
I'm demanding more/better code-completion style AI for sure. It's an invaluable part of my workflow now and I'm happy paying a monthly fee for the service.
It's become a really indispensable productivity boosting tool. Code, translation, broad research, summarization, writing drafts, finding that word you know but just can't remember, making up terrible puns... the list goes on.
Hours of work compressed into a minute or two at most.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#97In my imagination, I picture a long-time Google employee who spent his/her entire career dutifully pouring over every minutia of their search infrastructure to squeeze the most performance out of every watt, in a quest to make Google a better, more environmentally friendly company. And then comes AI...
> And then comes AI...
And the optimization work they did is even more significant and useful?
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#98The 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…
https://web.archive.org/web/20240702163550if_/https://www.gs...
page 31:
"In 2023, our total GHG emissions were 14.3 million tCO2e [metric tons of carbon dioxide], representing a 13% year-over-year increase and a 48% increase compared to our 2019 target base year. This result was primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions. As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment."
"...reducing emissions may be challenging..."
The supposed justification for this level of pollution and water use [see page 42] is debatable. The expected profits are highly speculative.
What seems more clear is that unless things change it is going to to nigh impossible for young people to rise to challenges of climate change while simultaneously being addicted to mobile/Wifi internet access. Disconnecting a kid today from the internet is like separating a junkie from their drugs.
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pand…
Google's own numbers say 2020 the smallest YoY increase.
Difference between 2019 and 2020: +2.901 TWh
Difference between 2020 and 2021: +3.149 TWh
Difference between 2021 and 2022: +3.489 TWh
Difference between 2022 and 2023: +3.531 TWh
Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 eco…
I'm all for doing down Nobel prize winning Paul Nobel prize winning Krugman and his Nobel prize (did you know he got a Nobel prize?) but as hideously as most of that has aged the bit about most people having nothing to say to each other was spot on.
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