51–60 of 69 posts
Water. Does. Not. Disappear. The water circulates through a cooling system. It soaks up heat from the servers and goes outside and cools down, then goes back again. You are not "using up" the water. This is article is nonsense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you can double your commute‘s environmental impact by using llama 1000x per day? That sounds pretty bad still, no?
A thousand times? I’d have a hard time typing out that many queries in 8 hours. Even 100 seems like a stretch for someone who uses it within something like cursor.
I wonder what the environmental costs of most American homes, stores and offices using A/C at full blast 24/7/365.
And whatabout all of the lights I can see being used in the average American house at night, shouldn’t we address the environmental costs of that first?
Modern bulbs are super energy efficient so that problem is kind of solved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I run some simple inference locally on a 4090 (450 TDW card) it takes order of seconds and that sucker's going full blast, you're looking at order of 1 kJ, which is significantly higher than what is quoted in the article. Article numbers line up better with CPU inference for ~1s.
1kj is nothing. That's 0.3wh, or 0.0003kwh.
What matters is strain on water infrastructure, but that is wildly variable and can't be compared apples to apples. Like a water cooled data center drawing from an aquifer is a massively different beast than one drawing from a river. Likewise a data center with a dedicated tap is much different than one drawing from the standard municipal system.
If datacenters are set up in places that can not support them, that's on the operators of the datacenters themselves, not the users of the compute power. And if datacenters are set up in locations where the resources they need are present but they create an excessive burden on the infrastructure upkeep, that's on the municipality for not appropriately charging them for their usage and/or approving plans without checking their capabilities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very high. But since they provide actual utility as opposed to the overwhelming majority of the current usecases for generative language models, it doesn’t seem relevant here.
I lived in the tropics where it was hotter than the USA and we survived just fine without A/C. A/C is luxury and your luxury is destroying the planet. I don’t want you to stop using A/C but I would like people to accept that it is a luxury that is not needed in most cases.
Water. Does. Not. Disappear. The water circulates through a cooling system. It soaks up heat from the servers and goes outside and cools down, then goes back again. You are not "using up" the water. This is article is nonsense.
Your comment is addressed in the introduction section of the paper being discussed. Do give it a read. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
The only datacenters that would actually consume water are the ones using open-loop evaporative cooling, which is not all of them. Over time, they'll get replaced with more efficient closed loop systems anyway.
Water costs money. Datacenters are highly incentivized to use it as efficiently as possible. If it’s becoming scarce, increase the price and they’ll find ways to be even more efficient.
If it takes 20 seconds for the model to compose the letter, that means: (3600/20)*140=25200W, a 25200W piece of hardware is used just to compose your email and no other request, this seems wrong by several orders of magnitude.
I think the comparison that should be made here is the actual alternative - what is the cost in kw/hr of me sitting in front of my powered-on and not-sleeping laptop while I spend the next 10 minutes penning an email? If the machine can make that happen in a second, and it takes me 600x longer to do that while consuming power that entire time, I suspect that the AI carries an overall advantage when you actually inclu…
That seems to get a bit philosophical. Are you not gonna use your laptop ~8 hours a day thanks to generative AI? If you still do, that part is constant. Are you gonna get less done in those 8 hours? Probably. Is it good for the environment to get more done in less time? Can't really answer that one generically. We humans do a lot of stuff simply because we can. If unemployment goes up 20% from generative AI (just a m…
>Of course another way to see all this is to argue that we need 20% less humans now, so we save any environmental costs those people induce. Seems a bit gruesome to me.
A third way (which differs only in timing) is thinking we can support 100% of the people who exist right now, but acknowledge that if you iteratively "add 20% more people" enough times eventually we will exceed the environment's capacity.
If you think any solution that might be proposed to that is "gruesome" (AKA the usual anti-population modulation trope) just look at the cruelties people inflict on each-other when humans blindly exceed the environment's capacity.
Though I suppose such "law of the jungle" ad hoc population control could be preferred by many, since it effects mostly the poor and powerless, whereas intentional population policy would effect all people equally.
I think the comparison that should be made here is the actual alternative - what is the cost in kw/hr of me sitting in front of my powered-on and not-sleeping laptop while I spend the next 10 minutes penning an email? If the machine can make that happen in a second, and it takes me 600x longer to do that while consuming power that entire time, I suspect that the AI carries an overall advantage when you actually inclu…
Of course, if it's streamlined to be 600x faster, it's just going to be done 600x more often.