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AI Is Facing a Crisis

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Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#41

Post by imglorp »

istjohn wrote: post #12
voidUpdate wrote: post #6

I've wondered this for a while, why does AI use so much water? Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain? Most computers I've seen use a closed loop and consume no water past the original filling up

Perhaps they use evaporative cooling towers?

Yes - it's going into the air. The water isn't removed from the water cycle, but the problem is that fresh water was removed from the upstream part of the cycle before it could be used by the land. The term is water diversion, where downstream ecosystems, agriculture, and other users are deprived.

In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate it and condense it, producing fresh water and salts as output.

Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#42

Post by planb »

Retr0id wrote: post #8

> 140Wh are needed to write a 100-word email, equivalent to 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max. An iPhone can write a whole email in a few seconds using a local model.

Exactly what I thought when reading this. And that's the moment I stop taking the (probably somewhat valid) claims seriously. This reminds me of the arguments against streaming we had a few years ago, that confused compression/decompression, completely disregarded local caching and calculated as if all network infrastructure in the world was just being used for streaming.

Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#43

Post by amarcheschi »

palmotea wrote: post #38
amarcheschi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally just a few days ago there was the Ai 2027 posted here that was absurd. BTW, there's an actual researches that made a LinkedIn post about that Ai 2027 article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just...

> Literally just a few days ago there was the Ai 2027 posted here that was absurd. BTW, there's an actual researches that made a LinkedIn post about that Ai 2027 article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just... Is that the right link? It seems mainly randing about Scott Alexander being a eugenicist and Rationalists.

Scott Alexander is one of the writers of the article I was talking about https://ai-2027.com/

To me as well that article reads as fan fiction, but it's no good that when reads like this are taken as truth they become hyperstition (is that a word in English? At least in italian it is. It means self fulfilling prophecy).

I wasn't talking about the original post, sorry for derailing the conversation

Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#44

Post by arresin »

Retr0id wrote: post #8

> 140Wh are needed to write a 100-word email, equivalent to 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max. An iPhone can write a whole email in a few seconds using a local model.

It’s not going to be a good email.

Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#45

Post by bryanlarsen »

imglorp wrote: post #41
istjohn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they use evaporative cooling towers?

Yes - it's going into the air. The water isn't removed from the water cycle, but the problem is that fresh water was removed from the upstream part of the cycle before it could be used by the land. The term is water diversion, where downstream ecosystems, agriculture, and other users are deprived. In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate i…

There can be very little difference between taking fresh water from a major river that dumps into the ocean vs taking from the ocean. For example, if you took 0.001% of the flow of the St. Lawrence river and run it through an evaporative cooling tower you're doing very little harm and perhaps benefiting the local ecosystem through increased rainfall. If you took 50% of the flow it'd be a problem, but the St. Lawrence is massive.

People think water is scarce, but there are still parts of the world where water is abundant, where flooding is more of a concern than fresh water scarcity.

Combine with Quebec's cheap electricity, and it seems an ideal place to site data centers.

Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#48

Post by eesmith »

voidUpdate wrote: post #35
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are closed-loop datacenters, but the hyperscalers now use evaporation chimneys. Google used ~21bn litres of water in 2023-24.

Doesn't that fall back down again as fresh rainwater?

Sure. While lowering the recharge rate on the aquifer, the river flow, etc. Instead of being re-used downstream, it's re-used downwind. Snow melt original destined for the over-allocated Colorado might instead end up in the Mississippi.

All that irrigation water pumped out of the ground in the southwest falls back as rain too. While the land subsides, plants can no longer reach water, and towns have to build deeper wells.

Re: AI Is Facing a Crisis

#50

Post by quickslowdown »

aredox wrote: post #40

Some here seem to think this is satire. Well, Sam Altman want us all to funnel 7 trillions of $ for AI, so, we[0] will have to make some sacrifices to satisfy his grand vision. [0]common folks, because of course you don't want to tax or stop subsidizing the "job creators" (i.e. rich people).

The only reason I thought it was satire is that it literally says that it is on one of the pages.
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