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Does that use a lot of energy?

hannahritchie.github.io

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Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#11

Post by mltvc »

quotemstr wrote: post #2

I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy. That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of…

How do you propose to convince people to get those externalities accounted without emotions? How do you convince people of the value of externalities that are far away in place or time (but not less real)?

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#12

Post by MerrimanInd »

bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

Hannah Ritchie is a quite well reputed writer and data scientist squarely in the climate field. She's written two books on climate and I found the one I read (Not The End of the World) was quite good and data-driven.

https://hannahritchie.com/

You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is biased towards LLM than that.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#13

Post by javascriptfan69 »

bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

Much like when people discuss whether these companies are profitable: training costs don't count.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#14

Post by jeffbee »

bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

You have set up a false conflict. The data centers are "huge" and they also consume about the same power as 1 airplane. These things are both true.

It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#15

Post by jeffbee »

spencerflem wrote: post #10
quotemstr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometime…

It’s new capacity! They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”

It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small, grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more efficient cloud services.

Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#16

Post by burkaman »

quotemstr wrote: post #2

I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy. That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of…

> As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else.

Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.

> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals

Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#18

Post by oulipo2 »

bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:

- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution

- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#19

Post by AgentME »

bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

LLMs don't use a lot of electricity per user. Why should the fact that the energy usage happens in data centers instead of each user's house be an important moral factor?

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#20

Post by alphazard »

spencerflem wrote: post #4
quotemstr wrote: post #2

I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy. That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of…

How am I as an individual supposed to get externalities priced in? And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?

Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?
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