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AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

johnquigginblog.substack.com

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Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#101

Post by vel0city »

everdrive wrote: post #69
Arnt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why "we're like a gas, and expand to fill the space we're in". What makes the simile apply to e.g. AI or 5G when it doesn't apply to others, e.g. computer prices?

I think the Apple ARM chips are a good example. They're fantastically more efficient and fantastically powerful. We _could_ take this incredible platform and say "we can probably do personal computing on 3-5 watts if we really focus on efficiency." But we don't do that. With more powerful chips, websites and apps and operating systems will get less efficient, bigger, more bloated. If there's any slack in the system w…

A lot of households did make the change from having a few hundred watt PC with a hundred watt monitor to a couple of phones and maybe a tablet that don't use anywhere near as much energy. They use those devices all day, but overall they use less power than a few hours a week of an older desktop.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#102

Post by palata »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #20
palata wrote: post #9

> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…

If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy. It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste. You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the…

You also seem to live in a different world. I urge you to start getting informed on what needs to be done in order to build hardware (hint: it does not grow on trees).

> then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.

Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy.

> but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.

Not sure if you really need the hint, but you shouldn't spend more time flying around the world.

> It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.

It is a fact that it isn't. Before Google, people were using less energy than we are now, period.

> Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.

The industry that gets you your memes on the hardware you call phone is anything but "close to nothing" when it comes to energy. I would say that you are in bad faith, but with all those examples you've giving, it seems like you are just uninformed.

So let me be blunt: your kids will most likely die because of how much energy we use (from one of the plethora of problems coming from that). At this point, we cannot do much about it, but the very least would be to be aware of it.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#103

Post by palata »

rtuulik wrote: post #66
wahnfrieden wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace

Its not. For the US, energy use per capita has been trending downwards since 1979. For the developing worlds, increase in energy usage is tied to increasing living standards.

> For the US, energy use per capita has been trending downwards since 1979

It would be relevant if the US was completely isolated from the rest of the world. But guess what? The hardware you used to write this comment does not come from the US.

Not taking into account the energy that went into building and transporting your hardware where you are currently using is... well wrong.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#104

Post by palata »

Arnt wrote: post #29
palata wrote: post #9

> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…

Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate. Computers grow cheaper, we rebound by buying ones with higher capacity, but the overall price still shrinks. I bet the computer you used to post today cost much less than Colossus. Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead. You can stream films via 5G that you might not have done via 4G, but you might've streamed via W…

> Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate.

Not sure what to say to that. Yeah, it would be great if we didn't put so much resources into destroying our own world. I agree.

The fact is that rebound effect very much dominates everything we do. I'm not saying it should, I'm saying it does. It's an observation.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#105

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

palata wrote: post #102
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy. It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste. You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the…

You also seem to live in a different world. I urge you to start getting informed on what needs to be done in order to build hardware (hint: it does not grow on trees). > then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy. Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy. > but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient. Not sure if you really need the h…

More energy because more people and more things are electrified & mechanical.

A massive portion of the world was basically living in the stone age and has been lifted into middle class lives over the last 60 years.

The population has also more than doubled.

This is like comparing apples to apes.

Sure, if you go back to when we were all monkeys, we are obviously using more energy per capita.

If you go back to WW2, The West is using far less energy per capita, even when you account for imports. And again, that's far less energy to produce far better lives. And both of those tr ends are continuing every year.

Sorry, you can't say, globally we use more energy, so every usage of energy is causing us to use more energy. It's not that simple.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#106

Post by palata »

Majestic121 wrote: post #22
palata wrote: post #9

> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…

This is countered in the article. "Yet throughout this period, the actual share of electricity use accounted for by the IT sector has hovered between 1 and 2 per cent, accounting for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions."

It's bad faith to talk about greenhouse gas emissions without taking into account the indirect contributions. When you use a computer, you cannot only account for the electricity that goes into the computer that is sitting on your desk.

You have to account for all the energy that went into extracting the materials from the ground, building the electronics, shipping it accross the world, and then the electricity to operate it.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#107

Post by palata »

taeric wrote: post #21
palata wrote: post #9

> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…

Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large. I can easily agree that phones that have internet capabilities use more, as a whole, than those that didn't. The infrastructure needs were very different. But, especially if you are comparing to 4G technology, much of that infrastructure already had to distribute content th…

> Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large.

If we did exactly the same with 5G than what we did with 4G, it would be more efficient.

But why do we develop 5G? Because we can do more. It is more efficient, but we do much more, so we increase our energy consumption. This is called the "rebound effect". It's observed for every. single. technology.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#108

Post by acaloiar »

jerf wrote: post #92
kyledrake wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. The same could be said of dark fiber laid during the dot com boom, or unused railroads, etc. Spending during a boom is not indicative of properly recognized future demand of resources.

It's not future demand, it's current demand. Microsoft has already said they're power blocked rather than chip blocked. Please note how I say current demand, and don't over project as to what my opinion about future demand is. I think there's a small, but reasonable chance that demand will sink for some reason or another in the next few years, and I think there's a pretty decent chance that in the next five years som…

> It's not future demand, it's current demand. Microsoft has already said they're power blocked rather than chip blocked.

This is not me doubting you, but your comment will carry considerably more weight if you provide a reference to Microsoft's statement.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#109

Post by datadrivenangel »

pixl97 wrote: post #84
bob1029 wrote: post #59

I'd be very interested in seeing some kind of aggregated daily demand curve for AI workloads. It seems like a lot of the hyperbolic angles are looking at this as a constant draw of power over time. There is no reason for a GPU inference farm to be ramped up to 100% clock speed when all of its users are in bed. The 5700XT in my computer is probably pulling a mere 8~12W right now since it is just sitting on an idle des…

With the current demand for GPU time it makes no sense to have your units idle. If you're not selling infrence to customers you'll batch out training to whoever will rent the excess time from you. Maybe in the future there will be idle time.

The point is that training activity has cost more than the marginal cost of running the hardware, if not, it's better to keep it idle.

Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)

#110

Post by danans »

JimDabell wrote: post #87
danans wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009. That's the number their CEO put out, but AFAIK it is completely unverified (they did not provide any background as to how it was calculated). To believe it is an article of faith at this point. What is concrete and verifiable are the large deals being struck between AI model providers and energy providers - often to b…

> That's the number their CEO put out, but AFAIK it is completely unverified (they did not provide any background as to how it was calculated). To believe it is an article of faith at this point. Google also puts the median Gemini prompt at 0.24 Wh. The information available from different sources point in the same direction; you don’t have to take Sam Altman’s word for it. 0.3 Wh was the figure that was already pret…

> Why are you demanding absolute, unimpeachable rigour when vendors give specific figures, but are comfortable with hand waving when it comes to complaining about energy use?

Because the evidence that AI data centers are using a lot of energy (generated by fossil fuels in particular) is observable in current concrete reality, like the xAI datacenters running gas turbines adjacent to a neighborhood in Memphis, TN:

https://gasoutlook.com/analysis/xai-data-centre-emits-plumes...

Companies like OpenAI, Google, and xAI have an incentive to downplay the energy usage of their facilities. If not, they should publish their methodology. The burden is on them to prove that they won't drive up energy prices and increase emissions.

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