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Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

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Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#111

Post by elbasti »

ec109685 wrote: post #49
elbasti wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reminder to everyone that global CO2 emissions are higher than they have ever been [0]. Again: 2024 was the mos polluting year in history. A lot of feel-good articles and tweets will often talk about the plummeting costs of solar, or how the share of renewables is higher than ever, or stuff like that, which is, from a global warming point of view, absolutely irrelevant . The only thing that matters as far as w…

The slope of new clean energy coming online is also important. A company may be losing money today, but if they are growing revenue on a path to profitability, that is what ultimately matters.

No. You're right about the company case: when you look at a company, you only care about its profit today (and in the future). You don't really care about how much money it spent to get here.

But for purposes of global warming, you care about the total amount of carbon in the air. The cumulative sum. The integral.

If a company becomes profitable today, it survives.

If emissions were to magically stop today...warming continues!

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#112

Post by kolinko »

delish wrote: post #22

It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase. I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralizat…

Microsoft is quite awesome in general when it comes to carbon neutrality.

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#113

Post by kolinko »

nozzlegear wrote: post #26
bastard_op wrote: post #11

They'll just buy some more fake carbon credits, tell everyone it'll be alright and the planet won't overheat now. Nothing to see here, move along.

Does Microsoft have a history of buying fake carbon credits? And by that I mean, do they buy carbon credits from disreputable sources more often than reputable ones on average in recent years? Or do you simply believe that all carbon credit systems are fake?

Microsoft has a whole dedicated fund for not credits but carbon capture projects - it’s quite detailed and I couldn’t spot any bs in it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sus...

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#114

Post by kolinko »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #25
listless wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting if one of the major benefits of AI is it pushing us to clean energy

Amazon already have a datacenter with an attached nuclear power plant, and Microsoft have contracted with Helion for future delivery of a fusion power plant (assuming it materializes). https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow... Zuckerberg says part of the problem is not just the amount of power needed for a SOTA AI-training datacenter (~1GW), but the fact that you need the power at that particula…

58MW would be ~0.5 km^2. One hectare is one MW (in Poland, in US it’s better because more sunlight, if I’m not mistaken)

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#115

Post by Taurenking »

bongodongobob wrote: post #108
smrq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, because given said understanding, surely it's impossible to hold a different opinion than yours.

It's not an opinion. Plagiarism has a meaning and LLMs are not doing that.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#116

Post by kolinko »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #64
Syonyk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting your information? There are many solar plants in US well in excess of 58MW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Mountain_Solar_Facility is one, at 800MW. It was at 58MW in 2010... which might confuse a LLM, though.

Thank god for comments like this. I find it truly disturbing how much people are treating LLMs like fact-machines. They are pattern matching machines that match using whatever information they have that matches best. It's closer to improv jazz than to factual authority; still super wonderful, and worthwhile listening to, but not really for the purpose of learning how the original sounded when it was first recorded. S…

I think the 58MW claim is so blatantly wrong that it’s not LLM that produced that „fact”.

I discussed various climate related things with chatgpt and it doesn’t make such crazy mistakes.

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#117

Post by tibbar »

caseyy wrote: post #90
tibbar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people frame generative AI this way a lot, as if they're strictly worse than alternatives in all dimensions ( in accurate, low quality). But I think there's several important dimension where they're strictly better, including flexibility, interactivity, and accessibility. I can ask an LLM a very specific question about my specific development environment, codebase, and tools and get a specific answer back that…

I think a lot of people drastically underestimate how much the LLMs mislead the user with plausible-sounding answers. I would say that whatever % of queries you found them not to give you correct answers, the actual percentage is materially higher. In my work niche, which at least 10,000 other software engineers do each day, ChatGPT 4 and 4o almost never give correct answers. Usually, they are misleading. I do find m…

It feels like you mostly view generative AI as a system that produces finished products, which you don’t like. And for some reason that is how they are marketed, but it’s a terrible use for them. To me the point of generative AI is as a tool for an expert user to use en route to achieving some larger goal. I can personally attest that it works really well for me in this regard, as can many others. I think if I tried to use LLMs as surrogate experts I would be very frustrated, since they are totally unready for that purpose.

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#118

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

delish wrote: post #22

It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase. I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralizat…

"Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclsoure of the increase."

Alternatively, one could argue the increase shows their commitment to profit at the expense of the environment and the voluntary disclosure shows a commitment to greenwashing.

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#119

Post by karma_pharmer »

Nition wrote: post #40
delish wrote: post #22

It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase. I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralizat…

It's funny how that happens sometimes. Reminds me of the United Nations' "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples". The only four countries that didn't sign it initially were the ones that actually looked at it and thought about whether they could really achieve it.

the ones that actually looked at it and

... noticed that it doesn't even define "indigenous"

Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

#120

Post by tim333 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #25
listless wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting if one of the major benefits of AI is it pushing us to clean energy

Amazon already have a datacenter with an attached nuclear power plant, and Microsoft have contracted with Helion for future delivery of a fusion power plant (assuming it materializes). https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow... Zuckerberg says part of the problem is not just the amount of power needed for a SOTA AI-training datacenter (~1GW), but the fact that you need the power at that particula…

I was curious how Helion were coming along and found quite a good youtube "Will the Helion Fusion Reactor ACTUALLY work? - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Real Engineering." The answer seems to be maybe eventually but not for quite a while. (vid https://youtu.be/lb7GXi0ZvYw)

I fear their breakeven in 2024 will go the same way as the one back in 2018. (HN on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676263)

That said they are building away on their latest Polaris machine. It'll be interesting to see how it works.

>Helion sets an ambitious goal to begin producing electricity by mid-2024, utilizing its innovative Polaris reactor. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/helion-aims-fusion-energy-bre...

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