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's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
121–130 of 136 posts
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#122It 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…
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Google search for "largest solar farms" or similar, but my bad - should have checked the date of the source.
The point I was trying to make, echoing Zuckerberg (who noted that power, not chips or data, is the constraining factor for further LLM scaling), is that power needs to be near to the data center, else the lead time and red tape will be even longer. If we're considering clean power then solar is an option, which limits datacenter location to where that is viable on this 1GW scale.
It's funny that you're the second person in this thread to assume that just because the data was wrong (out of date as it happens) it must have come from an LLM (which it didn't). I guess this is the world we are moving into, where all content is suspect of being AI generated and therefore suspect!
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#124Earlier 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…
Actually I got it from Google search, so you might have done a little fact checking yourself, before launching into your LLM speech.
This is the top Google search result for "largest solar farm".
"The 15 largest solar farms in the world 2024"
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/biggest-solar-f...
Another top result for Solar Star is this:
https://8billiontrees.com/solar-panels/largest-solar-farm/
Which indicates (correctly or not) a current capacity of 314MW for Solar Star 1 (still less than the 1GW needed for Zuckerberg's projected SOTA data center).
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Correct - it's from the "Top 5 Largest Solar Power Plants in the World (2024)" web site, which is Google's #1 search result for "biggest solar farm".
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/biggest-solar-f...
The WikiPedia page for Solar Star indicates a capacity of 579MW, which may have been mis-parsed by a human as 57.9MW?
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#126The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy . Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively. The US currently has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1160 GW of generation capa…
There is no renewable energy, only moved entropy
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data centers can't run on intermittent sources.
According to other comments, the data centers are less than 5% of the emissions in question. The data centers simply aren't relevant to this discussion.
The article suggests that data centers are the majority of energy consumption and more or less explicitly says they're not running on renewable sources.
> The vast majority comes from Scope 3 (96%), which includes the supply chain, data centers, and "the use of our products across millions of our customers."
> Yet the data centers remain an issue with no easy answer. The race to secure them is in full swing, and it would take years to switch them to renewable energy, experts tell PCMag.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#128The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy . Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively. The US currently has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1160 GW of generation capa…
> The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy. This is not the case. As long as electricity is fungible on the grid, and there's some fossil electricity production close enough for transmission, changes in renewable electricity use mean increases/decreases in fossil electricity use at the margin.
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Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that 14% different with solar? I’m just bringing this up, because solar is dead simple compared to engineering studies and infrastructure required to build something like a new nuclear plant. I wonder if the simplicity of solar and storage will start to change how power generation is approached.
There's been only 1 build in 2013 and last one before in 1978 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St... so nuclear wouldn't affect those 14%
It was just an example of complexity - I would imagine a new coal plant is still more complex than a solar farm.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#130I tried to find the source of the 29% figure, but it's defined as data center usage. I understand machine learning is resource intensive but how much is it really? Are the numbers for this available to the public?
It's matrix multiplication being done as fast as possible. On local machines the best proxy for useful gpu load for training is power draw.
Perhaps my question was worded poorly. I'm saying is: the premise of the article is wrong. It attributes the 29% figure to AI but the source attributes the 29% to new datacenters. It seems unlikely to me that 100% of new datacenter usage would go to AI.