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The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air . This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cen…
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”
The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air . This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN…
Who pays for their research?
The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air . This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN…
Who pays for their research?
https://ourworldindata.org/funding
[1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cen…
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