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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)

#41

Post by bilekas »

newsclues wrote: post #12

For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required.

> For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required

I'm not 100% sure that's strictly true.. We naturally assume for the moment that more energy = more quality.

It's like the Kardashev scale which basically says you can't advance without more and more energy consuptions to progress. Is this a proven thing ? Does the line need to always go up indefinitely ?

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

#43

Post by runako »

OpenAI yesterday announced[1] a partnership to deploy computer chips, but chose to denominate the size of the deal in gigawatts (instead of dollars, or some measure of computing capacity, or some measure of capability). They certainly seem to think about this in terms of electricity requirements, and seem to think they require a lot of it.

(I may have the units off a bit, but it looks like OpenAI's recent announcement would consume a bit more than the total residential electricity usage of Seattle.)

1 - https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by wahnfrieden »

pwarner wrote: post #11

Hopefully the panic continues and we get a lot of extra electricity, ideally via nuclear, wind, solar - and then if AI is a flop at least we get big progress on global warming.

How does an urgent need for more energy use lead to overall cleaner energy? Won’t it also accelerate unclean energy use to saturation, even if additional clean sources are needed for capacity?

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

#46

Post by Analemma_ »

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…

There is some limit to the rebound effect because people only have so many hours in the day, but we’re nowhere near the ceiling of how much AI compute people could use.

Note how many people pay for the $200/month plans from Anthropic, OAI etc. and still hit limits because they constantly spend $8000 worth of tokens letting the agents burn and churn. It’s pretty obvious that as compute gets cheaper via hardware improvements and power buildout, usage is going to climb exponentially as people go “eh, let the agent just run on autopilot, who cares if it takes 2MM tokens to do [simple task]”.

I think for the foreseeable future we should consider the rebound effect in this sector to be in full force and not expect any decreases in power usage for a long time.

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

#47

Post by Tycho »

What’s the energy profile of running inference in a typical ChatGPT prompt compared to:

  - doing a google search and loading a linked webpage
  - taking a photo with your smartphone and uploading it to social media for sharing
  - playing Fortnite for 20 minutes
  - hosting a Zoom conference with 15 people
  - sending an email to a hundred colleagues
I’d be curious. AI inference is massively centralised, so of course the data centres will be using a lot of energy, but less centralised use cases may be less power efficient from a wholistic perspective.

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

#48

Post by Arnt »

bilekas wrote: post #32
Arnt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead Am I missing something or has the need to vast GPU horsepower been solved ? Those requirements were not in DC's before and they're only going up. Whatever way you look at it, there's got to be an increase in power consumption somewhere no ?

Not necessarily, no.

You can pick and choose your comparisons, and make an incease appear or not.

Take weather forecasts as an example. Weather forecasting uses massively powerful computers today. If you compare that forecasting with the lack of forecasts two hundred years ago there obviously is an increase in power usage (no electricity was used then) or there obviously isn't (today's result is something we didn't have then, so it would be an apples-to-nothing comparison).

If you say "the GPUs are using power now that they weren't using before" you're implicitly doing the former kind of comparison. Which is obviously correct or obviously wrong ;)

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

#49

Post by kyledrake »

jerf wrote: post #28

It's been a while, but I don't recall any of the dotcom startups making deals with nuclear energy companies to buy out entire nuclear power stations: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla... And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude. The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told t…

> 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.

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

#50

Post by skybrian »

jerf wrote: post #28

It's been a while, but I don't recall any of the dotcom startups making deals with nuclear energy companies to buy out entire nuclear power stations: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla... And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude. The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told t…

Yes, big bets tell us something but they are not a crystal ball. Some of the same companies hired lots of people post-pandemic and then reversed. People who control enormous amounts of money can make risky bets that turn out to be wrong.
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