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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)

#61

Post by j45 »

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…

They might not be buying them outright but that doesn’t sound like a realistic first or initial set of steps.

There are new commitments.

Microsoft: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-goes-nuclear-bigges...

Google: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/google-gen4-nuclea...

Amazon: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/amazon-jumps-on-nuclear-po...

OpenAI/Sam Altman: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/oklo-to-generate-1...

More: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116339/ai-nucle...

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

#62

Post by timschmidt »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #37
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…

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

According to the following references, most residential energy is used for heating and cooling. Most commercial energy is used for lighting, heating, and cooling. And most industrial energy is used in chemical production, petroleum and coal products, and paper production.

1: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/publications/pdfs/cor...

2: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/industry.p...

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

#63

Post by Arnt »

everdrive wrote: post #54
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…

>Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate. Human nature does. We're like a gas, and we fill to expand the space we're in. If technology uses less power, in general, we'll just use more of it until we hit whatever natural limits are present. (usually cost, or availability) I'm not sure I'm a proponent of usage taxes, but they definitely have the right idea; people will just keep doing more things until it becomes…

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?

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

#64

Post by timschmidt »

Mistletoe wrote: post #10
dsr_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only useful point that they make is that predictions about unending growth are always wrong in detail. Every actual hockey stick turns into a sigmoid, then falls. Meanwhile, a new hockey stick comes along.

But AI training has been behaving like Bitcoin mining, which constantly increases the difficulty. AI companies so far have been having to release costlier and costlier models to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t want the final iteration to be a Dyson sphere around the sun or the black hole at the center of our galaxy so Gemini 10,000 Pro can tell us “Let there be light.” Or maybe we do, I don’t know.

DeepSeek has shown that significantly less costly training is possible when incentivized. Even for SOTA models.

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

#66

Post by rtuulik »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #37
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…

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.

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

#68

Post by newscombinatorY »

Similar concerns were raised regarding the energy used to mine cryptocurrencies. It's basically wasted energy - no doubt about that. But this is different. Crypto's potential has been very limited all along, whereas generative AI has numerous potential uses, and we are seeing more and more companies, as well as ordinary people, utilising it.

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

#69

Post by everdrive »

Arnt wrote: post #63
everdrive wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate. Human nature does. We're like a gas, and we fill to expand the space we're in. If technology uses less power, in general, we'll just use more of it until we hit whatever natural limits are present. (usually cost, or availability) I'm not sure I'm a proponent of usage taxes, but they definitely have the right idea; people will just keep doing more things until it becomes…

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 we'll just take it up with crap. The chips will be faster next year so why bother making things more efficient? Repeat this process forever, and we eat up all of our efficiency gains.

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

#70

Post by JimDabell »

Tycho wrote: post #47

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…

A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009.

AI energy use is negligible compared with other everyday activities. This is a great article on the subject:

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

The same author has published a series of articles that go into a lot of depth when it comes to AI energy and water use:

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment

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