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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

#71

Post by alpinisme »

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.

That’s a charitable description of the states that voted against and an uncharitable description of the ones that voted for. A less loaded description would just observe that the opposed countries were the ones where the indigenous peoples would have the greatest claims and the governments would have the greatest resources to claim.

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

#72

Post by Andrex »

Mawr wrote: post #60
ffhhj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean energy until waste is hidden under the carpet for thousands of years.

Sure, we may be heading right into a massive climate crisis in the next few decades, but what about the hypothetical post-humans who will dig up spent nuclear fuel 10_000 years from now?!

Transportation and storage are still issues we have to deal with today, though.

There was definitely a window, maybe fifty years ago, where widespread adoption of nuclear energy would have stopped and reversed climate change. We may have had an increase in Chernobyls with the proliferation of non-modern reactor designs, but in this hypothetical reality maybe people would have been OK with that.

The problem today is that renewables are getting too cheap and too good, and the storage problem shrinks every day. Meanwhile, it takes upwards of a decade to license and build a single reactor. France's fancy new reactors won't be online until 2040. Nuclear is just too slow.

I feel like 10 years from now it won't even be a debate or a contest, nuclear will just be the most expensive option by a country mile. Greenhouse gases will peak within the next 2 years[0]. The nuclear lobby missed their chance, which does mean we'll have to deal with some effects of climate change we could have avoided.

My feeling right now (and I kinda flip-flop every few years) is that nuclear lost and it's economically infeasible to try again. Change my mind?

0. https://climateanalytics.org/publications/when-will-global-g...

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

#73

Post by beeeeerp »

jonas21 wrote: post #47
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #28

The 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…

> 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 947 GW is the total proposed capacity for solar projects that are in various planning stages. They have not been built yet, and most of them will never be built -- historically only about 14% of proposed capacity ends up entering service [1]. This isn't…

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.

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

#74

Post by al_borland »

defrost wrote: post #51
loeg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers can't run on intermittent sources.

Why not? What stops training AI's during sunlight hours only and hibernating as power decreases?

Doesn’t the data center need to run for all the AI backed services to work?

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

#75

Post by bruce511 »

Syonyk wrote: post #24
ip26 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The positive side is supercomputers help us analyze the climate, the Atlantic current, and so forth. The negative side is they also help locate oil. Is it a win or loss on net? Hard to know. Thinking of entertainment, it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Supposedly a GPT-4 query costs 0.01kWh - m…

I would be very interested in the breakdown of how they conclude it's 0.01kWh (10Wh) per request, and what that does and doesn't include. I expect that if you were to calculate "incremental energy per request" - how much "extra CPU compute" each request adds, you could probably get to that sort of value. But odds are good that figure ignored all the training data collection, all the processing on that, storage of tha…

To put your follow upquestion differently,

'Is 10w/h per request the marginal cost of a request? Or does it factor in the fixed energy cost of the whole facility? Does it include training costs'

I'm inclined to lean towards it including at least some fixed costs. It seems rather high to be marginal cost. I have no gut feel for training costs though.

So, assuming it does include at least some fixed cost, using it more will reduce 'cost per use' while at the same time driving up actual consumption.

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

#76

Post by card_zero »

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…

Jazz facts

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

#77

Post by smrq »

bongodongobob wrote: post #31
neilv wrote: post #5

But it's for the noble cause of automated plagiarism of Web sites and open source code.

Just say you don't understand how LLMs work, you don't need to beat around the bush. Maybe someone will help you understand.

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

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

#78

Post by mmoskal »

One sentence from The Economist seems to explain more than TFA: "Microsoft reported a 31% increase in its indirect (Scope 3) emissions last year from building more data centres (including the carbon found in construction materials) as well as from semiconductors, servers and racks."

So no, it's not about lack of renewable electricity.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2024/05/16/bus...

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

#79

Post by asabjorn »

faeriechangling wrote: post #55
asabjorn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’a assume the hypothesis that they believe that to be true. Why would anyone that believe that shut off nuclear plants that emit zero CO2 in Germany and burn wood as well as gas instead?

I suppose that might be more related to left wing populism as embodied by the German Greens who worked for decades to get nuclear energy out of Germany. Also because the plants would have had to be decommissioned anyways and modern nuclear is not SO competitive for practical concerns to outweigh political expediency. I truly don't think it was a result of the actions of a centralised oligarch elite that drove this an…

They are also forbidding fossil fuel derived fertilizers and heavy machinery used to produce cheap food.

BRICS is allowed to build coal plants to replace the industry that dies in the west. This Marxist climate justice is like how DEI achieve equity, redistribution of outcomes, to favored activist groups or in this case the communist CCPs rule.

For communists like the greens it’s about destroying the west to put their oligarchic tyranny in place by destroying middle class economic independence, the issue never happened the revolution did.

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

#80

Post by al_borland »

kevindamm wrote: post #50
faeriechangling wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty firmly in the latter camp. Carbon credits essentially measure how much co2 emissions were prevented by the carbon credits existing. Not only is that pretty much impossible to measure, every company offering carbon credits at market rates is using a form of measurement which is BS. Carbon credit schemes may do SOMETHING to offset climate change but less than they advertise.

What about the carbon credits for building out renewable energy systems locally/domestically? Those exist.

Those systems should get built out because they make sense to build out. Having a company feeling justified in releasing tons of extra co2 in the process seems like it nullifies some of the good the plant would bring.
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