Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 134 posts

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#71

Post by williamcotton »

Frieren wrote: post #27

I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business. The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity. There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and pres…

I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful.

I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project:

https://github.com/williamcotton/guish

I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool. Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my time and I wouldn't have done much else.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#72

Post by ajross »

WheatMillington wrote: post #59
kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often within that document. It's directly from Google, and is significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's…

It's indeed pretty spun. Some quick googling shows that real GDP is up 11.5% from 2019-2024, which makes up a bunch of the "effect" right there (obviously datacenter power isn't directly tied to economic activity as a first principles thing, but like everything else at scale it's going to be pretty darn close).

Of the remainder, I get an average yearly increase of... 5.8% over the time period in question. I mean, that's an effect, but it's certainly not a big one.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

piva00 wrote: post #51
ETH_start wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is reason to be cautious about every kind of endeavor where the potential for enrichment can cloud judgment. However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat bots.

> However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat bots. The improvements it can be dreamed of to the bottom line of companies by replacing expensive labour are massive, that's why it got US$ 1tn Capex downed…

> AI can definitely turn out to be a panacea but more and more grifters are attaching themselves to it, and the companies churning out the most advances of it are not really invested in improving society as a whole

I came to see the "AI hype" not as reminiscent of crypto-hype, but of dot-com boom. Lots of grifters attached themselves to this new Internet thing. Lots of bullshit products was made. Lots of people lost their shirt through this. That had no bearing on how useful the Internet was, and turned out to be. And so today, we also have a lot of AI-grifters, and this also doesn't mean the underlying tech is bogus.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#74

Post by pkage »

WheatMillington wrote: post #59
kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often within that document. It's directly from Google, and is significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's…

Claiming that emissions surged 50% due exclusively to AI (as in the headline) is unsupported by the Google report, which is the article's singular source.

Again, looking at the graph of emissions at Google on pg 31, it's clear that the increase is linear after a dip 2019-2020 and the report identifies supply chain issues as a major source of emissions in addition to datacenter electricity costs—again, notably not specifically calling out their AI training/inference costs as a reason for their increase. The report does identify AI as a challenge going forwards, however that's not the same as saying it's exclusively responsible for the last 5 years of emissions.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#75

Post by JasonSage »

williamcotton wrote: post #71
Frieren wrote: post #27

I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business. The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity. There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and pres…

I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful. I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool. Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my time and I wouldn't have done much else.

Parent did not claim that LLMs are not useful. Parent also acknowledges that AI is not a temporary phenomenon.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#76

Post by jeffbee »

alecco wrote: post #8

I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)

It's because the NSA's "massive" datacenter is actually tiny, cannot contain the things that paranoid people think it contains, cannot do the things weirdos imagine it does.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#78

Post by lagrange77 »

sva_ wrote: post #53
Frieren wrote: post #27

I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business. The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity. There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and pres…

Not sure if energy use is a sufficient criteria to dismiss some technology. This universe progresses by turning low entropy energy into high entropy energy, which the use of energy is doing. So it seems to be closely tied. Making processes more energy-efficient is only really a good thing as long as it retains its effectiveness.

> Not sure if energy use is a sufficient criteria to dismiss some technology. This universe progresses by turning low entropy energy into high entropy energy, which the use of energy is doing.

What is the connection between those two sentences?

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#79

Post by muglug »

williamcotton wrote: post #71
Frieren wrote: post #27

I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business. The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity. There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and pres…

I'm getting very tired of the claim that LLMs are not useful. I hand-wrote perhaps 10 lines of code in this entire project: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish I spent most of the weekend playing with my kids in the pool. Three years ago this would have taken more than a week of my time and I wouldn't have done much else.

So three years ago you'd spend less time with your kids in order to write a 2,000-line FOSS app for understanding Bash scripts?

I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#80

Post by rqtwteye »

josefritzishere wrote: post #3

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

Consumers were not demanding the internet or computers either. But it turns out they were useful for consumers and especially for the profits of capitalists. People may not like it but AI will be an important part of our lives soon.
Post reply on HN