AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024) • Hacker News Board

newscombinatorY wrote: post #68

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.

Great potential uses like the upheaval of the jobs market during a time of political crises lol. Great time to destroy the energy market for the common citizen as well

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

#73

Post by thatguy0900 » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

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.

Notably this comes during a US administration with open, unironic hatred of all forms of clean energy for ideological reasons

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

#74

Post by wrs » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

I skimmed down as far as the Y2K bug being “obviously false” and closed the tab.

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

#75

Post by Arnt » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #69

Arnt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

My Apple ARM laptop has 24+ hours battery lifetime in practice, three times as much as the best laptop I had in the 2000-2015 period, and it's lighter than most of those laptops too. (Can't remember the battery lifetime of my 2015-2019 laptop.) Clearly not all efficiency gains have been eaten up.

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

#76

Post by danans » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

> Looking the other side of the market, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is bringing in around $3 billion a year in sales revenue, and has spent around $7 billion developing its model. Even if every penny of that was spent on electricity, the effect would be little more than a blip.

The electricity spend on AI datacenters won't be uniformly distributed. It will probably concentrate in areas that currently have cheaper (and dirtier) electricity, like what xAI is doing in Tennessee.

That will likely drive up local energy prices in those places, which will be further exacerbated by the US's disinvestment in renewable energy and resulting increased reliance on high cost fossil fuels.

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

#77

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

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

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

That has nothing to do with how much energy is spent on Google and the Internet vs how many more people there are, and how much more stuff the average person in developing economies has.

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

#78

Post by everdrive » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

Arnt wrote: post #75

everdrive wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

My Apple ARM laptop has 24+ hours battery lifetime in practice, three times as much as the best laptop I had in the 2000-2015 period, and it's lighter than most of those laptops too. (Can't remember the battery lifetime of my 2015-2019 laptop.) Clearly not all efficiency gains have been eaten up.

Agreed, it's not a perfect linear line, but if we how 2000-2015 computing requirements _and_ the Apple ARM efficiency we could be somewhere very special.

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

#79

Post by philipwhiuk » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

timschmidt wrote: post #57

bilekas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

GPU compute in datacenters has been a thing for at least 20 years. Many of the top500 have included significant GPU clusters for that long. There's nothing computationally special about AI compared to other workloads, and in fact it seems to lend itself to multiplexing quite efficiently - it's possible to process thousands of prompts for a negligable memory bandwidth increase over a single prompt. AI is still very ne…

> Moore will continue to exponentially decrease costs over time as with all other workloads.

There's absolutely no guarantee of this. The continuation of Moore's law is far from certain (NVIDIA think it's dead already).

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

#80

Post by chakat » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

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