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Estimating AI energy use
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Re: Estimating AI energy use
#72>We used the figure of 0.34 watt-hours that OpenAI’s Sam Altman stated in a blog post without supporting evidence. It’s worth noting that some researchers say the smartest models can consume over 20 Wh for a complex query. We derived the number of queries per day from OpenAI's usage statistics below.
I honestly have no clue how much trust to place in data from a blog post written by a guy trying to make people give him lots of money. My gut is to question every word that comes out of his mouth but I'm maybe pessimistic in that regard.
But besides that, the cost of this stuff isn't just the energy consumption of the computation itself; the equipment needs to be manufactured, raw materials need to be extracted and processed, supplies and manpower need to be shuffled around. Construction of associated infrastructure has it's own costs as well. what are we, as a society (as opposed to shareholders and executives) going to get in return and is it going to be enough to justify the costs, not just in terms of cash but also resources. To say nothing of the potential environmental impact of all this.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
These don't have to be dependent to be meaningful.
I think the point is that we all need to use less energy, we need to avoid flights from LA to Tokyo where possible, not using the energy use as an excuse to use even more energy.
> we all need to use less energy
We need cheaper and cleaner forms of energy. More efficient uses of energy.
I do not agree that we "all" need to use less energy overall. Energy use tracks wealth pretty closely, and manufacturing/creating things tends to be energy intensive.
The more cheap clean energy we make available, the more novel uses will be found for it.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#74One thing it's doing is jacking up electricity rates for US States that are part of the [PJM Interconnection grid]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJM_Interconnection ). It's a capacity auction price that is used to guarantee standby availability and it is [up significantly]( https://www.toledochamber.com/blog/watts-up-why-ohios-electr... ) at $270.43 per MW/day, which is far above prior years (~$29–58/MW/day) and thi…
The lack of investment in energy infrastructure - especially dispatchable power sources and grid transmission - is finally coming to bite us.
Datacenters are simply the final straw/tipping point, and make a convenient scapegoat.
At some point you run out of the prior generation's (no pun intended) energy investments. Efficiency gains only get you so far, eventually you need capital investment into actually building things.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
do you? maybe we just need more supply
The residential consumers also oppose that. Usually they try very hard to reduce it. E.g. Diablo Canyon NPP
Yeah. We have been turning off old plants and not bringing on-line new ones the entire time I've been alive now. At best we've perpetually been renewing licenses to grant operation of old plants well beyond their original design lifetimes. Anything new is fought tooth and nail by practically every local community. Even solar and wind brings out the NIMBYs in force.
Every recent "datacenters are evil" news segment/article these days has a section quoting a few local NIMBYs talking about how they are opposing more transmission lines in their area for various reasons. Then these same folks (usually literally the same person) is quoted as saying that they are "for" investing into the grid and understands America needs more capacity - just not here.
It's pretty frustrating to watch. There are actually large problems with the way many local communities are approving datacenter deals - but people cannot seem to put two and two together why we are where we are. If everyone vetos new electrical infrastructure in their community, it simply doesn't get built.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> consumers paying for electricity used by server farms wait what? consumers are literally paying for server farms? this isn't a supply-demand gap?
It's a supply-demand gap, but since the reasons for it are very apparent, it's completely reasonable to describe it as "consumers paying for [the existence of] datacenters".
I don't see how? It's much more reasonable to state "all electrical consumers are paying a proportionate amount to operate the grid based on their usage rates". This is typically spelled out by the rate commissions and designed to make sure one power consumer is not "subsidizing" the other.
In the case of your quoted article - taking it at face value - this means "everyone" is paying .02/khw more on their bill. A datacenter is going to be paying thousands of times more than your average household as they should.
I don't see a problem with this at all. Cheap electricity is required to have any sort of industrial base in any country. Paying a proportionate amount of what it costs the grid to serve you seems about as fair of a model as I can come up with.
If you need to subsidize some households, then having subsidized rates for usage under the average household consumption level for the area might make sense?
I don't really blame the last watt added to the grid for incremental uptick in costs. It was coming either way due to our severe lack of investment in dispatchable power generation and transmission capacity - datacenters simply brought the timeline forward a few years.
There are plenty of actual problematic things going into these datacenter deals. Them exposing how fragile our grid is due to severe lack of investment for 50 years is about the least interesting one to me. I'd start with local (and state) tax credits/abatements myself.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
These don't have to be dependent to be meaningful.
I think the point is that we all need to use less energy, we need to avoid flights from LA to Tokyo where possible, not using the energy use as an excuse to use even more energy.
If you want to meaningfully cut your energy usage, you need to identify its biggest sinks. 8 Wh per day is about as much as an idle charger you don't bother to remove from the outlet. I've yet to hear about anyone evaporating lakes with a charger, yet we almost all leave them plugged it.
It would be better to not use this energy, but it won't move the needle either way.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Serves of the big names in this space have green energy pledges and are actively building out nuclear power.
Nobody is actively building out nuclear power. Microsoft is turning on a recently decommissioned facility. New nuclear is too expensive to make sense. At most there are small investments in flash-in-the-pan startups that are failing to deliver plans for small modular reactors. The real build out that will happen is solar/wind with tons of batteries, which is so commonplace that it doesn't even make the news. Those ca…
Plenty of bets being placed on nuclear, but they are moonshot style bets.
From where I'm standing, the immediate capital seems to be being deployed at smaller-scale (2-5MW) natural gas turbines co-located on site with the load. I haven't heard a whole lot of battery deployments at the same scale.
Of course turbines are now out at 2029 or something for delivery.
Only marginally at the edge of this space these days though, so what I hear is through the grapevine and not direct any longer.
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#79MWh per day? TWh per year?
In what world are these sensible units of power? Why can't we just use Watts FFS?
Btw:
1 MWh per day ≈ 42 kW
1 TWh per year ≈ 114 MW
Or:
All Chat GPT users: 850 MWh / day = 310 GWh / year ≈ 35.4 MW
All AI users: 15 TWh / year ≈ 1.7 GW
Re: Estimating AI energy use
#80For reference, global energy consumption is about 180,000 TWh[1]. So while the numbers in this article are large, they're not a significant fraction of the total. Traveling and buying things are probably a much bigger part of your carbon footprint. For example: - 25 LLM queries: ~8.5 Wh - driving one mile: ~250-1000 Wh - one glass bottle: ~1000 Wh [2] - a new laptop: ~600,000 Wh [3] - round-trip flight from LA to Tok…
How did you get "one glass bottle: ~1000 Wh"?
[2] does not cite energy use, only CO2 emissions