Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy. That would only mean that this renewable energy would no longer be available for other uses. Like, for instance, replacing or reducing the use of fossil fuels.
The sun has more energy than that, really. Which reinforces the commenter’s point: Congress should act on making it available, fast
Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#82Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon already have a datacenter with an attached nuclear power plant, and Microsoft have contracted with Helion for future delivery of a fusion power plant (assuming it materializes). https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow... Zuckerberg says part of the problem is not just the amount of power needed for a SOTA AI-training datacenter (~1GW), but the fact that you need the power at that particula…
The huge solar power plants in China are in western China, aka deserts and frozen desert mountains, aka you can't build data centers there either. And shipping that power across thousands of KMs is as hard for China as it is for the US. Hence China is still building coal plants, and won't really stop. Especially if it means the future of AI is being bottlenecked by it.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#84Microsoft has talked about being carbon negative by 2030, and removing all emissions they've done over the lifetime of the company by 2050. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b... Sounds good. Reciprocally though, my skepticism in various green credit programs has only grown over time. It seems unclear how many efforts out there are green washing credits, to not yet mine or make some display t…
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I know nothing about this topic, but it seems like maybe this comment and the parent don't disagree. If most power generation is blocked by a lack of connectivity to the grid then it would stand to reason that most projects are abandoned or fail as they've no path to entering service (unless I've misunderstood).
I read the first comment quite literally. That there is over 900 GW of power that currently exists but just needs to be “hooked up”. i.e. a solar farm that is built, but through some bureaucracy there’s no line running from it to the grid.
With the context of the reply, that is not the case. Most of the cited 900GW isn’t even built yet. This seems like an important distinction when considering the scope of work needing to be done.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#86The 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…
What went up 30% is what they call Scope 3 (indirect emissions from suppliers, transport, construction and customers):
"Indirect emissions from all other activities up and down the value chain such as upstream and downstream transportation, materials, and end-of- life impacts, as well as all suppliers’ direct Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
Scope 3 represents over 96% of Microsoft’s annual emissions in FY23. Our Scope 3 emissions result primarily from the operations of our tens of thousands of suppliers (upstream) and the use of our products across millions of our customers (downstream).
Tackling Scope 3 means decarbonizing industrial processes such as steel, concrete, and other building material production for use in our campus and datacenter construction, as well as jet fuel for business travel and logistics."
Full report PDF: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW...
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#87The 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…
Data centers can't run on intermittent sources.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#882012:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/25/micr...
2018:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-wants-t...
2020: I wonder if anyone will hold them to this in 2030...
https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/energy/article/11428860/m...
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Microsoft have a history of buying fake carbon credits? And by that I mean, do they buy carbon credits from disreputable sources more often than reputable ones on average in recent years? Or do you simply believe that all carbon credit systems are fake?
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.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI isn't the most efficient way to retrieve accurate information or to generate quality content, it's the most efficient way to retrieve plausible information and generate poor quality art and code. And that's really interesting. There is a group of people that trust LLMs for all searches but most tech-literate people know they hallucinate, and understand roughly how an LLM works and that hallucinations are indisting…
I see people frame generative AI this way a lot, as if they're strictly worse than alternatives in all dimensions ( in accurate, low quality). But I think there's several important dimension where they're strictly better, including flexibility, interactivity, and accessibility. I can ask an LLM a very specific question about my specific development environment, codebase, and tools and get a specific answer back that…
In my work niche, which at least 10,000 other software engineers do each day, ChatGPT 4 and 4o almost never give correct answers. Usually, they are misleading. I do find myself trying the LLMs when I'm faced with a challenging problem, but in that scenario they have not been helpful once.
Granted, there are areas of work that are much more popular and LLMs will be more helpful there. But these are individual scenarios, and we can find many where LLMs are fantastic and many where LLMs are awful if we wanted to cherry-pick.
Overall, the quality of the content is lower than what a human professional would do in their area of work, including flexibility, interactivity, and accessibility. This extends to books written by professionals and lectures given by them, as well as work carried out by them. It applies to home carpentry as much as it does to neurosurgery.
The more specific the knowledge has to be, the more this is true. The more generic, the less. But all-in-all, I think it's still very evident humans produce higher quality knowledge and content. And any quantized model of that content and knowledge will be unable to reproduce it at the same fidelity or quality.
With that said, I hope I expressed this enough — I do see your point in some circumstances. Just not overall.