Does that use a lot of energy?
hannahritchie.github.io
Does that use a lot of energy?
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Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#2I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy.
That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.
If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.
As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken.
Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality.
That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#3My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"
And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.
Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.
You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#4I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy. That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of…
How am I as an individual supposed to get externalities priced in?
And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#5My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…
> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?
A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.
If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#6My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…
I'm not sure I understand where the issue is here - something can use a small amount of energy per use but a large amount in aggregate because of lots of use.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#7I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy. That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of…
Sure, by your own argument, you should somehow increase the price of people telling other people what to avoid spending money on
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#8My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…
War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery,
Facts are Whitewashing.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#9The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.
This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#10My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…
> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometime…
It’s new capacity!
They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”