AI’s voracious need for computing power is threatening to overwhelm energy sources, requiring the industry to change its approach to the technology, according to Arm Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.
I wonder if they made an error as simple as this in their projections. There’s no guarantee that AI interest continues to grow.
Sounds like some sensationalized bullshit. They don’t give a single number or meaningful statement and they are paywalled.
I don’t disagree that they should back up their claim, but it does intuitively make sense. AI - GPT LLMs in particular - are typically designed to push the limits of what modern hardware can provide - essentially eating whatever power you can throw at it.
Pair this with a huge AI boom and corporate hype cycle, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was consuming an incredible amount of power. It’s reminiscent of Bitcoin, from a resource perspective.
No, it makes no sense. India has over a billion people. There’s no way that amount of computing power could just magically have poofed into existence over the past few years, nor the power plants necessary to run all of that.
This is a future prediction, not a current observation.
I’m not saying it’s correct as a prediction, but “where are the extra power plants” is not good counter-argument.
A couple of months ago the average temperature where I live was well below freezing. Now it’s around twenty degrees C.
By this time next year it’ll be thousands of degrees!
The current LLM’S kinda suck, but companies have fired huge swaths of their staff and plan in putting LLMs in their place. Either those companies hire back all those workers, or they get the programs to not suck. And making LLMs actually capable of working unsupervised will take more and more energy.
My take is that LLMs are absolutely incredible… for personal use and hobby projects. I can’t think of a single task I would trust an LLM to perform entirely unsupervised in a business context.
Of course, that’s just where LLMs are at today, though. They’ll improve.
Sure, but it’s simply not physically possible for AI to be consuming that much power. Not enough computers exist, and not enough ability to manufacture new ones fast enough. There hasn’t been a giant surge of new power plants built in just the past few years, so if something was suddenly drawing an India’s worth of power then somewhere an India’s worth of consumers just went dark.
This just isn’t plausible.
If only there had been another widespread, wasteful prior use of expensive and power hungry compute equipment that suddenly became less valuable/effective and could quickly be repurposed to run LLMs…
Pretty sure the big AI corps aren’t depending on obsolete second-hand half-burned-out Ethereum mining rigs for their AI training.
I can’t think of a single thing AI does that is worth the amount of energy consumption.
I can’t think of a single thing AI does
Come on that’s not fair, it’s very good* at drawing album covers and video game assets, which gives more time to artists to go work for Starbucks or Amazon instead of doing something they actually enjoy.
* passable actually, but much cheaper.
I’m not in the industry per se, but I wouldn’t hire an AI to do art for my games or album covers.
You and AI, both.
I’m glad to know AI can’t think of a single thing AI does, although if it thought otherwise I still wouldn’t care.
Correction, AI in the LLM/Diffusion sense is a decent tutor for cheap. Can cobble together rough temp art, and if used by an actually capable artist, make cool stuff.
Anything else and it’s a garbage firehose, it’s the undisputed king of mediocrity. Which, given the standards of SPAM and the modern web, is exactly what it’s being used for.
What a shame.
Anything you learn from AI has a margin of error that could ruin you.
And we’re rapidly liquidating the reserves of useful information in order to feed this beast.
Google results are declining as websites like Stack Exchange and Reddit crap out, Wikipedia pages are filling up with misinformation, news articles are increasingly full of nonsense and procedural generated fluff.
Its not just garbage on its face. Its a cancer that’s spreading through the rest of our internet archives, blotting out the good and bloating front pages with bad data.
It also gets worse every generation as it recursively feeds on the bad data.
I wonder why countries let them.
Using up more electric power than there’s available is NOT a simple matter of demand and supply.
If they actually pull too much from the grid, they are going to cause damage to others, and maybe even to the grid itself.
Weird metric, but ok.
They finally reached crypto miner level awareness.
Yeah, don’t AI everything, please.
Take that, India! 😎
