• 5 Posts
  • 123 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Apologies, I didn’t post the link, it’s edited now.

    If you want to take issue with all energy usage that’s fine, its a position to take. But it’s quite a fringe one given that harnessing energy is what gives us the quality of life we have. Thankfully electricity is one of the easiest forms of energy to decarbonise and is already happening rapidly with solar and wind power, we need to transition more of our energy usage to it in order to reduce fossil fuel usage. My main point is that this railing against AI energy usage is akin to the whole plastic straw ban, mostly performative and distracting from the places where truely vast amounts of fossil fuels are burnt that need to be tackled urgently.

    You can say “people shouldn’t build data centres in those locations,” but they are. And the world doesn’t run on “shouldn’t.”

    I’m 100% behind forcing data centres to use sustainable water sources or other methods of cooling. But that is a far cry from AI energy consumption being a major threat, the vast majority of data centre usage isn’t AI anyway, it’s serving websites like the one we are talking on right now.


  • This New Yorker article estimates GPT usage at 0.5GWhr a day, which comes out to 0.0041% of the energy burnt just in vehicle gasoline per day in the USA (and this is for worldwide usage for chatGPT).

    I’m not asking you to trust me at all, I’ve listed my sources, if you disagree with any of them or multiplying three numbers together that’s fine.

    Cool, tell that to all the people who rely on glaciers for their fresh water. That only includes a huge percentage of people in India and China.

    Yes, if you read my last reply I answered that directly. Water usage can be a big issue, or it can be a non-issue, its locale dependent.


  • Forgive me for not trusting an ariticle that says that AI will use a petawatt within the next two years. Either the person who wrote it doesnt understand the difference between energy and power or they are very sloppy.

    Chat GPT took 50GWh to train source

    Americans burn 355 million gallons of gasoline a day source and at 33.5 Kwh/gal source that comes out to 12,000GWh per day burnt in gasoline.

    Water usage is more balanced, depending on where the data centres are it can either be a significant problem or not at all. The water doesnt vanish it just goes back into the air, but that can be problematic if it is a significant draw on local freshwater sources. e.g. using river water just before it flows into the sea, 0 issue, using a ground aquifer in a desert, big problem.









  • Local models WOULD form the basis of FOSS AI. Supposition on my part but entirely supportable given there is already a open source model movement focus on producing local models and open source software is generally privacy focused.

    Local models ARE inherently private due to the way that no information leaves the device it is processed on.

    I know you dont want to engage with arguments and instead just wail at the latest daemon for internet points, but you can have more than one statement in a sentence without being incoherent.