Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.
Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.
Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.
This is the same excuse crypto bros make. Though that makes sense because the venn diagram between AI evangelists that blow up like the Hindenburg the moment you levy any critique against AI and its usage is basically a circle with crypto bros who assure us that any day now it will stop being treated like penny stocks and actually be useful because “they just like the tech.”
You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
I agree it does. But that has nothing to do with how energy intensive it currently is. You can see in my other comment that I am an advocate for it in my own work - it has great uses in some industries.
We have to be critical of the resources it takes and the ways it is deployed. It’s the only way to improve it. Yet AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.
I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people I see actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.
Most people just either find it useful for some specific use cases or just don’t care. And a large part actually hate on it.
You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.
It seems like you missed the memo on reading comprehension. I literally quoted the exact part I’m criticizing, which clearly isn’t what you claimed.
And being overly emotional and telling people to STFU online? That’s a masterclass in civility right there.
Ohmahgosh you’re so right, I see it now, you telling them they were wrong to criticize AI was in fact the correct take all along. You’ve shown me the way, All Hail AI. ALL HAIL AI.
What a fucking shill.
As far as I know there would be, it’s just that nobody is using them that way
Yeah! Accelerating societal collapse!
Such as?
As a professional editor (video/audio) AI has drastically altered my work in amazing, productive ways.
I’m still a critic of course. For some industries it’s clearly a solution in search of a problem so they can hype investment. A tool being useful doesn’t mean I’m unable to critique it!
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I’ve used it to improve selected paragraphs of my writing, provide code snippets and find an old comic based on a crude description of a friend.
I feel like these interactions were valuable to me and only one (code snippets) could have been easily replaced with existing tools.
What about this?
That’s wrong, I buy drugs online with cryptocurrencies all the time to this day and have done it long before the normies showed up and turned it into a mostly financial scam.
Evading the man and LEOs when the law ain’t right is my god-given right and I’m thankful to be born in the age of onions and crypto.
Crypto bros hate you lol I think you use it the only way it’s actually useful. Drugs and tax evasion/hiding money.
If you could hold your breath long enough to get out of your first world bubble, you would be able to see that bitcoin is massively popular amongst people who need ways to escape their collapsing fiat currencies. It is hilarious how spoiled people who happen to be born in countries where everything is taken care of them are too thick and compationless to even consider that other people have actual problems.
Is that why you use it? Because of your collapsing fiat currency?
I’m lucky enough to be from a country with a relatively stable fiat currency, although it is unclear how much longer that will be the case. In order to protect the value I’ve gained from my work, I do hold some of it in Bitcoin. I also use it to support charitable efforts in less fortunate countries. It is an excellent way to transfer value to exactly who I want to transfer it to without giving massive fees to banks and other companies that facilitate the transfer of funds.
A big thing to remember is that whenever you hold any countries currency, you are basically giving them a blank check to your energy. You are telling them that they can have as much of the value that you have saved that they want. When they print more money, they are taking that value directly from you. It is one thing to pay taxes on income, property, and goods purchased and sold, but on top of that, they have the ability to extract extra value from you just by running their printers. The more you believe that a government represents you and has your best wishes at heart, the more you should be holding their currency.
So you lecture me about a bubble I supposedly live in/a lack of perspective for other groups - you know nothing about me by the way - and then prop up someone else’s theoretical problem/solution to make your point even though as far as you know we are both probably pretty privileged?
I’m not saying you have to only pull from your own lived experience, but you have to understand why this makes me raise an eyebrow given the unwarranted finger pointing happening here. It’s not white knighting so much as using other people’s problems that you don’t experience as a cudgel to win an internet argument between two people who don’t have skin in the game. That doesn’t sit right with me and I don’t want to participate.
tbh if you’re worried about fiat currency, you shouldn’t be investing in crypto currency (which is even more volatile imo) but instead in real, physical assets (such as food and housing).
Then again, i believe that the big problems can only be solved by repairing the society as a whole. Investing in your own wealth, imo, isn’t worth it. But your choice is yours.
Oh my God that’s hilarious that you are just making up a strawman of it being helpful for reasons you don’t even use.
What a weird libertarian crypto shill perspective that is so absolutely unhelpful for anyone.
Good, I hate cryptobros and aibros and artbros and luddites and industrialists and environmentalists, but I love communal living, hate cities, love AI (and AI art), love art (and craft of said art), love nature & the environment and animals, hate vegans, and love science and industry etc.
At this point I have such an ultra-niche hyper-specific take on this (and almost everything) that I feel completely out of touch with most people which seem at first glance to navigate mostly by vibes and emotions of how they feel about a vague aesthetic sense of modernity that day.
Crypto is basically cash for online transactions. Pretty niche, but cool and definitely in demand for some situations.
Just how in the real world you’re shit outta luck if you lose your wallet. Or if you give someone money, but they laugh you in the face you can either cut your losses or try your luck in a fist fight. It’s the same with crypto.
With banks you have a separate authority that can handle all these cases, which is desirable in 99% of all transactions.
Unfortunately it’s volatile af, and the most popular crypto currency (Bitcoin)has untenable transaction costs and transaction limitations (10 transactions per second, globally - what a stupid design decision)
That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).
Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always
always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.
Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.
(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)
I know what a whataboutism is haha but yes it’s good to see someone else recognize it for what it is.
“aI AnD cRyPtO aRe ThE sAmE bRo”
You know that your take that they both must suck in the exact same ways just because tech bros get hyped about them, is literally just as shallow, surface level, and uninformed as most tech bros?
Like yeah man, tech hype cycles suck. But you know what else was once a tech hype cycle? Computers, the internet, smartphones. Sometimes they are legitimate, sometimes not.
AI is solving an entirely new class of problem that computers have been literally unable to solve for their entire existence. Crypto was solving the problem of making a database without a single admin. One of those is a lot more important and foundational than the other.
On top of that, crypto algorithms are fundamentally based on “proof of work”, i.e. literally wasting more energy than other miners in the network is a fundamental part of how their algorithm functions. Meaning that with crypto there is basically no value prop to society and it inherently tries to waste energy, neither is the case for AI.
Plus guess how much energy everyone streaming 4K video would take if we were all doing it on CPUs and unoptimized GPUs?
Orders of magnitude more power than every AI model put together.
But guess what? Instead we invented 4k decoding chips that are optimized to redner 4k signals at the hardware level so that they don’t use much power, and now every $30 fire stick can decode a 4k signal on a 5V usb power supply.
That’s also where we’re at with the first Neural Processing Units only just hitting the market now.
I did not say AI and crypto are the same. I said the loudest advocates sound the same.
I mined from 2012 to 2015. Then I wisened up. Currently I use AI almost every day in my work. I was using it in my production tools before anyone knew with an LLM was outside of academic circles. Hell i barely understood what I was using at first. I am squarely in favor of AI tools. The inability of tech bros to handle the slightest critique is incredibly familiar and frustrating. They spike the conversation at every turn and immediately attack people’s intelligence.
Sure, uninformed tech hypebois suck in the same way, but the arguments around crypto and AI, especially around energy usage, are fundamentally not the same.
You keep responding to a thing I didn’t say.
But I will say now that both are very energy intensive/resource draining and the refusal to have a serious conversation about it - as spearheaded by tech bros/AI evangelists like I’ve described - is incredibly frustrating and makes people like me look down on the entire endeavor as a result.
Intellectually I know there are “responsible” developers and tools being made. But the loudest and most funded are not those people. And we need to consider the impact they have. This includes resource usage.
Edit: this just appeared on my feed https://www.ft.com/content/ddaac44b-e245-4c8a-bf68-c773cc8f4e63
Someone posted a shitty article about AI and power usage, someone pointed out that literally every industry uses a ton of power but AI gets clicks, you said AI and Crypto bros are the same.
If you don’t mean to imply that the counter arguments around AI and Crypto in terms of energy use are the same then write better given the context of the conversation.
And posting another shitty article that just talks about power usage going up across literally all types of industry, including just normal data centers and manufacturing plants, and then vaguely talking about chatGPT’s power usage compared to Google search to try and make it sound like those things are connected, is not having a serious discussion about it.
It’s skimming a clickbait headline of a clickbait article and regurgitating the implication in it like it’s a fact.
👍
Go on benefiting from the people who actually do stuff while simultaneously whining about it. You’ve been using AI for 20 years, you’re just too thick to know about it. There are millions of people in 2nd and 3rd world countries who have had their lives massively improved thanks to bitcoin, you’re just too spoiled and naive and to give a shit about them. Climb down off your soap box and go read something beyond the headline.
I mined crypto for 4 years and have used AI professionally on a daily basis for years but you seem to have a knack for making a lot of assumptions about me so I don’t know why you would stop now.
I am allowed to critique things I use/participate in.
Cryptos have drastically reduced their energy consumption through technological improvements.
That’s why nobody complains about crypto energy consumption anymore. It’s just bitcoin.
But these LLMs just need more and more with no end in sight.
Yeah “just” Bitcoin which comprises ~50% of the market cap for all of crypto.
Funny how 99.99% of cryptos shrivel up and die while bitcoin continues to serve people all over the world and is constantly becoming more and more popular. Maybe if you lived with, or even gave a shit about, people in below average wealth countries you would understand why Bitcoin is so useful to them.
To be fair, crypto will never stand a chance against fiat as a means for payments because governments ensure that it’s complicated to tax. However, the underlying blockchain technology remains very interesting to me as a means of getting around middlemen companies.
Guys guys! There’s room for all of us to eat our fair share of natural resources and doom the planet together!
Difference is that AI is absolutely pointless lmao
But no, AI bad AI bad AI bad AI bad lalalaa I can’t hear you AI bad /s
Seems like you’re hearing it perfectly, but not listening.
“The world is complicated and scary! I don’t understand it so it must be bad! M-muh planet farting cows evil industry fuck the disabled/sick/queer!” - What luddites actually believe.
Anprims/eco-fashes begone. If the planet was destroyed for the betterment of conditions for the proletariat today and future alike there’d be literally no issue, it’s just some rock lol, AI is far more important. Also brutalism and soviet blocs are the best architectural styles, everything else is bourgeois cringe.
Dumb.