Hacker News Reader

Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit worried about the resource consumption of all these AIs. Could it be that the mass of AIs that are now being created are driving climate change and in return we are mainly getting more text summaries and cat pictures?

View on HN

Data center infrastructure is a relatively small component of global emissions. I believe "compute" is something like <2% of global emissions, whereas construction is double digits, travel is double digits, etc. AI might increase this, maybe substantially, but it's unlikely to 10x it overall, as "traditional" compute is going to be dominant for a long time to come still.

Add to this the fact that companies in this space tend to be significantly better than average on carbon emissions commitments. I'm biased as a Googler, but the fact Google is entirely carbon neutral is one of the reasons I'm here. This is done mostly through buying green energy I believe, so our AI stuff is in a pretty good place in this respect, in my opinion.

I think it's reasonable to be a little concerned, but overall I don't think AI is going to be a significant contributor to the climate crisis, and actually has the potential to help in reducing carbon emissions or atmospheric warming in other ways.

If Google is largely buying carbon offset contracts, it's likely not carbon neutral. Most of them are junk and don't actually end up doing what they promise. Convince your employer to plant trees itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660256

Yeah I'm fully aware of carbon offset fraud. I believe much of the carbon neutrality comes from buying actual clean energy – something that is much clearer cut as a good thing. I believe there is a component of carbon offsetting, but the fraud risk and general quality of carbon offsets is something the company seems acutely aware of, and seems to put a lot of effort into not falling into the traps.

Google has been doing this since well before it was cool. It's not some attempt to green-wash an image, it's deeply ingrained in the company in my experience and there's a lot of effort to do it right.

„Carbon neutral“ is a meaningless propaganda term. We need to stop as much CO2 emissions as possible now. Buying things / papers and even planting trees does not undo your carbon emissions in a magical way.

Buying clean energy to run your datacenters does however have a huge impact on this, and as far as I understand it, that's where much of the current solution is.

It's a valid concern, and there is research into this. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/06/09/ais-growing-car... is one article, but lots more to be found via Google. Currently AI training is very small relative to agriculture and industry, but of course it's trending upwards.

It’s a relief that it’s small compared to what feeds us…

Instead of complaining to a void about resource consumption, you should be pushing for green power, then. Resource consumption isn't a thing that is going down, and it most certainly won't go down unless there's an economic incentive to do so.

Isn't a great part of even green power converted to heat while consumed? Isn't that also additional energy which heats the atmosphere or is the amount too low for any effects?

Global warming is more about the "greenhouse effect" (certain gases like CO2 helping to trap in infrared energy) than it is about individual sources of infrared energy.

But isn't the effect bigger when there is more infrared energy? The source of it shouldn't matter.

The reason why AGW is such a big threat is because it causes Sun's energy output to be trapped more effectively. Even if we collectively dumped every single joule of energy we generated into the environment, we'd still be miniscule compared to that.

Note however that it can have local effects - e.g. if you use water from natural sources to cool your datacenter and then dump it back into the environment, it can easily raise up the water temperature enough to affect the ecosystem around. This can also have far-reaching effects - e.g. say you do that in a river where salmon from far away comes to spawn...

You know that somebody can hold two thoughts in their head at once, yeah?

Green power is great! But there'll be limits to how much of that there is, too, and asking if pictures of hypothetical cats is a good use of that is also reasonable.

It's not. But I'm also making a judgment call and neither of us knows or can even evaluate what percent of these queries are "a waste."

I'm flying with my family from New York to Florida in a month to visit my sister's side of the family. How would I objectively evaluate whether that is "worth" the impact on my carbon footprint that that flight will have?

You could use a carbon calculator. https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx

One source recommends keeping it under 2T/yr. https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon...

>neither of us knows or can even evaluate what percent of these queries are waste.

Maybe we should find ways to evaluate to know if AI has a net benefit or not

How would we objectively measure whether humanity existing is a net benefit or not?

I'm worried about that too, but it does seem like one of the things that can be moved to clean energy the easiest. You can route requests to the datacenters where energy is cheap, i.e. where generation from renewables is currently high.

Climate change + a massive waste of resources in general if all this ends up being good for is text summaries and cat pictures. Even automated text summaries and cat movies doesn't cut it.

It is for sure a problem, even if some people say it’s 2-3% of the worlds emissions, it doesn’t matter , it’s a problem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com