As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires | Hacker News Reader

As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires

e360.yale.edu

26 points1vuio0pswjnm714 comments

Virtue signaling clickbait doesn’t give any real estimates of the impact, only that all data center usage is projected to be 1,000 terawatts, meanwhile Bitcoin alone already uses over 100 terawatts today. But if you already hate AI clicking on an article that itself almost feels AI generated with fluff sounds about right

How does it compare to the energy/water use of a human doing the same work?

This would be similar to how airlines report their carbon emissions for each flight they post. I don't believe that it is currently a law and that they are required to do so, but I can support legislative effort to regulate posting that information for AI companies. Honestly, I don’t know how it would be done in practicality, considering that there could be many different computational sources used to generate the output that a user sees.

The angle here is a bit of a baffler - people spend money on to use an AI product, then companies spend that money on the resources they need to provide the product. The only thing that would get an angrier article was if they don't spend the money on resources, then people arc up and whine that profit margins are too high.

There is a problem with data centres using energy in the EU and US. Both those polities have been squeezing the energy market for decades and are in long energy-per-capita downtrends. If people had behaved rationally and let the nuclear industry flourish in the 80s instead of going all-in on fossil fuels, we'd have had a shot at avoiding this. Scapegoating AI and other new uses for energy will not help undo decades of poor economic management. If the communists in China managed to figure this out then the western powers have no excuses.

AI use is soaring? Where is it soaring? I've found going back to StackOverflow, Google and my brain works best.

In some cases I've found that that's true. In the time it takes for Bing or Gemini to generate an answer, I could already get a faster and more accurate answer via Google search.

I use perplexity over google now. I thought I would never get my muscle memory for google changed but here we are.

Before you freak out about "millions of gallons" of water globally, you might want to consider that oil and gas in Texas alone uses about 2 trillion gallons of water per year. Environmental writers unfortunately have this huge hate boner for the information industry and a corresponding blind spot towards the oil business.

Some think AI will save us from the negative effects of climate change.

I wonder if "reverse anthropogenic global warming" could be a Skynet inducing prompt

ChatGPT, how can entropy be reversed?

Funny you should ask...

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1448:_Question

Yet another way to avoid thinking about the problem and hoping someone or something else takes care of it.

Why can't it?

The pandemic made a significant positive impact on the environment.

If LLMs can replace certain lines of work (eliminating commutes!), reduce demand for certain consumer goods, and spread the demand for power throughout the day, they could have a huge impact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com