https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-fir...
> "Apple defines high-quality credits as those from projects that are real, additional, measurable, and quantified, with systems in place to avoid double-counting, and that ensure permanence."
Apple then pledged to buy carbon credits from a company called Verra. In 2023, an investigation found that more than 90% of Verra's carbon credits are a sham. Notably, Apple made their pledge after the results of this investigation were known - so much for their greenwashing.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...
At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for budgeting purposes.
Apple doesn’t have to build the data centers. Apple doesn’t have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for Apple designed chips). Apple doesn’t have to have the personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They don’t have to pay for all the network bandwidth.
There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by the GP.
But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means it’s no longer their resources being used up above and beyond electricity.
I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits fall.
Apple doesn’t have to deal with any of that. They have underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a faster device).
I was trying to say that there was still a cost to using their own chips for server AI because they still had to pay to have them made so they weren’t “free” because they’re Apple products as opposed to buying nVidia parts.
You’re right, there is a cost to them to put the AI stuff on end user chips too since die space isn’t free and extra circuits mean fewer chips fit per wafer.
That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it in the cleanest way possible. What’s an alternative in your mind, just don’t do the processing? That sounds like making progress towards being green. If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
Sometimes, but parallelization has a cost. The power consumption from 400,000,000 iPhones downloading a 2gb LLM is not negligible, probably more than what you'd consume running it as a REST API on a remote server. Not to mention slower.
The random ads in most phone games are much worse on my battery life.
Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think Different or stay mad.
Not much of a gamer anyway, just an observation when I tried a couple apparently dodgy games.
Not sure why your reply wasn’t related to your original comment. Felt rather knee-jerk reactionary to me instead. Oh well.
This doesn't make any sense.
> If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake.
Though in this case using renewable energy can help.
Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be, is trite and borderline intellectually dishonest. They don’t want to have a conversation about how it could be improved, they just want to interject “haha that’s stupid, corporations are fooling all of you sheeple” from their place of moral superiority. This shit is so played out.
Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort.
Fake green should always be called greenwashing.
You don't need to suggest an improvement to call out something that is completely fake. The faker doesn't get to demand a "conversation".
You've seen a bunch of people be incorrectly dismissive and decided that dismissiveness is automatically wrong. It's not.
For an extreme example, imagine a company installs a "pollution-preventing boulder" at their HQ. It's very valid to call that greenwashing and walk away. Don't let them get PR for nothing. If they were actually trying, and made a mistake, suggest a fix. But you can't fix fake.
Yes, I consider it baseless for the following reasons:
- First, consider the hardware running in data centers, and the iDevices running at the edge – the iPhones, iPads and presumably Macs. There's a massive difference in power consumption between a data center full of GPUs, and whatever the equivalent might be in iDevices. Few chips come close to Apple's M-series in power usage.
- Second, Apple's commitment to making those devices carbon neutral by 2030; I'm unaware of any commitment to make cloud compute hardware carbon neutral, but I'll admit that I don't really keep up with that kind of hardware so I could be totally wrong there.
- Third, consider that an AI compute service (I'm not sure what you call it) like OpenAI is always running and crunching numbers in its data center, while the iDevices are each individually running only when needed by the user.
- Fourth, the people who own the iDevices may charge them using more sustainable methods than would power a data center. For example, Iowa – where I live – generates 62% of its energy from wind power and nearly two-thirds of its total energy from renewable resources [1], whereas California only gets 54% of its energy from renewable resources. Of course this cuts both ways, there are plenty of states or even countries that get most of their power from coal, like Ohio.
That said, neither of us have any real numbers on these things so the best either of us can do is be optimistic or pessimistic. But I'd rather do that and have a discussion about it, instead of dismiss it out of hand like everyone else does by saying "haha dumb, get greenwashed".
You're right that improvements don't need to be suggested to have a conversation about greening/greenwashing. My irritation lies more in the fact that it's almost a trope at this point that you can click into the comments on any HN story that mentions greening/sustainability, and there will be comments calling it fake greenwashing. I don't disagree that it's easy for a company to greenwash if they want to, but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking. Everyone wants to be so jaded about corporations that they'll never trust a word about it.
[1] Although this two-thirds total includes the bio-fuel ethanol, so I feel like it shouldn't be included.
2. That's an interesting angle.
3. It's the same total amount, and both will go idle when there's less demand.
4. I think the average data center gets cleaner energy than the average house but I can't find a proper comparison so maybe that's baseless.
Also as far as I'm aware, inference takes significantly fewer resources when you can batch it.
> but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking
That does sound tiring, but in this particular case I think there was sufficient critical thinking, and it was originally brought up as just a possibility.
If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.