ChatGPT consumes 25 times more energy than Google
brusselstimes.com
brusselstimes.com
> ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy in the process, up to 25 times more than a Google search
>However, ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy in the process, up to 25 times more than a Google search.
per what metric?
>Per conversation of about 20 to 50 queries, half a litre of water evaporates – a small bottle, in other words.
closed circuit cooling systems don't evaporate any fucking water
>Consulting firm Gartner calculated that at this rate, AI will account for up to 3.5% of global electricity demand by 2030.
a number pulled out of someone's ass. trying to predict anything related to generative AI is pure hubris.
Nobody uses closed circuit cooling systems anymore. Pretty much every datacenter is cooled by evaporative (open loop) cooling.
The enthalpy of vaporization of water is pretty high, so for a relatively large energy use, they only need to evaporate quite small amounts of water. A single household water supply (10GPM), on full blast, could cool 1.5 megawatts of computers - a small datacenter.
If future people are forfeit as we refuse to sacrifice today, why preserve people today? I say bring chaos now so the mess makers deal with their externalities for a change instead of waving them off to make “line go up”.
You’re just a contemporary worker bee following orders. The economy is built on academic BS as the older, less numerate financier generation had no ability to falsify that which they had no education in, they handed their pensions and post world war welfare job money to their kids who made up this and think the future just has to keep honoring decades old contracts while ignoring they don’t honor their elders past.
Entropy will attenuate the past. Our achievements are meaningless to the next centuries as physics will force them to be rebuilt.
There is lots that only humans can do, including what a sentence predictor presented as AI can't imagine. It's getting better at reasoning for sure, but net new, novel stuff, I think is still the domains of most.
It's true though that GPT may offset a lot of people to have to change and grow, and it might be hardest for the people who got away with BSing. I've never had that luxury and always have had to deliver so I guess it feels a little less frightening.
Either way, I figure its easier to learn which way the currents in this realms are flowing to recognize them better, than to sit on the side of the pool looking at it with disdain.
We stop growing not only when we stop learning, but when we stop creating.
This is generic enough to leave open to debate what we should create.
It waves off the impact on the future to create.
It’s cute and poetic but as usual ignores externalities as our taught economic models inherently rely on ignoring externalities. You are refusing to engage in such discussion because we don’t socially normalize an obligation to do so.
Why must we create what we currently create?
Can you not create new skill and awareness any other way? Are you that unimaginative you must simulate the galactic differential manifold inside a machine as you cannot imagine it and draw it for yourself? At the cost of what for the species over the next decades for us?
And I say for us as you cannot guarantee there’s Lindy effects measured in centuries from the outputs of the work. It’s not unreasonable to find all this high minded talk near equivalent to hearsay and religious belief in the potential for forever growth and expansion.
It’s not unreasonable to assume this just conviction to economic memes you memorized wrapped in overly reductive poetry to obfuscate.
There was a post of a detailed imaging of a tiny part of the brain and it contained 1.7 Petaflops of data or something.
CPUs and GPUs have a long way to go beyond nm production.
That headline is misleading (and should probably be updated. 25x more energy than a search, not 25x more than the company. Which anyone who knows anything about the two things could tell you - one is running inference, the other is a database lookup. In fact, I'd be surprised if it's only 25x in that case.
Both companies will keep highy secret their energy use, so I doubt this article is based on anything more than a researchers guess.
Overall, it's the source of energy that matters, not the consumption.
Note some interesting things about this article. Lack of sources, obviously, but the byline itself is sus.
What's even scarier is that people on HN actually accept this noncritically. We're better than that! This is a perfect article to train your media literacy and critical thinking skills on.
No thanks, I flagged it.
It was a stupid article when someone posted it on the GPT-4o story (and I said as much in the comments then) and it’s a stupid article now that has no business being on HN.
HN regularly flags trash that climbs up the ranks, the argument that we shouldn’t do that so that people can train their “media literacy” is just absurd. Go read The Sun or any number of bad publications if you want to train your media literacy.
The website removes three key words from the title vs what's in their actual article. And 25 times more than a google search is incredible vague how they come to that number.
What? I have no idea about server farm cooling, can anyone explain this to me?
Data centers have separate systems to remove heat from the entire datacenter. These are often evaporative coolers, which means the water is evaporated away.
A better analogy would be the HVAC system for your house. Your computer dumps heat into the house, the HVAC system removes the heat from the house to the environment. It's the latter part that uses evaporative cooling in many data centers.
Of course it's possible to use air-cooled equipment and this is more common in cooler climates or smaller data centres, so it's not a rule of nature that cooling servers wastes water but it's certainly a very common outcome.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiller
Alternatively, you can cycle closed-loop water through a chiller to a hot server and back, or just cool the air around the server (CRACs and CRAHs) using either water or refrigerant as the heat-carrying material.
We can push it much further if the decisions are made by engineers with spreadsheets rather than angry people with no technical grounding.