I'm personally on the side that the ROI will probably work out in the long run but not by minimizing the potential impact and keeping the focus on how we can make this technology (currently in its infancy) more efficient. [edit wording]
I'm personally on the side that the ROI will probably work out in the long run but not by minimizing the potential impact and keeping the focus on how we can make this technology (currently in its infancy) more efficient. [edit wording]
Fossil fuel companies won, and they won in about 1980s when BP paid an advertising firm to come up with "personal carbon footprint" as a meaningful metric. Basically destroyed environmentalism since...well I'll let you know when it stops.
interesting qualification.
maybe conservation should start with the masters of the universe who fly private jets all over the world etc. and emit more than the rest of us do all year in a matter of hours.
We can not get there by adding new power generation.
And to be honest what we need to do is replace them with nuclear power stations to manages the base load of nations power requirements. Either that or much better power storage is required
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1433498-no-take-only-throw
"No add new power plants, only transform our grid to greener".
And shoving LLMs into every nook and cranny of every application, so just tech giants who run the data centers can make more money and some middle managers get automatic summaries of their unnecessary video calls and emails is, I would argue, not important.
But once again, the fundamental issue is late-stage capitalism.
A lot of people believe in a higher power. If trusting in this supposed "market" brings you comfort and clarity in a complicated world, I do not begrudge you it. But invoking it doesn't address the claim it's answering
It's also clear that "the market" does not care enough about environmental impact to even do stuff like remove the current significant fossil fuel subsidies present in most government budgets, nor stop individuals or organizations from consuming or selling said fuels, natural gas, or plastic products at massive scales, so it's unclear why it would allocate energy in a way that didn't deprive crucial priorities.
Like the theodicy on the invisible hand's problem of environmental collapse ain't lookin' good is all I'm saying
Because of the reason I just explained above. 100% renewable energy does not mean that producing that energy does not have an environmental cost.
> Why not just let the market decide? If I'm paying for it, why does anyone else get a say in how I use it?
Because the "free market" does not internalize externalities (costs to shared resources like the environment, air quality, public health, etc.).
Cf how we addressed the ozone hole, acid rain, slavery, etc.
Also AI training is easiest workload to regulate, as you can only train when you have cheaper green energy.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678b6b3e-9708-8009-bcad-8ba84a5145...
The issue is that they are often localised, so even if it’s just 1% of power, it can cause issues.
Still, by itself, grid issues don’t mean climate issues. And any argument complaining about a co2 cost should also consider alternative cost to be reliable. Even if ai was causing 1% or 2% or 10% of energy use, the real question is how much it saves by making society more efficient. And even if it wasn’t, it’s again more of a question about energy companies polluting with co2.
Microsoft, which hosts OpenAI, is famously amazing in terms of their co2 emissions - so far they were going way beyond what other companies were doing.
A grid isn't a magic battery that is always there, it is constantly fluctuating, regardless of the intent of producers and consumers. You need to be able to have enough elasticity to deal with that fact. Changing that is hard (and expensive), but it is the only way (such as the technical reality).
The solution is not to create say, 1000 extra coal-fired generating facilities since you can't really turn them on or off at will. Same goes for gas, nuclear etc. You'd need a few of them for your baseline load (combined with other sources like solar, wind, hydro, whatever) and then make sure you have your non-renewable sources have margin and redundancy and use storage for the rest. This was always the case, and it will always be the case.
But now with information technology, the degree to which you can permanently raise demand on the grid to an extreme degree is where the problem becomes much more apparent. And because it's not manufacturing (which is an extreme consumer of energy) you don't really get the "run on lower output" option. You can't have an LLM do "just a little bit of inferencing". Just like you can't have your Netflix send only half a movie to "save power".
In the past we had the luxury of nighttime lower demand which means industry could up their usage, but datacenters don't sleep at night. And they also can't wait for batch processing during the day.
> Gas-fired generation could meet data centers’ immediate power needs and transition to backup generation over time, panelists told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
What you are saying has nothing to do with local, but has to do with large abrupt changes in electricity usage, and datacenter electricity usage is generally more predictible and smooth than most other industry.
If your transmission line is saturated, it doesn't matter how much more generation you add on the source end, it's not gonna deliver 'more' over the transmission lines.
And that is just a simplistic local example, because it's not a single producer, single consumer, single transmission line scenario. ChatGPT and the article aren't diving in to that. The closest they might get is congestion but even then you already have to know the issue to be able to ask about it.
As far as the article itself is involved here, this tread mostly goes into the reason why global usage percentages doesn't mean there are no problems. It's like saying gerrymandering has no impact because of some percentages elsewhere.
This is coupled with low public awareness, many people don't understand the moral problem in using fossils so the PR penalty from a fossil powered data center is low.