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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"

And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.

Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.

You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?

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Hannah Ritchie is a quite well reputed writer and data scientist squarely in the climate field. She's written two books on climate and I found the one I read (Not The End of the World) was quite good and data-driven.

https://hannahritchie.com/

You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is biased towards LLM than that.

I'm not sure I understand where the issue is here - something can use a small amount of energy per use but a large amount in aggregate because of lots of use.

You have set up a false conflict. The data centers are "huge" and they also consume about the same power as 1 airplane. These things are both true.

It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.

> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?

A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.

If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?

It’s new capacity!

They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”

It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small, grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more efficient cloud services.

Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth

If so, why do they need to build new power plants for it?

Yeah you can, though to be fair its referred to as jevons paradox because it is counterintuitive.

I’m not saying it’s inefficient. I’m saying cloud computing uses a lot of power.

Useful work is debatable here, a lot of people just talk to the thing or use it instead of searching the internet.

The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.

I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.

What about it is whitewashing? This seems like it would be a great resource if you wanted to contextualize the argument you're gesturing at.

LLMs don't use a lot of electricity per user. Why should the fact that the energy usage happens in data centers instead of each user's house be an important moral factor?

War is Peace,

Freedom is Slavery,

Facts are Whitewashing.

Much like when people discuss whether these companies are profitable: training costs don't count.

Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:

- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution

- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads

LLM calls are getting cheaper every day.

Are they getting cheaper faster than their usage is increasing?

1. Your prediction is that soon browing the web for a few hours is going use >30,000+ Wh (based on the "equivalent" you mentioned)? (For comparison to that 30,000+ figure, the energy use from using a laptop for a few hours is 75 Wh, all per OP source.)

2. > most of this will be done just to sell more ads

Are you predicting that the value of ads is going to increase by a number of magnitudes? Because 30,000+ Wh of electricity has a quite significant cost, and even a video ad currently only earns pennies, so I'm trying to imagine how the math would work in this scenario?

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