What's Wrong with AI?
kurtis.weblog.lol
kurtis.weblog.lol
-- strangely I had never actually thought about this
The problem with this essay is thinking power demand is bad. It is not when we can deploy massive amounts of renewables. Not only for AI, but for other industrial workloads that user power.
If the rest of the dipshits around here hadn't elected the dumbest mother fuckers on earth, we'd be pushing out subsidies to build out renewables at 10x the rate we are now. But hey, coal jobs matter.
Funny how this line of thinking is indistinguishable from crypto.
> It is not when we can deploy massive amounts of renewables. Not only for AI, but for other industrial workloads that user power.
Funny how this line of thinking is indistinguishable from crypto. "Yes, we build a lot o power which is immediately consumed by us, but see how this is good? See? SEE?!"
> we'd be pushing out subsidies to build out renewables at 10x the rate we are now.
And these would be gobbled up by crypto and AI data centers, right?
https://www.itpro.com/infrastructure/data-centres/gas-powere...
"Traditional hubs are at or near saturation, which has created long connection queues with waits of typically seven-to-ten years and in some cases 13-15. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that globally, nearly 20% of planned data center projects risk delay due to grid bottlenecks, and as a result developers are building ‘behind the meter’ primary generation. This offers speed to market in months rather than years.”"
"gas is mainly chosen because it’s the fastest and easiest way to generate your own power. Turbines and engines can be set up and begin providing reliable energy quickly, while renewable power generation can be intermittent without costly storage – and takes time and money to be set up."
https://www.greengasturbines.com/blog/gas-turbines-for-data-...
"Global data center electricity consumption is projected to more than double by 2030, driven primarily by AI training and inference workloads. The IEA estimates data centers could consume over 1,000 TWh annually by 2030 — roughly equal to Japan's total electricity consumption."
"Grid interconnection queues are now 4–7 years in many US markets, making behind-the-meter gas turbine generation the fastest path to powering new hyperscale campuses."
"Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all signed gas turbine power agreements or acquired generation assets in 2024–2026, signalling a structural shift in how hyperscalers think about electricity procurement."
"The gas turbine data center trend is not temporary. Even as renewable procurement grows, the intermittency gap and the sheer scale of AI power demand mean firm, dispatchable generation will remain essential for Tier III and IV reliability standards."
> Additionally, many residents who live near AI data centres are seeing increased electricity bills due to the amount of electricity those data centres use.5 That's right, trillion dollar companies are using you to subsidize their power bill!
I'm glad the author put this paragraph early into this article though. Saved me a few minutes reading the rest.
There is a root issue here: prices of nonrenewables don't incorporate the costs of climate change. But that's a much broader issue, and otherwise the market price system is excellent at allocating energy to its most economically beneficially uses.
No, because that solar farm would have never been built in the first place without the datacenter. You either get both or you get none of them. It's completely different than using an existing solar farm that was already there before anyone started planning for that datacenter
"most renewables are sited so poorly that it likely doesn't reduce CO2 emissions at all" -- source?
Particularly, newer data centers are much more likely to used closed loop systems. And, the bigger they are, the more likely they're on closed loop.
At a global level the water stays around but at a local level it "vanishes into thin air".
Source: Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI)
> Evaporation Process: Roughly 80% of the water evaporates, cooling the servers, while minerals, microorganisms, and chemical additives (like anti-corrosion or anti-scaling agents) remain in the remaining 20% liquid, which is later discharged.
Traditional search engines use vanishingly little energy, and 10x vanishingly little is still very small.
> It is estimated that AI alone will evaporate between 4 and 7 billion cubic metres of water per year in 2027
ChatGPT has 1 billion users every week, so AI is adding 1% to their water usage?
The great thing about market competition is the bosses may be bastards but they are forced to make good products so as to compete with other companies, hence pretty good cars and satellite coms from Musk for example.
I'm cheered that the AI companies have little moat and stiff competition amongst themselves.
>Asking ChatGPT a question uses approximately 10x as much energy as a traditional search engine
I stopped reading here. It is more energy efficient to have ChatGPT write the code than a developer on their workstation. It in fact can save energy by having AI do it.
However, in the tech bubble I live in to use these tools for as much as possible in order to “make it” in some sense and actually be employable. Like you said it is a game of chicken. Perhaps the best strategy (for me) is to campaign for institutional guardrails on usage while continuing to individually try to be competitive?
> Unlike a lot of anti-AI writing I have seen which can drift into the territory of reactionist rhetoric, this feels very grounded
So much written about this but nothing about anti-ai-psychosis, which this article is a clear example of.
There is no possible response to any of the issues raised would make a whit of difference to the author, since they have made a quasi-religious and certainly political determination that anything associated with AI is bad and should be avoided.
So the article itself can be basically ignored, it’s not written in good faith, it’s essentially propaganda in service of a fixed political viewpoint.