I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x
And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173
To drive this point home: if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year, it would entirely offset the annual water consumption of all US datacenters (including, therefore, the water footprint of AI).
I fear that you have unwittingly led us further into the inevitable Environmental Hamburger-Cost Continuum.
Wherein we will use EHCC units to inform the hamburger voters about a) the nobility of even the smallest hamburgerian sacrifice, and b) the gentle, loving hand of industrialisation.
How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?
See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!
They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.
The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.
I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense.
Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for
So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough.
On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear.
On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?
This is bullshit to be charitable.
> This is bullshit to be charitable.
What is bullshit is sockpuppets shilling for the very few who have bet the 'farm' on this and want return on their investment, the wellbeing of society be damned.
There are ideological perspectives--another comment in this chain declares that anything that an LLM does has zero value, purely by virtue of being from an LLM. There's not much to discuss there: maybe I find alfalfa useless and LLMs provide a lot of value, maybe you do the opposite. Short of violence, either immediate or delegated, the best way to resolve this conflict is to incorporate costs for resources like water appropriately (accounting for externalities), and let market participants bid to determine who gets access to it.
Datacenter owners are highly likely to find this a reasonable process, because they believe that what they are investing in and operating will provide a great deal of value on the market. And other industries (like your alfalfa) are far more likely to throw a fit at this process.
Or if you think alfalfa farms have fundamental, deep-seated water rights that don't extend to data centers, then data center operators can just purchase water from alfalfa farmers, and everyone involved will eagerly make that trade.
Even amongst municipal water usage, it seems hard to figure out how much DC usage factors in to other uses because often they’re not required, and therefore don’t, disclose their usage.
All I’m saying is that it’s not a closed case and not everyone complaining about DC water usage is a Russian propaganda bot.
Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.
This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.
we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.
Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.
I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.
He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
> Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve found on my own, and to my knowledge I’m the first person to notice it.
Yeah, she might be wrong. But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating. We also have a base rate fallacy, we don't know know how well or how poorly they are using water. Nearly all criticisms of AI data center criticisms boil (no pun intended) down to yeah, but what about almonds or rice or xyz. That isn't a healthy way to adjust how we talk about data center water consumption.
It is a classic debate tactic. Someone makes an argument, then buttresses that argument with a number. You attack the number, pretending that you didn't just correct the number, but also invalidate the original argument. We shouldn't be using these tactics to talk about the tragedy of the commons.
I worked for a hyperscaler, I poked around a bit about water usage both internally and externally and it wasn't good. There was little to no thought other than, "we can pay X to have water delivered, doesn't matter if it sourced responsibly." (to glibly paraphrase, company policy is to never write the honest part down)
Look at how hard Google fought to not have water data released in The Dalles Oregon for their DC there. Many DCs are supplied by water that is meant for humans, sourced from aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill, that are being depleted faster than they are filled, already.
I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.
I really don't think we are. In the wider culture the idea that data centers use an absurd amount of water is baked in at this point.
It frustrates me because I think it distracts from energy usage, which is a much more real issue than water usage.
I defer plugging in my electric car until 10am so I know that my neighbors solar arrays are charging my car.
In Seattle, every watt saved is water saved since we are blessed with hydro.
Why, when that's such a minuscule amount of water in the grand scheme of things? Why focus our energy there? Why not spend that energy on the myriad many-orders-of-magnitude-worse offenders?
Most of the changes seem to be because Masley found one counter-example (Newton County, Georgia) where AI datacenters do seem to be increasing water costs; the only deletions AFAICS is toning down language where Masley used to say "there are no examples" to "there is one counter-example". I don't see any other major corrections that have been removed.
Here's an annotated diff of the two texts: https://bafybeie7b3zs2gqifpvn7ee7y7326wcexwnsbhnur5coymu3m6w...
Did she really think Google cares about ethics? Such positions seem purely performative, we all know that ethics go out the window first to make room for more profits.