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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

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* 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.*

I think it’s massive.

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What's massive is the amount of water used for a handful of almonds. Not daily AI use.

https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

>I think it’s massive.

So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.

If it was 2% for VOD streaming, and 3% for every other service that is delivered by a networked computer, I would think "wow, streaming is huge". 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all, versus 3% for everything else on the computer, is still a remarkable statistic. I'm not making any value judgment in order to say that.

I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.

> 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all

AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.

Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.

Everyone using Google. Watching Netflix. Listening to Spotify. Shopping at Amazon or a Shopify store.

Or reading almost anything these days. :(

Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check.

Beam forming wireless signals.

It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.

Was the 2% figure counting all those things? I don't think so. This is changing the grounds of the discussion. Ridiculously so. Do you take me for some zealot who hates tensors or matrices or something? I don't even hate LLMs, though I have huge issues with how data has been gathered. I feel like this discussion is useless.

Look at Meta’s capital budget and tell me people aren’t using AI. People use Facebook, Instagram, etc. I’d say the same for Google, but with Google Cloud it’s hard to know where the dollars are going and for whom.

Who exactly is the 2% figure? Can’t all be HN people on side projects using Claude code.

A lot of it is training, not inference, right? I really do think the vast majority of use is HN Claude Code, with some lawyers, etc., preparing initial draft emails that they rewrite, sprinkled on top.

As for capex implying high usage, look at xAI's capex and how it turns out most of it is now being rented out to Google, etc. High capex does not imply capex that has already found its customers and margins. Meta is an extraordinarily bad example to use, given the failure of the whole metaverse/VR thing that is now their name, but is completely vestigial.

Have a good afternoon.

The deli is using it to make advertising flyers. Every consumer is using it as a replacement for google search as far as I can tell. I do a fair bit of work with people in the 18-25 range and almost all of them love to rail against AI, but none of them seem to be capable of completing even simple tasks without using it. Even my 63 year old mother uses it at work to generate reports. I would love to see some hard numbers, but I would be truly shocked if "most people still don't really know what AI is" is in any way justifiable across all adults in OECD countries.

>that most people hardly use at all

Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

I was referring to AI in that statement, I wrote it somewhat poorly.

The "hardly use" comparison quickly runs into issues, though. If I use AI and it completes a job that would have taken an hour in 1 minute, should that be counted as a factor against AI, because I'm "hardly" using it (1 minute) compared to the alternative (1 hour)?

It was written in a specific context:

> [AI] that most people hardly use at all

and while ambiguous, I meant that quantifying the number of people that use it, results in a not large number. I've had discussions in other threads about how to talk about transitive use, etc., so as with everything at all times, there are certainly ways to skin the cat that justify or invalidate the statement. One has to rely upon good judgment to decide which way is best, and reasonable people may disagree.

> So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI?

How did you read that in my comment?

By all means, cull them all. I'm sure the remaining 3% support (in one way or another) terrible web apps that use 150 MB of javascript and data brokers.

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