So much more stuff and growing- what it is actually useful for ? Are we getting actually more done than with previous volumes or is it just all wasted energy?
Higher resource consumption and the set back in CO2 reduction?
> water is not unlimited
> you don't want to release a bunch of acid into a river
> I know next to nothing about this
> I know basically nothing
> corn is one of the thirstiest major crops grown in the US
What is this rant supposed to inform? Whats wrong with OP being concerned about the costs of operating a DC?
When someone in a discussion about the benefits of AI goes "did you think about the environment?!", it's always performative.
The real motivation is disliking AI itself or doubt about the government's ability to offset the labor market impact. Discussions that start with feigned concerns being raised are nearly always going to be unproductive.
I don’t dislike AI but really of mine are negatively affected by climate change and AI isn’t helping what is easily observed when Google and MS scrapped their CO2 reduction targets.
So every time I use AI I think about the necessity and usefulness of what I‘m doing with AI and if the use outweighs the costs.
Since the rise of AI the environmental impact doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
I guess because it’s the shiny new toy of the hackernews audience.
Privacy also lost importance given the fact that the same people who refused to give information like their phone number to companies like Google and Meta now upload their whole life to their AIs to asks what should the eat, hyperbolically speaking
The reason it doesn't matter is because the environmental impact is moderate, and the benefit obviously tremendous.
That is moderate. Energy-intensive industry is around 130 EJ, and global final energy consumption > 450 EJ.
Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035.
Now that was about operational energy consumption. Someone might bring up manufacturing and construction.
From what I could find the climate impact of those are estimated somewhere between 10-35% of the total climate impact of data centers, so relatively small compared to the operational energy consumption.
It is very hard to justify more than moderate environmental impact here, in my opinion.
For the benefits of AI, my personal results have been great, so I am quite optimistic. And objectively, I find it hard to ignore recent results in mathematics and security research.
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...
That is today where we already consume too much. If by 2030 AI's consumption doubles it gets worse. While training large models draws major initial power, everyday AI usage (inference) now drives roughly 80% to 90% of cumulative AI energy
"Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035."
Seems like AI helps slowing down the rise of energy consumption.
We are at a point where we want less CO2 not moderataly more. In the end more is more.
If your doctor tells you to lose weight or you get sick it's not a success to gain weigth slower
And if the potential of >13 EJ/year is actually realized, it would seem like the net impact of the data centers is not just "moderately more CO2" but possibly "moderately less".
Please avoid low quality analogies on HN.
Anything but a reduction is bad and AI is a setback for that.
Potential benefits are as long useless as they aren’t realized.
BTW the energy consumption reduction is achieved by what kind of AI? LLMs?
The construction of data centers needs resources and also creates more the CO2.
The energy for these data centers is often created through fossil fuels which also creates additional CO2
What do you think why Google and MS scrapped their CO2 reduction targets
On the other hand recent papers highlight the validity of concern/suspicion:
> This systematic review demonstrates that the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence is a structural and increasingly consequential challenge, shaped by interdependent decisions across algorithms, software pipelines, hardware infrastructures, and deployment contexts. The synthesized evidence shows that energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with AI systems are highly variable, context-dependent, and often underestimated — Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Review of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint Across the AI Lifecycle (published in “Sustainability” an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal) https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/3/1359
That's the whole 21 minute 59 second video in a nutshell.
A loud and hectic quick cut rambling video essay. Millions of views, naturally.
If it's not your job, then just ignore the reports.
If it's actually critical, someone will put money on the table and then it's a business. And then it's about scheduling and resourcing - also should not burn anyone out.
Just because many people have false sense of entitlement as soon as they get a free offering, it does not mean anyone needs to accommodate them.
If you have a highly conscientious personality, this is easier said than done.
You don't owe the world anything at all. If you're conscientious, then give a little -- here and there. Don't turn it into an unpaid job.
Just doing what others wish is not conscientous in itself! It _may_ be depdending on situation but it can be just pathological towards the self.
When it's psyhocologically hard to do things you imagine will dissapoint someone that's probably not concientousness. It's more like low self-esteem or codependency.
It's very hard for someone to tell these apart themselves. Hence when this topic pops out it's good idea to remind that being super-accomodating may in fact be a personality flaw - that can be healed if acknowledged.
There is very large spectrum between "trying not to dissapoint anyone" and doing what you know is the right thing.
Yet they kind of did. I've limited participation in my libraries with GitHub's setting that nobody who made an account in the last 6 months can do anything in my repos (after some misguided hustler thought they're an easy target and posted an ad).lp
Time's marching forward though. Wonder what will happen after a few more months. We'll have bot spam accounts that are no longer as fresh.
A great majority of business applications do run on open source projects, and in turn, are affected by them if things go awry. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma in this case.
(I don't mean you. just these so called open source developers.)
https://github.com/uclouvain/openjpeg
Basically the only library for reading jp2k data (complicated specs, ask your AI to one shot an implementation, mine said "it's 3000 lines of fiddly spec, too complicated"). Issues full of buffer-overflows. Recently unmaintained.
Used in tons of projects, now all possibly vulnerable.
did we lose anything of value? probably not.
If one claims such extraordinary figures of 100x increased productivity, a step forward never seen in the history of humanity in such short timespans, they must present extraordinary proof or be branded as a complete lunatic. I could have accepted people saying "I'm 20% more productive", which is an incredible achievement by itself, but not the 10x, 20x, 100x I keep hearing about. I think I've read 200x this week.
I’m only back at it four months later and I don’t really know what happened before, or why it’s working now, I’m just happy that I can scratch that itch again.
The ratios are factual though. Just look at the "Insights" tab of any LLM written project. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulse
This kind of velocity is impossible to achieve manually.
AI built me a 1.5k+ LOC react component which is probably a 15x increase on the file size I would have created, with negative impact on the project for those extra LOC.
Most software work is just churn / doing the same thing over and over. More productivity can just mean more output, not better output.
Another possibility is that the people who experience these 100x productivity increases are honest, correct, and simply had abysmal productivity which has now been increased to near-average junior levels thanks to AI.
I spent a couple of days on those, and its would have taken me months to write manually I am sure, so in that regards it's close to 50x.
I've also had Claude track down some logic issue in a module I was unfamiliar with which had very large and complicated flows. Would have taken me many days, since I did not have a reproducible case, so had to go by logs and customer description alone. I spent 5 minutes writing a prompt and when I checked back, Claude had identified the issue. The fix I had to implement myself, but was fairly easy. So there Claude definitely was a 100x increase in productivity.
Then there are cases where they're much more modest, or where they might even be negative, when they think they're fixing stuff but actually are introducing more bugs.
So, what are you doing/ have done with all your productivity?
And yes, we can rebut that with "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted" except of course some externalities, like boiling earths oceans.
Note: It's sarcasm.
What I have noticed an increase though is in demands and pressure to deliver.
On CVE probing, and I haven't really seen anyone describe/use it (or I may be oblivious), but the way you do it is you curate a list of CVEs for the class of software you're writing, say a web server. Then you take this list in chunks and hand them off to your agents to devise and implement adversarial technically analogous attacks against your codebase. If it's red, report and patch. Ironically (even with Fable 5) it's never complained/refused to do it.
There was a huge exodus of existing programmers/modders ~two years ago, due to paid mods and what not. The gamers took over with their LLM tools.
EDIT: Instead of simply down-voting, you're welcome to name examples that proves me wrong ;)
So, if it doesn't then you learned something about your workplace (and it's not good).
In a good company that should be discussed in the next 1:1s so actual change can happen meanwhile. If it just waits for the end of year review, then it's not a good company.
But ofc, slop has increased a lot more as well.
How long do they last until the get replaced by the next feature?