it doesn't matter. Millions of watt-hours of electricity is wasted on other irrelevant, unnecessary stuffs
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Human extinction from AI is a bigger problem than the carbon emissions.
Depends on if it solves the environment problem.
You are bad for the environment bro
Just large models, small models have been used for ages
Sasha Luccioni at HuggingFace is doing a lot of great work on exactly this. https://www.sashaluccioni.com/
Every single form of compute is carbon neutral.
We don't have CO2 or methane spewing out of gpus when they run.
After training AI actually emits less CO2 emissions than humans working on the same thing. So the initial power draw is just a sacrifice for longer term eco friendly. This isn't dumping GPU into ponds like manufacturing that actually decimates ecosystems sources of water.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ai-driven-creators-are-better-for-the-environment-than-humans-says-new-study#:~:text=AI%20versus%20Humans%3A%20Illustration%20Tasks&text=The%20researchers%20propose%20that%20%22AI,per%20image%20than%20human%20creators.%22
Training models uses lots of energy, but so does every other human activity. Even for large companies like Google.
Google used 15,439 GW hrs in 2020. The average per capita US energy consumption is 311 GJ. That comes out to the energy equivalent of 178,715 people. Google had 135,300 employees in 2020. Barely above average energy usage and probably below average for the income google makes. Those 135,300 employees probably easily exceed the company’s energy usage with their normal household spending.
I think server clusters cost around 2-3 % of energy already. That is about airlines levels of energy usage.
Analogue chips are prob. going to help this not accelerate more than absolutely needed the next decade or two.
I mean it's all relative, and in many cases where ML-based systems are saving use of the alternative solutions that cost a lot more energy, no ML is helping the environment. As it stands though, yes, many of the areas are incredibly energy-consuming.
Pretty sure GPUs aren't nowhere near as harmful to the environment as e.g. air flights. The main harm comes from throwing away GPUs which are still perfectly functional.
I'm excited to see if IBM Hermes could affect this huge demand with more efficient power usage.
No reason to assume so. The largest players in AI/cloud, Google and Microsoft, are firmly on track to become carbon neutral and make significant investments in renewable energy.
Using energy isn't the same thing as creating emissions -- it depends on your source.
Machine learning also has the ability to streamline many energy intensive operations. One recent example is DeepMind generating an accurate 10-day weather forecast in under a minute which used to take hours of computation.
Or significantly speeding up drug discovery and materials research cutting out lengthy rounds of experimentation.
Unlikely ... as long as the price of electricity isn't kept artificially low, and possibly even then. The use of AI has purpose, and is going to give something in return for that electricity. As long as the AI is used for a productive purpose, it will be a net positive.
Now replace "AI" with "bitcoin", and the answer would change.
Why do you not see the value with Bitcoin? It is a decentralised currency - that is valuable to a lot of people
Not going to get into a big debate on this one ... but the market cap of bitcoin is $1.44 Trillion at the moment. Where did this "wealth" come from? Well from nothing, and it can't be converted into anything physical or otherwise useful, so it is the currency aspect only. I don't have recent numbers, but around 2022, the network was using 131.26 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. No idea what the cost is in terms of hardware and labour misallocation. That is an insanely inefficient decenstralised currency, so extremely unlikely to be a net positive.
Not worse than useless people flying around in private jets all the time.
No and it's just a dumb argument. In Microsoft's presentation just a few days ago, they revealed they were planning on running their data centers on completely renewable energy. The fair comparison here is how much resources it takes to raise a person until the age of 25 where they start to contribute to society. And it's also what proportion of these people are actually creating new knowledge which is what we expect these models to be able to do? It's a very small proportion.
Why not just do an environment tax on every kWt/h produced and then use that environment tax money to fix the environment?
I.e. if burning 1 kg of coal produces 1 kWth of energy and costs 1$, but it costs 10$ to extract 1 kg of coal from the air in the form of CO2, just put a tax on it and make every 1 kWth of coal energy cost 11$ instead.
That way, clean energy is cheaper and more attractive, and dirty energy costs what it truly costs, i.e. the harm to the environment is quantified.
If you compare it to cars it is environment friendly