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ai thirst is killing us (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/shitposting@lemmy.today
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[–] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I believe the paper was looking at total footprint including building and running data centers with open evaporative cooling, and the water "used" by civilian power stations.

I don't really see more water in the air as the most pressing environmental issue around data centers. That's better than the water being destroyed or contaminated.

The main environmental hazard of data centers is the rapid expansion of them. The running of them for months on end in the training of models... And above all else, the fact billionaires have chosen to power them in the least environmentally friendly ways (gas and disel):

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dirty+power+ai+data+centers+powered+by

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I'm much more concerned about the electricity going in as well. If they want to build these huge power sinks, they should be required to build their own green power for them as well, not just buy from the already constrained grid. And burning gas or any other fossil fuel for them is just madness.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Yep, we're paying for answers we know are wrong, using the currency of environmental health. It's probably the dumbest thing I've seen humanity do.

    People who use the technology need to use things like AnythingLLM for running answer machines locally (yes, AnythingLLM can go online, search websites, and do GPT style answering)... and something like Kolbold.cpp (also run locally) for creative writing tasks.

    AnythingLLM is very simple to set up, Kolbold.cpp has tutorials on YouTube and is far less restrictive than ChatGPT. Both avoid interacting with AI data centers (now the available models have already been trained).

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    Self hosted definitely is the way to go. I have a second hand Intel nuc + nvidia p100 setup, and its more than enough for what I need it to be. And it only uses 250w when im using it, I turn it off when I'm done. Plus my power is all my own solar, so effectively free.

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