this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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242
Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret (www.nature.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
112 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 8 months ago (23 children)

And nobody seems to give a shit. Even people who would normally give a shit about this sort of thing. Even people who do things like denounce Bitcoin mining's waste of energy (and I agree) are not talking about the energy- and water- waste from AI systems.

That article says that OpenAI uses 6% of Des Moines' water.

Meanwhile-

According to Colorado State University research, nearly half of the 204 freshwater basins they studied in the United States may not be able to meet the monthly water demand by 2071.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/parts-america-water-crisis/story?id=98484121

And nobody seems to give a shit.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (41 children)

Lots of people give a shit, they're just not in any sort of position to do anything about it.

We won't treat climate change seriously until we get a significant climate related mass casualty event in North America.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (4 children)

As soon as the gulf streams collapse I think a few more of us may start giving a shit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Giving a shit about the horse barn after someone's already let out all the horses doesn't really make a difference.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Have you met humanity??

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Yep. We suck. I'm reminded of it every day.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I think that’s their point

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

gulf streams collapse

Nah, there were some people worried about it, but it won't happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream

The possibility of a Gulf Stream collapse has been covered by some news publications.[vague] The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report addressed this issue specifically, and found that based on model projections and theoretical understanding, the Gulf Stream will not shut down in a warming climate. While the Gulf Stream is expected to slow down as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) weakens, it will not collapse, even if the AMOC were to collapse. Nevertheless, this slowing down will have significant effects, including a rise in sea level along the North American coast, reduced precipitation in the midlatitudes, changing patterns of strong precipitation around Europe and the tropics, and stronger storms in the North Atlantic.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

So what you're saying is that it's fine?

1000008187

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

At the point it's too late.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

*The AMOC. The Gulf Stream can't really collapse.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I guess it depends on how you use chatbots. If you’re just too lazy to click on the first google result you get, it’s wasteful to bother ChatGPT with your question. On the other hand, for complex topics, a single answer may save you quite a lot of googling and following links.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Oh, well as long as it save you from Googling it's okay that it's a massive ecological disaster. My mistake.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (22 children)

That's the opposite of what he said. That sort of usage isn't what ChatGPT is good for, it's best to use it for other kinds of things.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I mean an argument could be made here, right? Just thinking theoretically.

Maxim: we want to be as eco-friendly as possible.

Per a given task, understand the least environmentally-taxing way to accomplish the goal.

Task requires one, two, or three/four DuckDuckGo searches? DDG away.

Task requires five DDG searches, OR one LLM query? Language model it is.

(LLM may well rarely be the answer there, of course, just laying out the theory!)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

Bitcoin was wasteful with little benefit, but AI has the potential to benefit humanity at large. Maybe ChatGPT itself isn't a great example of that, but their research has gone on to spur lots of advancements in AI, advancement that have allowed AI to make all sorts of breakthroughs in areas like medicine

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Yeah, but LLMs like ChatGPT and the like aren't where that advancement is being made. LLMs are driving investment in the technology, but it's just a mostly useless investor target that just happens to run on the same hardware that can be used for useful AI-powered research. Sure, it's pushing the hardware advancement forward maybe 10-15 years faster than it might have otherwise happened, but it's coming with a lot of wasteful baggage as well because LLMs are the golden boy investors want to to throw money at.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Why the heck does it use so much water? It sounds like a very inefficient and stupid design to not have a closed loop.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

It's not secret, people just don't care. Manufacturers publish power and cooling data on spec sheets, but because people are easily wowed by pure garbage masquerading as breakthroughs and "future", they simply ignore the costs and push ahead. Add in the fact that most "AI" startups are actual scams, and you've got a corporate incentive to pretend this isn't doing permanent damage too.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

That doesn't sound like they're taking future hardware optimizations into account, we won't be using GPUs for this purpose forever (as much as Nvidia would like that to be true lol)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention that increasing usage of AI means AI is producing more useful work in the process, too.

The people running these AIs are paying for the electricity they're using. If the AI isn't doing enough work to make it worth that expense they wouldn't be running them. If the general goal is "reduce electricity usage" then there's no need to target AI, or any other specific use for that matter. Just make electricity in general cost more, and usage will go down. It's basic market forces.

I suspect that most people raging about AIs wouldn't want their energy bill to shoot up, though. They want everyone else to pay for their preferences.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Anything power saved by hardware design improvements will be consumed by adding more transistors. You will not be seeing a power consumption decrease. Manufacturers of this hardware have been giving talks for the past two years calling for literal power plants to be build co-resident with datacenters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I'm not sure if future optimization wouldn't bring more demand. At least, that's what my hardware and apps shown in a couple of decades. If another start up would have an ability to train with additional billion or trillion of parameters, I'm sure they would. It also leads to a wider window for poor optimization.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That was my thought too. I heard a take about how we may see us shift away from GPUs to purpose built PUs as a way to continue process progress now we’re getting pretty small on the silicon scale. Neural nets may be one of these special “PU”s we see.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How much power does the brain consume? In bagels. How many bagels does ChatGPT consume?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

How much power does the brain consume? In bagels. How many bagels does ChatGPT consume?

The great thing about math is that it's interchangeable.

https://rpsc.energy.gov/energy-data-facts#collapse-accordion-25-3

The average U.S. household used about 77 million British thermal units (Btu) in 2015

https://www.inchcalculator.com/convert/british-thermal-unit-to-kilocalorie/

The energy in kilocalories is equal to the energy in british thermal units multiplied by 0.252164.

33,000 households x 77,000,000 Btu/household x 0.252164 kcal/Btu = 640,748,724,000 kcal

https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-bagels

One plain medium-sized bagel –  about 100 grams – has about 264 calories

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/kcal-vs-calories

Instead, the terms calories — capitalized or not — and kcal are used interchangeably and refer to the same amount of energy

640,748,724,000 kcal / 264 kcal/bagel = 2,427,078,500 bagels

Your homework is finding out how much energy the brain consumes in bagels

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They're scared of skynet but not global warming

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Tbf, talking about the environmental costs of generative AI is just framing.
The issue is the environmental cost of electricity, no matter what it is used for.
If we want this to be considered in consumption then it needs to be part of the electricity price. And of course all other power sources, like combustion motors, need to also price in external costs.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Just wait until the AI finds out about Bitcoin....

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