is it a massive contributor? I would venture to argue that air conditioning globally, is probably equally as large, if not larger.
I would argue that most industries, consume more energy. Though it’s also worth noting microsoft spun up the good TMI core to generate power for AI (iirc at the very least a datacenter), so in some cases it is actually consuming cleanly generated power.
That’s like saying it’s fine to waste food because it can theoretically be grown sustainably, even when the food you’re wasting wasn’t.
also to be clear, it’s a little more complicated than this, it doesn’t make sense to ship food products, and then re-ship those food products, only to be shipped again economically, or environmentally, compared to having better local sources of food (and likewise, income, the major problem with global food insecurity is actually monetary, rather than production/consumption based)
Although there are definitely optimizations to be made in terms of how food is consumed. It’s not a black and white, unless you want to live in a strictly controlled environment where you get fed synthetic nutrient paste every few hours. In which case, by all means.
is it a massive contributor? I would venture to argue that air conditioning globally, is probably equally as large, if not larger.
I would argue that most industries, consume more energy. Though it’s also worth noting microsoft spun up the good TMI core to generate power for AI (iirc at the very least a datacenter), so in some cases it is actually consuming cleanly generated power
Although there are definitely optimizations to be made in terms of how food is consumed. It’s not a black and white, unless you want to live in a strictly controlled environment where you get fed synthetic nutrient paste every few hours. In which case, by all means.
I just want us to live within our energy budget so we don’t cook ourselves.
It’s a new contributor, which means it is contributing on top of already existing contributors like air conditioning and other industries.
yeah but the part that i don’t understand is why this is relevant, sure it’s new, sure it’s not particularly effective but like. Do you really need to be using both the internet and the power grid to shitpost on lemmy right now? You can’t hold arbitrary standards for AI like “it doesnt do anything useful” and then post on one of the least useful websites on the internet with some of the least useful information either.
If we don’t have AI, why don’t we just ban gaming hardware, it just takes up unnecessary production time and consumption costs, as well as electricity. If we’re banning those, why don’t we also just ban most home appliances, those consume a pretty good amount of resources also. And if we’re banning those, why don’t we go a step further and delete housing all together as well, it’s a wasteful industry after all.
Like there’s a point where you start, and a point where you stop, people were doing the same shit over crypto mining, and then the same shit over NFTs, and now nobody gives a fuck about either, tbf sort of dead now, but still. It really just seems like outrage bait to me at best. It starts at “AI bad” because “ai bad” and then stops and “AI bad” because “AI BAD” it’s just illogical reasoning to me.
data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities
i really hate this stat, idk why people keep making this statement, you know what uses more electricity than some cities? Some other cities! wow incredible observation, some things use lots of power, and some other things, sometimes also use lots of power.
You mean to tell me a technologically fresh and relevant field has popped onto the market and it’s leading to a massive increase in consumption of electricity, because it consumes electricity? Yeah, that sounds like industry to me.
It’s literally just the mantra of do things and stuff happens. But people are mad about it.
I just want us to live within our energy budget so we don’t cook ourselves.
i’m assuming you’re referring to global warming here, and yeah me too, i would prefer we didn’t end our civilization over some stupid shit like global warming, but i’m more concerned about stuff like dirty energy production, the shipping industry, environmental regulations, things that actually tend to have an effect, rather than like, company consumes lots of energy for a little bit.
BTW, recommend looking into the electrical infrastructure for china, they consume WAY more electricity than the US, and have vastly dirtier production. So if we’re going to complain about AI, go complain about chinese AI training instead.
You mean to tell me a technologically fresh and relevant field has popped onto the market and it’s leading to a massive increase in consumption of electricity, because it consumes electricity? Yeah, that sounds like industry to me.
Yes, and because it’s causing a massive increase in the consumption of electricity it’s causing lots of pollution.
BTW, recommend looking into the electrical infrastructure for china, they consume WAY more electricity than the US, and have vastly dirtier production. So if we’re going to complain about AI, go complain about chinese AI training instead.
Yes, and because it’s causing a massive increase in the consumption of electricity it’s causing lots of pollution.
again this is great, but can i have concrete numbers on this shit and not just some schizo ramblings telling me it’s “more than a city actually”
fun fact, if you google list of US cities, you’ll find there are about 300 of them. so using the same level of information you provided in your previous comment i can determine that AI power consumption, must be 1/300th and just a little bit more than that, of a national US city power consumption metric, this is ignoring most industry, and most rural consumption as well.
wow an irrelevant article on an irrelevant topic, sure do remember typing “china has really shitty air quality AS A RESULT OF ALL THE POWER CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION THEY HAVE” too bad i didn’t explicitly type:
BTW, recommend looking into the electrical infrastructure for china, they consume WAY more electricity than the US, and have vastly dirtier production. So if we’re going to complain about AI, go complain about chinese AI training instead.
instead, explicitly not mentioning the pollution issues associated with it.
looks like the US is consuming about 20% of all production from coal fired power production.
And it looks like china is consuming about 60% of all production from coal fired power production.
again this is great, but can i have concrete numbers on this shit and not just some schizo ramblings telling me it’s “more than a city actually”
In the article it directly tells you "the facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area last year.
fun fact, if you google list of US cities, you’ll find there are about 300 of them. so using the same level of information you provided in your previous comment i can determine that AI power consumption, must be 1/300th and just a little bit more than that, of a national US city power consumption metric, this is ignoring most industry, and most rural consumption as well.
I provided a link. Did you not see it?
wow an irrelevant article on an irrelevant topic, sure do remember typing “china has really shitty air quality AS A RESULT OF ALL THE POWER CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION THEY HAVE” too bad i didn’t explicitly type:
Why are you talking to me this way? 🤔
oh wow, look at that, china consumes almost twice as much energy as the US.
Yeah, because we outsourced our industry to them. They consume that electricity making stuff for us. It’s all for external consumption. It’s real easy to reduce electricity consumption when you shut down your manufacturing capacity lol
oh wow, if you look at the total percent, china blows literally every other country out of the water.
Again, they make everything for everyone else. They’re the world’s factory. Just because a widget is manufactured in China doesn’t actually mean China is the sole country responsible for the emissions from manufacturing the widget. If they make a solar panel and then that solar panel is used in the US, there’s this neat little carbon accounting trick the US can do where it says that it reduced carbon emissions while not accounting for the carbon emitted from actually making the solar panel.
looks like the US is consuming about 20% of all production from coal fired power production. And it looks like china is consuming about 60% of all production from coal fired power production.
China has to keep increasing its base load of energy production to produce all of our shit for us. They’re kind of forced into this “all of the above” energy production system because they don’t have the capacity to actually transition.
Yet even so, new energy production capacity is not coming from coal. Why are we talking about this anyway? We were talking about how AI is consuming lots of energy, what the fuck does China have to do with it? China makes useful stuff with the energy they consume! AI makes bad art, bad articles, bad videos, bad music, and bad customer service bots. It’s garbage.
In the article it directly tells you "the facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area last year.
again, this is just a statement What even is a gigawatt here specifically? A gigawatt over the period of a week? A month? A year? 10 years? What’s the time frame we’re talking about here, what’s the real world implications of “facilities” are we talking a group of 10 data centers? What does this even mean? Are we talking about reactive power or real power?
Also to be clear, it looks like this is contract negotiation, not even listed power consumption. So it looks like we’re talking about what the grid is willing to supply at most at the utility hookup point. Not the actual consumption capability. It’s still technically a kind of consumption, but it’s the same as paying for gigabit speed internet, and then not using it at gigabit speed the entire time, you might be paying for that theoretical gigabit link, but unless you’re actually using it, it means nothing.
A gigawatt-size data center using 85% of its peak demand over the course of a year will consume nearly as much energy as 710,000 U.S. households or 1.8 million people.
looking into the article some more, it looks like they even said as much. Over the course of a year it’s about 1GW. If we;re converting this into real world units, this is about 3 million watts a day. Which is still a useless unit because watts are measured over the course of a second. Interestingly converting it into seconds, a unit where watts actually makes sense, it seems like this is an average continual consumption, on the range of seconds, of about 30 watts, constantly. This is like, a light fixture with LED lights, running 24/7 over the period of a year. Your phone is literally comparable to this.
It looks like global energy consumption across the entire world for the year has been about 180,000 TWh To be clear, 1GW is a completely different order of magnitude compared to the global consumption that is the entire earth.
I provided a link. Did you not see it?
yeah no i saw it, but you never cited anything actually useful to your argument so i just assumed it was irrelevant, otherwise you would’ve included it, or at least mentioned it. But you didn’t.
Why are you talking to me this way? 🤔
because people just say shit and then expect it to win arguments, not understanding literally anything about how arguments work apparently.
To be clear, i mentioned a very true fact, which you then responded to with an entirely different, irrelevant, but also true fact. Do you expect me to pat you on the back for pointing out that the sky is blue after i solve cancer? There is a standard for making an argument, and that barely meets the standard for making a statement.
If you wanted to counter the fossil fuels point, you could’ve pointed to the fact that china has one of the largest and fastest growing renewable energy sectors, globally, which would’ve actually been relevant, and a pretty ok point to make.
like i try to be nice, but it’s really hard when people are literally just ignoring what you’re saying, shoving their fingers into their ears, and then mentioning something else that they like instead. It’s not even a conversation at that point, you’re discussing past the other person.
Yeah, because we outsourced our industry to them. They consume that electricity making stuff for us. It’s all for external consumption. It’s real easy to reduce electricity consumption when you shut down your manufacturing capacity lol
yeah, that’s generally how manufacturing economies tend to work. You could make the argument that AI in the US is equivalent to manufacturing industry in china for example.
Again, they make everything for everyone else. They’re the world’s factory. Just because a widget is manufactured in China doesn’t actually mean China is the sole country responsible for the emissions from manufacturing the widget.
oh, interesting, so you’re telling me it’s not actually the companies that are responsible for all of the pollution, but in fact it’s actually the consumers that buy the products, that enable the companies to then pollute the earth? Did i get that correct?
Yet even so, new energy production capacity is not coming from coal. Why are we talking about this anyway?
oh, see i thought we were concerned about like, the environmental effects of pollution on things like global warming from things like AI, which are primarily US based, and not actually a massive consumer of dirty energy compared to countries like china who mostly consume coal power, a very dirty source of energy, where you could very easily make significant changes to impact significant carbon emissions.
It’s almost like hyper-focusing on a technicality of a specific thing that happens to be negative is worse than focusing on the actual problem behind that negative. Weird.
China makes useful stuff with the energy they consume!
oh interesting, so what about things like shein and temu, and fast fashion, and a lot of consumable electronics products that come straight from factories in china? Or is there a magic utility to these products, even though they are inevitably going to be waste product given enough time.
AI makes bad art, bad articles, bad videos, bad music, and bad customer service bots.
and you’re just using it incorrectly, if you burn fabric in a giant pile, it does little more than produce a lot of carbon, and create a little pile of ash, i guess we should delete the entire textiles industry under this basis.
AI is just burning energy for nothing.
so is Chinese manufacturing, since it’s using primarily dirty energy, compared to another country producing a similar thing using cleaner energy, it’s literally “creating carbon for nothing” Just stop buying Chinese steel. Simple as that.
Honestly it is makes the problem a little worse. It is far from the cause. You can run AI on clean power.
But they aren’t running it on clean power? And so it is a massive contributor?
That’s like saying it’s fine to waste food because it can theoretically be grown sustainably, even when the food you’re wasting wasn’t.
is it a massive contributor? I would venture to argue that air conditioning globally, is probably equally as large, if not larger.
I would argue that most industries, consume more energy. Though it’s also worth noting microsoft spun up the good TMI core to generate power for AI (iirc at the very least a datacenter), so in some cases it is actually consuming cleanly generated power.
also to be clear, it’s a little more complicated than this, it doesn’t make sense to ship food products, and then re-ship those food products, only to be shipped again economically, or environmentally, compared to having better local sources of food (and likewise, income, the major problem with global food insecurity is actually monetary, rather than production/consumption based)
Although there are definitely optimizations to be made in terms of how food is consumed. It’s not a black and white, unless you want to live in a strictly controlled environment where you get fed synthetic nutrient paste every few hours. In which case, by all means.
It’s a new contributor, which means it is contributing on top of already existing contributors like air conditioning and other industries. But even if you include them It’s also particularly bad i.e. data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities
I just want us to live within our energy budget so we don’t cook ourselves.
yeah but the part that i don’t understand is why this is relevant, sure it’s new, sure it’s not particularly effective but like. Do you really need to be using both the internet and the power grid to shitpost on lemmy right now? You can’t hold arbitrary standards for AI like “it doesnt do anything useful” and then post on one of the least useful websites on the internet with some of the least useful information either.
If we don’t have AI, why don’t we just ban gaming hardware, it just takes up unnecessary production time and consumption costs, as well as electricity. If we’re banning those, why don’t we also just ban most home appliances, those consume a pretty good amount of resources also. And if we’re banning those, why don’t we go a step further and delete housing all together as well, it’s a wasteful industry after all.
Like there’s a point where you start, and a point where you stop, people were doing the same shit over crypto mining, and then the same shit over NFTs, and now nobody gives a fuck about either, tbf sort of dead now, but still. It really just seems like outrage bait to me at best. It starts at “AI bad” because “ai bad” and then stops and “AI bad” because “AI BAD” it’s just illogical reasoning to me.
i really hate this stat, idk why people keep making this statement, you know what uses more electricity than some cities? Some other cities! wow incredible observation, some things use lots of power, and some other things, sometimes also use lots of power.
You mean to tell me a technologically fresh and relevant field has popped onto the market and it’s leading to a massive increase in consumption of electricity, because it consumes electricity? Yeah, that sounds like industry to me.
It’s literally just the mantra of do things and stuff happens. But people are mad about it.
i’m assuming you’re referring to global warming here, and yeah me too, i would prefer we didn’t end our civilization over some stupid shit like global warming, but i’m more concerned about stuff like dirty energy production, the shipping industry, environmental regulations, things that actually tend to have an effect, rather than like, company consumes lots of energy for a little bit.
BTW, recommend looking into the electrical infrastructure for china, they consume WAY more electricity than the US, and have vastly dirtier production. So if we’re going to complain about AI, go complain about chinese AI training instead.
Yes, and because it’s causing a massive increase in the consumption of electricity it’s causing lots of pollution.
https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/chinas-air-quality-policies-have-swifty-reduced-pollution-improved-life-expectancy/
🤔
again this is great, but can i have concrete numbers on this shit and not just some schizo ramblings telling me it’s “more than a city actually”
fun fact, if you google list of US cities, you’ll find there are about 300 of them. so using the same level of information you provided in your previous comment i can determine that AI power consumption, must be 1/300th and just a little bit more than that, of a national US city power consumption metric, this is ignoring most industry, and most rural consumption as well.
wow an irrelevant article on an irrelevant topic, sure do remember typing “china has really shitty air quality AS A RESULT OF ALL THE POWER CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION THEY HAVE” too bad i didn’t explicitly type:
instead, explicitly not mentioning the pollution issues associated with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption
oh wow, look at that, china consumes almost twice as much energy as the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
oh wow, if you look at the total percent, china blows literally every other country out of the water.
now lets have a look at power production stats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
looks like the US is consuming about 20% of all production from coal fired power production. And it looks like china is consuming about 60% of all production from coal fired power production.
In the article it directly tells you "the facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area last year.
I provided a link. Did you not see it?
Why are you talking to me this way? 🤔
Yeah, because we outsourced our industry to them. They consume that electricity making stuff for us. It’s all for external consumption. It’s real easy to reduce electricity consumption when you shut down your manufacturing capacity lol
Again, they make everything for everyone else. They’re the world’s factory. Just because a widget is manufactured in China doesn’t actually mean China is the sole country responsible for the emissions from manufacturing the widget. If they make a solar panel and then that solar panel is used in the US, there’s this neat little carbon accounting trick the US can do where it says that it reduced carbon emissions while not accounting for the carbon emitted from actually making the solar panel.
China has to keep increasing its base load of energy production to produce all of our shit for us. They’re kind of forced into this “all of the above” energy production system because they don’t have the capacity to actually transition.
Yet even so, new energy production capacity is not coming from coal. Why are we talking about this anyway? We were talking about how AI is consuming lots of energy, what the fuck does China have to do with it? China makes useful stuff with the energy they consume! AI makes bad art, bad articles, bad videos, bad music, and bad customer service bots. It’s garbage.
AI is just burning energy for nothing.
again, this is just a statement What even is a gigawatt here specifically? A gigawatt over the period of a week? A month? A year? 10 years? What’s the time frame we’re talking about here, what’s the real world implications of “facilities” are we talking a group of 10 data centers? What does this even mean? Are we talking about reactive power or real power?
Also to be clear, it looks like this is contract negotiation, not even listed power consumption. So it looks like we’re talking about what the grid is willing to supply at most at the utility hookup point. Not the actual consumption capability. It’s still technically a kind of consumption, but it’s the same as paying for gigabit speed internet, and then not using it at gigabit speed the entire time, you might be paying for that theoretical gigabit link, but unless you’re actually using it, it means nothing.
looking into the article some more, it looks like they even said as much. Over the course of a year it’s about 1GW. If we;re converting this into real world units, this is about 3 million watts a day. Which is still a useless unit because watts are measured over the course of a second. Interestingly converting it into seconds, a unit where watts actually makes sense, it seems like this is an average continual consumption, on the range of seconds, of about 30 watts, constantly. This is like, a light fixture with LED lights, running 24/7 over the period of a year. Your phone is literally comparable to this.
It looks like global energy consumption across the entire world for the year has been about 180,000 TWh To be clear, 1GW is a completely different order of magnitude compared to the global consumption that is the entire earth.
yeah no i saw it, but you never cited anything actually useful to your argument so i just assumed it was irrelevant, otherwise you would’ve included it, or at least mentioned it. But you didn’t.
because people just say shit and then expect it to win arguments, not understanding literally anything about how arguments work apparently.
To be clear, i mentioned a very true fact, which you then responded to with an entirely different, irrelevant, but also true fact. Do you expect me to pat you on the back for pointing out that the sky is blue after i solve cancer? There is a standard for making an argument, and that barely meets the standard for making a statement.
If you wanted to counter the fossil fuels point, you could’ve pointed to the fact that china has one of the largest and fastest growing renewable energy sectors, globally, which would’ve actually been relevant, and a pretty ok point to make.
like i try to be nice, but it’s really hard when people are literally just ignoring what you’re saying, shoving their fingers into their ears, and then mentioning something else that they like instead. It’s not even a conversation at that point, you’re discussing past the other person.
yeah, that’s generally how manufacturing economies tend to work. You could make the argument that AI in the US is equivalent to manufacturing industry in china for example.
oh, interesting, so you’re telling me it’s not actually the companies that are responsible for all of the pollution, but in fact it’s actually the consumers that buy the products, that enable the companies to then pollute the earth? Did i get that correct?
oh, see i thought we were concerned about like, the environmental effects of pollution on things like global warming from things like AI, which are primarily US based, and not actually a massive consumer of dirty energy compared to countries like china who mostly consume coal power, a very dirty source of energy, where you could very easily make significant changes to impact significant carbon emissions.
It’s almost like hyper-focusing on a technicality of a specific thing that happens to be negative is worse than focusing on the actual problem behind that negative. Weird.
oh interesting, so what about things like shein and temu, and fast fashion, and a lot of consumable electronics products that come straight from factories in china? Or is there a magic utility to these products, even though they are inevitably going to be waste product given enough time.
and you’re just using it incorrectly, if you burn fabric in a giant pile, it does little more than produce a lot of carbon, and create a little pile of ash, i guess we should delete the entire textiles industry under this basis.
so is Chinese manufacturing, since it’s using primarily dirty energy, compared to another country producing a similar thing using cleaner energy, it’s literally “creating carbon for nothing” Just stop buying Chinese steel. Simple as that.