The comments section reminds me of The Dead Great-Grandfather Test
[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.
Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.
But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.
This is a fallacy. People 100 years like your great grandfather ago solved problems they had 100 years ago. People today solve problems they have today.
Basically "Don't live beyond our collective means" = "Die".
Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.
I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".
I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.
Great writeup! I've done some work on Codecarbon [1] in the past, it's a pretty standard tool for measuring ML/AI workload emissions, it would be awesome to have your findings contributed to that project as well.
The reasoning effort knob is becoming a really important variable regarding how much impact AI models will have on energy consumption. Medium and max can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude in their token consumption. We also have to consider the amplification of compute demand that occurs by way of the tool calls themselves. Tokens are mostly a constant cost thing, but how they are interpreted can mean the difference between a 5 minute cpu bound operation and a 50uS cached database lookup. At some point, the CPU is going to become the bottleneck again.
And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.
I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.
How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?
The relative resource consumption of meat vs. plants is well established. Chicken is much more resource efficient than beef if you want to eat meat but consume less resources, and mussels are even more efficient.
That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?
“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”
0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.
Most people in the West eat too much meat. Red meat in particular is a group 2 carcinogen according to the WHO, so the body isn't meant to consume a lot of it. Yet many people eat meat every day, because "It's not a complete meal without it" or "I somehow need 10 times more protein than people a millenium ago while claiming to eat like them".
Worry not, AI people! Greenhouse gas exemptions will be made for the future of work, maths and art, the salvation of the humankind, the genie that is out of the bottle, etc, if only at the expense of taxing your and your dog's fart.
One of the reasons to build them near populated areas is that it makes it easier to repurpose waste heat to, for example, heat houses in colder climates.
This is why people in left wing areas need to oppose datacenters bans. Regulate them. Require green energy investments that more than offset their load. Use some of that flowing AI money for the betterment of society.
You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
Datacenter wouldn't stop, and there would be some country or area which allows it. Unless they regulate the entire world, we should focus on lowering CO2 globally, and that means allowing datacenter in your neighour if your energy is better.
We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.
Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.
Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.
This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?
They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.
There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.
I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.
[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.
Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.
But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-and...
Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.
I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".
I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.
[1] https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
That will put some sweat on some brows :)
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.
How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?
What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...
“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”
0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.
Power connections.
How much of the AI generated content is actually useful, how much useless, how much harmful?
This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?
They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.
My opinion that reality should take precedent over feel good lies?
By what?
You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.
1. Hydropower 40%
2. Nuclear 27%
3. Wind 22%
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...