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7 months agoOn Lemmy:
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Challenge Defeatism. Resist Doomerism
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023
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2·7 months agoSo, for contrast I’m going to shamelessly copy-paste an interesting post I found on Reddit recently. Make of it what you will:
AI is significantly less pollutive compared to humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
Published in Nature, which is peer reviewed and highly prestigious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal
AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than humans.
Data centers that host AI are cooled with a closed loop. The water doesn’t even touch computer parts, it just carries the heat away, which is radiated elsewhere. It does not evaporate or get polluted in the loop. Water is not wasted or lost in this process.
The most common type of water-based cooling in data centers is the chilled water system. In this system, water is initially cooled in a central chiller, and then it circulates through cooling coils. These coils absorb heat from the air inside the data center. The system then expels the absorbed heat into the outside environment via a cooling tower. In the cooling tower, the now-heated water interacts with the outside air, allowing heat to escape before the water cycles back into the system for re-cooling.
Source: https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/
Data centers do not use a lot of water. Microsoft’s data center in Goodyear uses 56 million gallons of water a year. The city produces 4.9 BILLION gallons per year just from surface water and, with future expansion, has the ability to produce 5.84 billion gallons (source: https://www.goodyearaz.gov/government/departments/water-services/water-conservation). It produces more from groundwater, but the source doesn’t say how much. Additionally, the city actively recharges the aquifer by sending treated effluent to a Soil Aquifer Treatment facility. This provides needed recharged water to the aquifer and stores water underground for future needs. Also, the Goodyear facility doesn’t just host AI. We have no idea how much of the compute is used for AI. It’s probably less than half.
gpt-4 used 21 billion petaflops of compute during training (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/artificial-intelligence-training-computation) and the world uses 1.1 zetaflop per second (https://market.us/report/computing-power-market/ per second as flops is flop per second). So from these numbers (21 * 109 * 1015) / (1.1 * 1021 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365) gpt-4 used 0.06% of the world’s compute per year. So this would also only be 0.06% of the water and energy used for compute worldwide. That’s the equivalent of 5.3 hours of time for all computations on the planet, being dedicated to training an LLM that hundreds of millions of people use every month.
Using it after it finished training costs HALF as much as it took to train it: https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/global/en/documents/eotm/a-severe-case-of-covidia-prognosis-for-an-ai-driven-us-equity-market.pdf
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Image generators only use about 2.9 W of electricity per image, or 0.2 grams of CO2 per image: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.16863
For reference, a good gaming computer can use over 862 Watts per hour with a headroom of 688 Watts: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-much-power-does-my-pc-use/
One AI image generated creates the same amount of carbon emissions as about 7.7 tweets (at 0.026 grams of CO2 each, totaling 0.2 grams for both). There are 316 billion tweets each year and 486 million active users, an average of 650 tweets per account each year: https://envirotecmagazine.com/2022/12/08/tracking-the-ecological-cost-of-a-tweet/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x
ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes” for 13.6 BILLION annual visits plus API usage (source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-most-popular-ai-tools/). that’s 442,000 visits per household, not even including API usage.
From this estimate (https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/understanding-flops-per-token-estimates-from-openais-scaling-laws/23133), the amount of FLOPS a model uses per token should be around twice the number of parameters. Given that LLAMA 3.1 405b spits out 28 tokens per second (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-4), you get 22.7 teraFLOPS (2 * 405 billion parameters * 28 tokens per second), while a gaming rig’s RTX 4090 would give you 83 teraFLOPS.
Everything consumes power and resources, including superfluous things like video games and social media. Why is AI not allowed to when other, less useful things can?
In 2022, Twitter created 8,200 tons in CO2e emissions, the equivalent of 4,685 flights between Paris and New York. https://envirotecmagazine.com/2022/12/08/tracking-the-ecological-cost-of-a-tweet/
Meanwhile, GPT-3 (which has 175 billion parameters, almost 22x the size of significantly better models like LLAMA 3.1 8b) only took about 8 cars worth of emissions (502 tons of CO2e) to train from start to finish: https://truthout.org/articles/report-on-chatgpt-models-emissions-offers-rare-glimpse-of-ais-climate-impacts/
By the way, using it after it finished training costs HALF as much as it took to train it: https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/global/en/documents/eotm/a-severe-case-of-covidia-prognosis-for-an-ai-driven-us-equity-market.pdf
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7·7 months ago
It looks really cool, mate. Nice purchase. 👍
Just went on ebay to check the prices of these things and…damn…
👉😎👉
All of which should be done by human beings. Period.
Currently, maybe. But technology is fantastic at accuracy, better than humans in many regards. Gemini might have a way to go before it gets there, but it or its successors will get there and it’s moving fast.
Productivity is irrelevant here
I’m not sure it is. Productivity also refers to efficiency of services. If AI can make the services of the National Archives more productive for its staff and/or the public then surely that’s a good thing?
🎵 Tesla Optimus! Humans in disguise! 🎵
Second recommendation for Affinity Photo as a Photoshop replacement. 👍
Oh for sure. How we regulate AI (including how we power it) is really important, definitely.
Typical lack of nuance on the Internet, sadly. Everything has to be Bad or Good. Black or White. AI is either The best thing ever™ or The worst thing ever™. No room for anything in between. Considering negative news generates more clicks, you can see why the media tend to take the latter approach.
I also think much of the hate is just people jumping on the AI = bad band-wagon. Does it have issues? Absolutely. Is it perfect? Far from it. But the constant negativity has gotten tired. There’s a lot of fascinating discussion to be had around AI, especially in the art world, but God forbid you suggest it’s anything but responsible for the total collapse of civilisation as we know it…
2·9 months agoI felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of bank accounts suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly emptied.
7·10 months agoFascinating article!
This is for EU countries only. UK details here: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/countries/united_kingdom for anyone interested.
Man, Brink had so much promise…
Maybe, but we can certainly help by, amongst many other things, not advertising AI Nude Apps on Instagram. Ultimately what we shouldn’t be doing is blaming the victims by implying they are somehow at fault for having the audacity to upload pictures of themselves to the Internet.
It’s about consent. If you have no problem with people jerking off to your pictures, fine, but others do.
If you don’t want people to jerk off to your photos, don’t upload any. It happens with and without these apps.
You get that that opinion is pretty much the same as those who say if she didn’t want to be harrassed she shouldn’t have worn such provocative clothing!?
How about we allow people to upload whatever pictures they want and try to address the weirdos turning them into porn without consent, rather than blaming the victims?
Excellent news.
Sequel to Alyx?