On the plus side, the industry is rapidly moving towards locally-run AI models specifically because they don’t want to purchase and run fleets of these absurd things or any other expensive hardware.
The tragic irony of the kind of misinformed article this is linking is that the server farms that would be running this stuff are fairly efficient. The water is reused and recycled, the heat is often used for other applications. Because wasting fewer resources is cheaper than wasting more resources.
But all those locally-run models on laptop CPUs and desktop GPUs? That’s grid power being turned into heat and vented into a home (probably with air conditioning on).
The weird AI panic, driven by an attempt to repurpose the popular anti-crypto arguments whether they matched the new challenges or not, is going to PR this tech into wasting way more energy than it would otherwise by distributing it over billions of computer devices paid by individual users. And nobody is going to notice or care.
I do hate our media landscape sometimes.
If I make a gas engine with 100% heat efficiency but only run it in my backyard, do the greenhouse gases not count because it’s so efficient? Of course they do. The high efficiency of a data center is great, but that’s not what the article laments. The problem it’s calling out is the absurdly wasteful nature of why these farms will flourish: to power excessively animated programs to feign intelligence, vainly wasting power for what a simple program was already addressing.
It’s the same story with lighting. LEDs seemed like a savior for energy consumption because they were so efficient. Sure they save energy overall (for now), but it prompted people to multiply the number of lights and total output by an order of magnitude simply because it’s so cheap. This stems a secondary issue of further increasing light pollution and intrusion.
Greater efficiency doesn’t make things right if it comes with an increase in use.
For one thing, it’s absolutely not true that what these apps provide is the same as what we had. That’s another place where the AI grifters and the AI fearmongers are both lying. This is not a 1:1 replacement for older tech. Not on search, where LLM queries are less reliable at finding facts and being accurate but better at matching fuzzy searches without specific parameters. Not with image generation, obviously. Not with tools like upscaling, frame interpolation and so on.
For another, some of the numbers being thrown around are not realistic or factual, are not presented in context or are part of a power increase trend that was already ongoing with earlier applications. The average high end desktop PC used to run on 250W in the 90s, 500W in the 2000s. Mine now runs at 1000W. Playing a videogame used to burn as much power as a couple of lightbulbs, now it’s the equivalent of turning on your microwave oven.
The argument that we are burning more power because we’re using more compute for entertainment purposes is not factually incorrect, but it’s both hyperbolic (some of the cost estimates being shared virally are deliberate overestimates taken out of context) and not inconsistent with how we use other computer features and have used other computer features for ages.
The only reason you’re so mad about me wasting some energy asking an AI to generate a cute picture but not at me using an AI to generate frames for my videogame is that one of those is a viral panic that maps nicely into the viral panic about crypto people already had and the other is a frog that has been slow burning for three decades so people don’t have a reason to have an opinion about it.
This article is one of the most down-to-earth, realistic observations on technology I’ve ever read. Utterly striking as well.
Go Read This Article.
Eh it’s not that great.
One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.
Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that’s natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There’s no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.
If you ignore the two fastest growing methods of power generation, which coincidentally are also carbon free, cheap and scalable, the future does indeed look bleak. But solar and wind do exist…
The rest is purely a policy rant. Yes, if productivity increases we need some way of distributing the gains from said productivity increase fairly across the population. But jumping to the conclusion that, since this is a challenge to be solved, the increase in productivity is bad, is just stupid.
So if each GPU takes 1,800W, isn’t that the equivalent of what a handheld hair dryer consumes?
Innovation is a scam, it breeds endless bullshit we keep buying and talking about like 10 year olds with their latest gimmick.
Look, they replaced this button with A TOUCHSCREEN!
Look! This artficial face has PORES NOW!
LOOK! This coffee machine costs 2000$ now and uses PROPRIATARY SUPEREXPENSIVE CAPSULES!!
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level. It’s much less gadgety.
You’re not wrong. We’ve reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left… and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. “Standing on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. And yet we have a corrupt “patent” system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.
I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.
As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.
Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.
Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.
It’s bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.
Capitalism is a tool. Please let’s grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It’s like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?
Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it’s bad for the people.
Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn’t.
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.
Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these “what if manual labor but fascade of robots!” gimmicks aren’t improvements in engineering. They’re an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.
Even setting aside you believe these aren’t just a line up of mechanical turks controlled from a sweetshop in the Philippines, their work product isn’t anything approaching good. Its just cheap.
THE MORE YOU BUY
