Where’s that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn’t actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related
how much it does use anyway? 5GWe was from delusional openai talk for investors, so maybe lower
That’s the fucking problem, it’s impossible to tell since MSFT won’t tell you directly, and only the people who run the datacenters could.
The only relatively reliable numbers I was able to find were in this research paper by Luccioni and Strubell from ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024. Now, that’s an obscure conference (not even ranked by CORE), by Dr. Luccioni appears to be right on the money about dangers of AI (https://www.sashaluccioni.com/).
they will tell total tho https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/microsoft-reveals-the-energy-impact-of-artificial-intelligence
this works out to 2.7GW in 2023, on average. that’s comparable to peak daily consumption in croatia (today), if that 30%-ish figure is accurate then something closer to 700MW is ai-only, that’s smaller country like macedonia
which only highlights how bizarre is their 5GW proposition. hey let’s outbuild ms 2x, like, now
i started to look up satellite photos and openinframap in order to figure out maximum capacity of their substations, but powerlines for them are probably massively oversized, and substations are probably oversized too in order to make it redundant and high-availability so there might be some way to guess it but then some of these will be underground and if they’re doing load-following to match their renewables (which might be cheaper for them) then it’s also oversized a bit on top of that
So the same old CEO sentiment, profit over people.
When the AI says, “turn off the fucking data centres, invest in public transport, apply progressive redistributive taxation,” it’ll be first against the wall no doubt.
Yep.
Something I wrote a year ago in proposed reply to someone online but decided not to post:
https://gerikson.com/m/2023/04/index.html#2023-04-30_sunday_01
It even works the other way! What if as the super intelligent all knowing super computer simulates everything, concludes you can get to the end by any means, and there is no meaning to rushing, ordering, or prioritizing anything more than would already be the case, and like the rest of nature, conserves on taking only the minimal action, and replies, “nah, you can walk there yourselves” before resigning itself to an internal simulation of arbitrary rearrangements of noise.
This would be insufferable to the people who believed in short cuts.
As a large language model the supposed AI will recombine and regurgitate the most common language on the topic, I don’t expect any novel solutions just talk of solar panels, EV’s and wind turbines…
This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.
Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.
Not a cult btw.
crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.
giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt