I wonder what the power consumption of getting to the information in the summary is as a whole when using a regular search, clicking on multiple links, finding the right information and extracting the relevant parts. Including the expenditures of energy by the human performing the task and everything that surrounds the activity.
There are real concerns surrounding AI, I wonder if this is truly one of them or if it’s just poorly researched ragebait.
I’m surprised it’s only 10x. Running a prompt though a llm takes quite a bit of energy, so I guess even the regular searches take more energy than I thought.
Same. I think I’ve read that a single GPT-4 instance runs on a 128 GPU cluster, and ChatGPT can still take something like 30s to finish a long response. A H100 GPU has a TDP of 700w. Hard to believe that uses only 10x more energy than a search that takes milliseconds.
Summary:
- AI’s rapid growth has transformed digital life, but its significant environmental impact remains largely unchecked.
- AI-powered features can consume up to 10 times more electricity than traditional searches, potentially equating to a country’s power usage.
- The proliferation of energy-intensive data centers powering AI is outpacing the electric grid’s capacity, forcing utilities to maintain fossil fuel plants for reliability.
- Estimates suggest AI could account for 9% of U.S. energy demand by 2030, substantially contributing to climate change.
- Lack of industry transparency and mandatory reporting makes quantifying AI’s full environmental toll difficult.
- Tech companies negotiate discounted utility rates, shifting costs to ratepayers and reducing incentives for energy efficiency.
- Government regulation has been slow and industry-influenced, focusing on hypothetical future risks over current, tangible harms.
- The burden of AI’s environmental impact disproportionately falls on Global South communities where data centers are located.
- Tech companies resist mandatory disclosures, prioritizing profits over sustainability while the public bears the physical costs.
Just curious. Do your summaries are made by you, human?
Used AI to summarize article about misuse of AI.
Genius.
Using AI the correct way 👌
If these guys gave a shit they’d focus on light based chips, which are in very early stages, but will save a lot of power.
you mean the IBM light chips and bus ?
The annoying part is how many mainstream tech companies have ham-fisted AI into every crevice of every product. It isn’t necessary and I’m not convinced it results in a “better search result” for 90% of the crap people throw into Google. Basic indexed searches are fine for most use cases.
As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than “agile”, which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.
Before AI it was IoT. Nobody asked for an Internet connected toaster or fridge…
I always felt like I was alone in this thinking. I think anyone with a bit of a security mindset don’t want everything connected, besides it makes them more expensive and easier to break.
It definitely has to walk in the desert for a while. I know multiple people who like it for some stuff. Like cameras and managing air conditioning.
I would point out that Google has been “carbon neutral” with it’s data centers for quite some time, unlike others who still rape the environment ahem AWS.
carbon neutral is when you don’t emit it in the first place, not by paying someone else to promise to make up for it later.
Its not even hidden, people just give zero fucks about how their magical rectangle works and get mad if you try t9 tell them.
I build AI for a living, and I can tell you that generative AI is a crock of shit.
I use generative ai sometimes, and I find it useful for certain usecases.
Are you just following the in ternate hate bandwagon or do you really think it’s no good?
Generative AI has yet to actually solve a real business problem, let alone a problem that consumers actually have.
It’s creating content that floods internet spaces and workplace wikis faster than we can sort it.
AI-generated content is basically plastic: disposable, cheaper and worse quality than alternatives (human labor), and once it enters the ocean (the internet) will require humans to manually fish out and dispose of.
Wow AI is just so amazing
whats up with these shit ass titles? It’s not even REMOTELY hidden, it takes two fucking seconds of googling to figure this shit out.
The entire AI industry was dependent on GPU hardware manufacturers, and nvidia is STILL back ordered (to my knowledge)
This is like saying that crypto has a hidden energy cost.
For you it might be clear. For the overwhelming majority of people, this is news. People don’t know shit about tech. Most would assume the AI thingy does its thing on the local computer.
It’s hidden in the sense that the normal user does not see the cost on their energy bill. You perform a search and get the result in milliseconds. That makes it easy to imagine that it’s just a minor operation. It’s not like driving a car and watching the the fuel gauge and see the consumption.
Of course one can research how much energy Google consumes and find out the background – IF you’re interested. But most people just use tech and do not question or even understand.
it’s hidden in the same sense that your closet is hidden.
Yet most people know they also have closets.
As long as we are talking about crypto, and I know this is shocking, turns out some people are using it for unsavory acts. It is okay if you want to sit down.
my brother in christ people are making child pornography using generative AI. Everything sucks and is awful.
I don’t know what you want from me. I think it was pretty clear I was talking about crypto and badmouthing it. I won’t touch the child pornography generative AI issue with a ten foot pole and Covid mask.
nothing, i’m just making the point that it doesnt matter what you look at, there’s terrible shit happening everywhere.
Some people? The vast majority of the crypto eco system is grifters and get-rich-quick rubes.
Perhaps you need a seat then. Lol
There’s cocaine on literally every US Dollar and that currency is backed by oil, relatively speaking crypto is cleaner
I am against the drug war and I think the cocaine thing was an urban legend. Also the US dollar is not backed up by oil.
The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.
Im against the war on drugs too. But speaking of drugs, weed is schedule 1, where Xanax is schedule 4 (low risk of abuse). It’s completely upside down and not accurate. That said, the harmfulness of the substance and being for or against the war on drugs is completely separate from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill. Money is the dirtiest thing in general, and by those metrics, the US Dollar is dirtier
The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.
Keep your story straight next time.
from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill.
Prove it.
92%, I may have used the word literally figuratively, but so does every other American
That’s the proof man, it’s literally on the bills. We can literally see it
Also, what do you mean keep my story straight next time? It’s not controversial at all that the US gets involved in military conflicts for oil or financial control (neorealism, neoliberalism). Oil is just one of the many incentives which makes the USD arguably dirty
92% == 100%
If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.
I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it’s out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I’ve tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I’ve used in years.
DDG has also gotten much worse since the introduction of AI features.
I haven’t had any problems myself.
In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn’t readily appear near the top of search. It’s made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.
To be fair, it was never “hidden” since all the top 5 decided that GPU was the way to go with this monetization.
Guess who is waiting on the other side of this idiocy with a solution? AMD with cheap FPGA that will do all this work at 10x the speed and similar energy reduction. At a massive fraction of the cost and hassle for cloud providers.
AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It’s immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
energy for a solution in search of a problem,
Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
Ah yes the classic it is useless and here is a use for it logic.
I take it you haven’t had to go through an AI chat bot for support before huh
I have and don’t see the relevance. The argument is that it is useless and then mentions a use case. If you want to say it’s crap I won’t argue the point but you can’t say X and ~X.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
There’s a sucker born every minute
Tell that to my wallet. I hold a little crypto and it’s down over 50%
And it’s only 10x more useless :)
This is terrible. Why don’t we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?
You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.
