Comment on Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 14 hours ago
Actual interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down AI response time? A lot of the time you get an instant response from an LLM, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don’t need it that urgently.
Another interesting question:
How much energy and resources would we save by simply slowing down Ai usage? A lot of the time people make unnecessary prompts or receive unhelpful generated text, and sure, it looks impressive, but most of the time you don’t need it at all.
At scale? None. If we assume that (a) the number of queries are constant (i.e. that the slow response doesn’t drive away users) and (b) that the efficiency is the same whether it’s fast or slow, then having computers that take longer to calculate each response just means you need to have more of them working in parallel to service the demand.
Now, for a home user running AI locally, you could maybe save some energy by using more efficient silicon since you only need it to process one query at a time (assuming lower-spec parts actually are more efficient, which may or may not be the case), but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.
Maybe you wanted to answer to the original comment? I was mostly ironizing it and mentioning a reduction in overall usage.
I disagree. I think the biggest consumers of AI currently use it for work, and depending on the type of work I think very fast ai == more customers.
Lulzagna@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
The majority of energy consumed is for training the AI models, not providing output from those models.
This means the water consumption is not tied to usage and prompts. Also it means resource consumption to train models is temporary, relative to the model.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Oh ok. So they’ll put the water back once the models are trained?
Patches@ttrpg.network 14 hours ago
No they will just train more models. Do you ever pay attention?
The line must always go up. NO DOWN.