This doesn’t really track with companies commissioning power plants to support power usage of AI training demand
Comment on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
sbv@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.
Maaji@lemmynsfw.com 1 day ago
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 22 hours ago
It does if you consider that they are actually building them to support power usage of datacenters. And that datacenters are used for a lot more than just AI training.
Maaji@lemmynsfw.com 22 hours ago
Oh, sorry I forgot that data centers were just invented. Thanks for the reminder!
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 21 hours ago
No you’re right, they built the first one, all the demand that could ever be needed is covered by it, and there’s no reason to ever build any more.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The article also mentions each enquiry also evaporates 0.26 of a milliliter of water… or “about five drops”.
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 23 hours ago
I wonder how many people clutching their pearls over this also eat meat…
Sxan@piefed.zip 22 hours ago
I'll bet you're a stinking water drinker yourself. Probably a liter or two a day. And probably luxuriating in clean water when you could be using your body to recycling toilet water.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Thank you! I skimmed for that and gave up.
ganksy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In addition:
This report was also strictly limited to text prompts, so it doesn’t represent what’s needed to generate an image or a video.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
There are zero downsides when mentally associating an energy hog with “1 second of use time of the device that is routinely used for minutes at a time.”
xkcd.com/1035/
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, it turns out that I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.
Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.
victorz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You should probably not eat things because of how much calories they have or don’t have, but because of how much of their nutrients you need, and how much they lack other, dangerous shit. Also eat slowly until you’re full and no more. Also move a lot.
We shouldn’t need calculators for this healthy lifestyle.
The problem with needing to know which foods are healthy is because… well, we forgot.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave it sometimes then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of certain other desserts (like soft drinks) is relatively high. I’d much rather eat the pint of ice cream than drink six cans of coke, but the calories are approximately equivalent and the ice cream is probably healthier in other ways.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
On a “respond to an individual query” level, yeah it’s not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There’s also way too many “hidden” queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.
All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.
Furthermore, that’s the median value–the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There’s a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there’s a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.
null@lemmy.nullspace.lol 23 hours ago
But do you actually know how much that is? Or are you just assuming it’s a lot.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Individually you’re spot on. Your AI use doesn’t matter. But, and this is where companies tend to leave off, when you take into account how many millions (or billions) of times something is done in a day (like AI prompts), then that’s when it genuinely matters.
To me, this is akin to companies trying to pass the blame to consumers when it’s the companies themselves who are the biggest climate offenders.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.