Perhaps it’s part of some effort to counter the bad reputation ai has been getting on the high energy demands? I grew up to be doubtful of any seemingly inoffensive news article out there
Comment on AI helps lighten the load on the electric grid – without skimping on people’s energy use.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 months ago
Does the sheer amount of claims that boil down to “chrust us” in this text feel fishy for anyone else? They claimed a lot of stuff, but the only thing resembling a description on how the system works boils down to
It automatically collects data on how people use energy in their homes and identifies opportunities to charge and discharge home battery storage.
You don’t need machine learning for that. Unless they’re using the vague term “artificial intelligence” for something else; this vagueness also smells fishy to be honest.
nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 3 months ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 months ago
Perhaps. But they suck at it - people might be willing to suspend their disbelief and look over small issues when they’re overexcited, but AI’s phase of overexcitement is long gone, they’d need to show something more concrete to counter the bad rep. And poorly made propaganda is bound to backfire.
IllNess@infosec.pub 3 months ago
The term AI is used for everything. If a company is selling a watch with an alarm feature, they would call that AI.
Power companies are already doing what they are doing now.
What exactly is this more than averaging out numbers in a database separated by time ranges, then getting a numbers from the load on the grid?
helenslunch@feddit.nl 3 months ago
They mention things like “learning” thermostats, which are completely useless devices, considering if I had the exact same schedule every day I would just program it accordingly. Instead it annoys me by constantly being wrong because it’s trying to “guess” when I’m going to be home.
I assume this system will be similarly annoying.
over_clox@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Plus absolutely no mention of how much energy the Merlin AI servers will consume, when AI server farms are known to consume enough energy to power a village or small city…
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 months ago
This, too. With some numbers they could even reason “look, this system demands X% energy, but you’re predicted to economise Y% in the long run, and Y > X”. But there’s nothing like that in the text.