Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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An interesting topic but the article has virtually no information on it and what was there was unsourced and confusing. Maybe I'm just tired and not seeing it but damn, the taking 50 Belgiuns to the moon comparison really got me confused. I agree in general though, new technologies take energy and we need to decarbonise our energy generation as quickly as possible.
I'd actually be really interested in an actual deep dive into this topic though. What kind of tasks are people using these assistants for and how does energy use of an assistant compare with how people would do that before? I'm sure it's more energy intensive but it'd be interesting to understand more at least for me.
I agree that the article is a bit confusing, but we can't keep increasing energy consumption and hope decarbonization will fix it.
From an environmental point of view energy is never free. Also as long as we still use fossil fuels, any new usage of renewable (e.g. run AI on solar panels) is energy that could have been use to replace fossil usage.
Energy consumption has a dark underbelly of rare earth mineral consumption that is often just swept under the rug of shiny new thing. Ooh.
What do you propose, exactly? We have the technology right now to decarbonise our grid, it's even the sensible move economically now. Are you saying we should all stop having kids and building anything new that uses electricity? I'm assuming that's not your position but that's what I took from reading your comment.
Simply be mindful of our energy usage, and not just rely on decarbonization. We need both because decarbonization will not happen overnight.
Historically, worldwide our production of renewable have kept growing, the percentage have been growing, but fossil fuels usage have also kept growing.
Now we get a new technology that is using even more energy, maybe we should work on energy efficiency and use that tech sparingly instead of building more data centers so incels can get their voice chat AI girlfriend, and say "we'll just install more solar panels and windmills".
Sure but... what do you propose? Saying be mindful of our energy use isn't actionable. Are you saying we should cap energy use and have a bidding system for industries who want to use new capacity, have a carbon price so industries are encouraged to use non carbon producing energy? I still don't understand what you're suggesting. Or maybe if you think entertainment is a waste of energy we should ban non educational use of video on the internet as I'm sure that is an insane amount of energy use worldwide.
How much energy do you think gets used by a computer that costs $700,000 per day to run?
https://earth.org/environmental-impact-chatgpt/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/chatgpt-cost-to-operate/
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/13/chatgpt-and-generative-ai-are-booming-but-at-a-very-expensive-price.html
I have no idea, that's kind of my point. I'm not trying to argue that it's not much, or that it's a lot, or that it's worth it or not, just saying I have no idea and neither that article nor any of the ones you linked gave me the answer.
I think it's an important consideration, so I'd love more information but it seems that it's not available. Maybe it's hard to calculate because things like the energy used and exact amount of compute are trade secrets or something, I don't know. It'd be nice to know though.
From earth.org: “Data centres are typically considered black box compared to other industries reporting their carbon footprint; thus, while researchers have estimated emissions, there is no explicit figure documenting the total power used by ChatGPT. The rapid growth of the AI sector combined with limited transparency means that the total electricity use and carbon emissions attributed to AI are unknown, and major cloud providers are not providing the necessary information.”