this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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there’s this type of reply guy on fedi lately who does the “well actually querying LLMs only happens in bursts and training is much more efficient than you’d think and nvidia says their gpus are energy-efficient” thing whenever the topic comes up
and meanwhile a bunch of major companies have violated their climate pledges and say it’s due to AI, they’re planning power plants specifically for data centers expanded for the push into AI, and large GPUs are notoriously the part of a computer that consumes the most power and emits a ton of heat (which notoriously has to be cooled in a way that wastes and pollutes a fuckton of clean water)
but the companies don’t publish smoking gun energy usage statistics on LLMs and generative AI specifically so who can say
On one hand, yes let's get annoyed at companies for using alot of energy. On the other hand, we have known our energy needs will be exponential for decades yet we haven't tackled the issue. We still burn fossil fuels, despite having the ability to not do that.
Being angry at companies for building a new technology yet not being angry at the government and NIMBY fuckwads is a little... Backwards imo.
Electric energy needs are not "exponential". They've actually been flat in the US. Other developed countries are similar:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php
Thanks for proving me wrong, this actually helps my argument however that LLMs and crypto aren't the boogeyman these people claim it to be, and that it's just more likely a distracting talking point to stop people talking about issues that actually matter
They are a waste of energy. No one actually used cryptocurrency, so it's not a large part of actual usage. It's still wasteful.
LLMs are stupidly being trained on a lot of irrelevant data, which is causing electricity usage to increase when it should decrease. A simple Google search shouldn't take that much energy.