HN Reader

The majority of comments seem to imply that if the future utility is uncertain or unknown, it is OK to disregard climate change implications.

HN discourse typically treats climate change as a non-negotiable absolutist issue.

Tech (understandably?), as opposed to auto, has a special carve out?

I guess the price of electricity will have to go up then

More than the residential use of some entire cities.

This is a misleading comparison. "AI data centers" aren't a residential use, they're much closer to an industrial one, and they should be considered on that basis.

In comparison, a 2007 report on the US Aluminum industry (https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/aluminu...) (aluminum is a particularly heavy user of electricity, since its main processes are electric-driven and not chemical/combustion like steel) notes that the US industry used 90e9 kWh/yr in 2003. That's 10GW of power on a continuous basis, comparable to the data center usage discussed in the article.

An exact comparison is more difficult because the article discusses a number of individual projects, without aggregating them over time.

Is this projected energy usage good? I don't know, but the statement that "AI will be as important to the United States as the aluminum industry" doesn't seem too outlandish.

When Alcoa built their aluminum plant in Tennessee in the early part of the 20th century they had to build a series of hydroelectric dams to power the plant. They were using far more power than nearby Knoxville.

The headline is clickbait. Nothing to see here.

This is kinda meaningless without knowing how much data goes through a given data center, and ultimately how many people-hours it ends up serving. A data center is just a concentrated processing center for many people's computing needs, so of course it's going to use a lot of power. If you removed the centralized data center and spread it out all over the world, that same amount of computing will be even less efficient, and use even more power, especially accounting for heating and cooling.

If the argument is that AI training is wasteful, well, yes it is, but it's also valuable enough that many people and billions of dollars want to keep doing it. And if they bring back enough nuclear, power won't really be an issue anyway. But whether it's concentrated in a data center, and whether a particular data center may end up using more energy than some random city, is completely irrelevant and really misleading as an absolute number instead of a ratio of energy consumption divided by usage.

Crypto currencies consume more than entire countries. AI has at least good uses compared to that. I have yet to come across a single good use-case. It will never offset the damage that is has done and is currently still doing. But I am still looking. Web3 is going great... maybe it is time to reduce the energy consumption that is only doing harm.

But at least Jerry can autocomplete his node script and ask it silly questions. What's the earth limited resources compared to that productivity boost.

Increased demand for, and investment in energy is what we need to get to abundant, cheap, green energy. Stop the stupid incrementalism (e.g., banning gas stoves), and jump to the solution. Or take off the mask and admit the real goal is deindustrialization.

I’m curious to see a detailed analysis on potential impacts to energy costs and how it changes the ROI on things like residential solar.

These articles never dive deep enough into the subject to make an informed decision. They just want us to be outraged by how much energy it uses then don’t even acknowledge the other consumers that use just as much or more.

Can we keep The Matrix out of training data? We don't want AI to see what the machines did there for an additional power source.

This is crypto scare all over again.

My answer is still the same you always have to do a cost benefit analysis.

AI is many times more valuable than the energy it consumes and thus:

AI doesn't have an energy problem, energy have an AI problem.

I don't know how anyone can look at situations like this and claim letting investors run society is going to yield any rational result for our species.

People who write about this stuff refuse to believe how much energy an oil refinery or a chlorine factory consumes. But not one single journalist in the history of America has ever written a flashy headline like "Chloralkali process consumes more energy than thirty entire states" even though that headline would be completely accurate.

An "average" Qatari consumes 1160x more energy than a Somalian. An average American consumes 84x more energy than a Nepali, and so on... [1]

There will be 10 billion of us on this planet by ~ 2050. [2]

We might need more energy efficient AI, if everyone is joining the AI party... Please tell me that someone on this hallowed site is working on this. :-)

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/energy-consumpt...

[2] https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicator...

The brain uses 20% of the human body's energy.

As machines become intelligent, maybe AI will account for 20% of global energy consumption?

I think it will move in a way that they have to provide their own power.

Who cares? If it brings benefits to the people who paid for the service, duh!

Yeah, whatever - most of us like a president who does not believe climate change is real and thus this topic does not need to be addressed. Drill, baby, drill!

:'(