The cost of "AI"

Sporky

dano said:

Can they cook the lasagna in the data centre ? Just thinking, but the more sttupid questions people ask AI, the crisper the lasagna gets.

There are already systems that recover waste heat from data centres and use it to heat homes.

ThePrettyDamned

I do think there is a lot of alarmist AI stuff out there, but deep fakes can be damaging and some people will accept them at face value (for example, it's not uncommon in some parts of the world for deep fakes to be used to put someone else's face in a porno to discredit them - even if the results are a bit crude the effect is real on victims, who are often ostracised). 

Overall, I'm pretty Pro-AI, but like all technology, we need to make sure we keep up education and make sure people are aware of what it does, how it does it, how to understand it and how to protect from it. I don't think it's the beginning of the end, but hopefully it'll accelerate a lot of solutions to very real problems. 

Axe_meister

Sustainable IT is a massive subject.
Just think of an image that may go viral. Taken on a phone with a 50mpx camera. Size is about 20MB.
If it reaches 1M people that's over 19TB of data being transmitted.
Who these days reduces an image for upload. 
We do our best by running our DCs by purchasing from sustainable power companies with a plan to be carbon free by 2030, but then again for every GW we consume from a finite resource others will have to buy from non sustainable energy companies.

digitalscream

Axe_meister said:

Sustainable IT is a massive subject.
Just think of an image that may go viral. Taken on a phone with a 50mpx camera. Size is about 20MB.
If it reaches 1M people that's over 19TB of data being transmitted.
Who these days reduces an image for upload. 

That's entirely down to developers - it's the height of insanity for a system to just store and regurgitate that original image. What will usually happen is that the 20MB image is reduced to several sizes which are appropriate for the eventual use case (display within the website or app), and the original is discarded. Those 20MB+ images will actually be transmitted as <1MB images (in most cases, even less than that - thumbnails and images displayed inline within a timeline will generally be about 100kb, max), and for high-traffic sites where it could go viral they'll be cached at the edge, geographically close to the people who're downloading them.

Of course, those developers aren't doing it for sustainability reasons, but rather speed (and to save on storage). The end result satisfies both requirements, though, for the cost of a one-off conversion that happens in the background.

Stratavarious

digitalscream said:

Stratavarious said:

Sporky said:

Also 23,000 households is about 0.015% of the total in the US. Residential use is about 38% of the overall total.

So AI is using 0.006% of US total consumption.

Less than 1% of 1%.

They were talking about one chatbot today.

Globally 3% of energy currently goes to data centres and is predicted to go to 4-5% by end of the decade,  AI may double that as it’s embedded into more things.  So it’s not an unreasonable estimate.


https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-bf08-952fdd62118a/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/global-data-center-electricity-use-to-double-by-2026-report/

In the US, which the report said is home to 33 percent of the world’s data centers, consumption is expected to rise from 200TWh in 2022 to 260TWh in 2026, some six percent of all power use across the country.

The situation is more acute in Ireland where, by 2026, data centers could account for 32 percent of all power consumption due to a high number of new builds planned. This compares to 17 percent in 2022. 

It's worth bearing in mind that most datacentre energy use is nothing to do with AI services, and everything to do with data storage and cooling. This is what I discovered when I built the 220TB archiving server - the main cost wasn't the hardware or the CPU/GPU (~180W), it was the drives themselves (~400W), the hardware to run them (~30-50W) and keeping them cool (another 40W). And that was using an old, horrifically inefficient CPU to do the job.

Ultimately, AI is highly unlikely to make a significant difference to that on a global scale. On the other hand, we're on the verge of much higher-density spinning rust storage coming to the market (think in terms of 50-100TB on a single drive, so a single disk can replace 4-5 existing units), as well as high-capacity SSDs that use a fraction of the power and require almost no cooling (comparitively-speaking).

The report covers the scope of data centre energy use and improving efficiencies… it’s just that there is more demand coming. We keep consuming and we have to hope that the outputs overall are not too trivial.

And FYI, I do work consulting re. AI in industry applications among other things and my daughter working in genetics uses AI and trains learning tools to model and analyse experiments. There are plenty of very useful and potentially massive advances but also a vast and growing infantalising use which the facebooks of the world love. Mediating what we read, see, think and believe we like or know to be true.

After a few days of AI workshops in a business I find I have a desperate need to play a gig or visit an art gallery to remember what it is to be a thinking independent human being.  Give it a generation and the kids will simply go where their device tells them they will be happy. We will be the robots.   

It is already happening with instagrammable locations.. algorithms driving hordes of people to the same spot,… no discovery and adventure left. Dehumanised.  Humans are weak and easily influenced and AI is strong at exploiting that.  Our resilience of mind is what is at risk. 

Tech is not 1984, it’s Brave New World.

This is so sad.