Let’s have a round of slow claps for the tech industry.
First the “whole ass country of energy use to make fake money” that is bitcoin and now this?
Lovely.
This is a bad article, with a misleading headline.
It shows no direct connection between the two, it just talks about how AI models are less power efficient than search engines, and then talks about how all industries including normal, non AI data centers, manufacturing, etc, are all increasing power usage.
“I’ve cut out these goatees made of felt for us all to wear until we can grow real ones.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fuck this “AI” nonsense, the techbros shoving it into everything, and the Bitcoin cryptobros that came before them.
I don’t understand, clean nuclear power has never been easier. Why not just build some current gen nuke plants?
As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isn’t a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.
I think it’s fair to predict energy consumption will continue to rise. With that timescale, it’s basically “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. Doesn’t solve the immediate issue, but if we keep not starting new nuclear projects, it’s going to remain an issue forever.
Oh, I totally agree – didn’t mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is what’s happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of what’s being brought up this year:
That’s an amazing chart!
It takes a long time to get a nuclear plant up and running. While it would be great to replace coal plants with nuclear, it wouldn’t help with all of the power being wasted on AI right now.
Time…
And a lot of concrete.
It takes a long time to see the climate gains from a nuclear reactor.
Hell, depending on size it can take a decade or longer to finish curing, and part of curing is releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
I always bring up waste disposal, and always get waved away.
Nuclear waste isnt that big of an issue.
That part is kind of overblown.
Hell, for nuclear waste from naval nuclear reactors, I’m pretty sure we still sell it to France. I know we did up to at least a decade ago. They just refine it again and keep using it.
If it’s radioactive nuclear waste, that means it’s still radioactive.
All you gotta do is get rid of the non radioactive bits and it’s fuel again. By the time you can’t do it anymore due to prohibitive cost to gain ratio, it’s not a big problem to get rid of it, because it’s not that radioactive
The above comment is an example of this getting waved away.
Yes, because if you read their previous comment you’ll see their primary concern is the CO2 released by curing concrete that is the equivalent of running a coal plant for DOZENS of seconds.
I mean yeah…
Because that part should be…
I mean, statistically speaking I’m probably the only person that will see this thread that had the US government drop over six figures on teaching nuclear engineering…
But feel to do some googling about reusing spent fuel to verify for yourself.
This is the part that has always confused me. Radioactive “waste” should either be radioactive enough that it can continue to be used in some capacity, or it’s inert enough that it’s not too complicated to just bury it, given the relatively small scale. I guess I assumed that there must have been a large gap between being useful and being inert and that must have been the problem with managing waste, but if spent fuel can be refined back into new fuel and inert waste, then I don’t see the issue.
Very sustainable technology, this AI 😎
and the techbro ais are mostly a novelty so far…
I mean, it’s all runing on general purpose hardware. If we decoded 4k video on general purpose hardware we’d use more power than every AI company put together, but once that became popular we developed chips capable of decoding it at the hardware level that consume barely any power.
And the exact same thing is starting to happen with dedicated machine learning chips / NPUs.
How fucking convenient.
There was always something that was going to prevent this, they never seriously wanted it to happen, that would hurt fossil fuel donations to politicians
I like conspiracy theories like an average bloke does but have you seen quarterly reports from big tech? Their energy consumption and costs are skyrocketing. Are they in cahoots with big
oilcoal?What?
AI is the excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If it was just about AI, it could be used as an excuse to build up renewables.
What I meant was if the excuse wasn’t AI, it would be something else for the excuse.
The current admin (and trump if he wins) neither have any desire to cut back on fossil fuels. It’s one of the few things propping up “the economy” which is why Biden is shattering the domestic fossil fuel production records that trump just set a few years ago.
There is tangible data on how much energy it’s using.
That’s just a link to all datacenters and doesn’t break out how much energy is going to AI vs how much energy is being used to stream Netflix.
You might as well say we should shut down the internet because it uses too much electricity.
…
I’m sorry, I just don’t seem to follow these train of comments.
Each reply just seems kind of random and not related to what I’m saying.
AI is not an excuse to burn fossil fuels. AI exploded and it’s energy consumption exploded, there’s lots of data to back it up. You’re saying if not for AI there would be some other excuse. What excuse would that he? Would fossil fuel industry have to invent something that would consume this much energy?
AI is not an excuse to burn fossil fuels
AI is not a valid reasons to burn more fossil fuels
It is definitely being used as an excuse to do so.
And if it wasnt, something else would be.
I’m sorry if I’m still not explaining that in a clear way, but I don’t think we’re going to resolve this at this point if it still isn’t.
Microsoft and other big tech already power their data centers with their own renewables, and they will continue to do so. In the latest quarterly report from MS they admit they didn’t anticipate AI boom to be this big and so they have to buy more power externally. This is not good for them and they wouldn’t do this on purpose. They will catch up because it’s profitable thing to do.
What kind of world are we going to leave behind for the AI though?
It’ll be a coal-powered Dyson sphere sustaining data center tasked with generating pictures of celebrity porn, Jesus, flight attendants, babies and seafood. By then AI will enjoy them as much as my mother does.
