AI Needs So Much Electricity That Tech Companies Are Getting Into Energy Busines...
source link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/04/22/1427219/ai-needs-so-much-electricity-that-tech-companies-are-getting-into-energy-business
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AI Needs So Much Electricity That Tech Companies Are Getting Into Energy Businessbinspamdupenotthebestofftopicslownewsdaystalestupid freshfunnyinsightfulinterestingmaybe offtopicflamebaittrollredundantoverrated insightfulinterestinginformativefunnyunderrated descriptive typodupeerror
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I won't bother with sherwood.news. No need to read any further.
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A "news" company owned by Robinhood. So basically manipulating people to invest more by providing not-quite-impartial investment advice news.
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at least they are (lincoln) green
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/. editors had ONE job./s
Guess no one cares about spelling anymore (original author or the editors.):-/
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Man if typos or grammatical mistakes caused you to not bother with a site you'd have closed your Slashdot account down back in the 90s.
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Typos and grammatical mistakes are fine when the general public does this. But it used to be part and parcel of the journalism trade to actually be careful with stories, including with the spelling and grammar, you couldn't be a good journalistic publisher and have bad spelling, even if the original authors didn't spell well you were expected to do the proper work of editing and fixing articles. Or at the very least be smart enough to insert "[sic]" where apropriate. But today, it's just slam the stories
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These companies have a lot of cash right now, but likely won't get many returns investing it in more new tech. Might as well vertically integrate and invest in something that's otherwise an expense anyway.
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Once AI starts going on an unfettered rampage, we can scorch the sky so there's no sunlight for them to power up.
A perfect plan indeed.
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Most of them are actually relying on coal, gas and nuclear reactors. The selling of carbon credits to China for solar energy is a scam, it does not actually make your energy come from solar panels, otherwise the AI datacenters would be shutting down at night.
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Humans will make good power sources.
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That's the real reason the only data center certification anyone cares about is actually just a financial audit.
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We wait for the patch^B^B^B^B^Bconcrete sarcophagus.
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Mod this up (FUNNY)
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The ultraviolet screen of ultraviolent death!
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Time to move to China, where cheap coal power is plentiful.
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You don't need to move to China. The US DoE will help fund small, modular coal plants of the 100MW or so size that you would put accompanying a data center.
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please do.
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The human brain runs on about 29 watts.
Let's focus on hardware improvements rather than massive power generation increases.
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The high cost of AI isn't due to hardware it's due to the *large* in large language model. The LLMs achieve what they do with massive data sets. They don't work analogously to the human brain which uses only a tiny fraction of the training data (no human could ingest that amount of data)
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i think software improvements are more critical here. specially at scale, energy costs will for sure spur optimization of algorithms and toolchains. maybe even promote more resource-aware coding which hasn't been a priority for a long time, precisely because of hardware improvements and the fact that it tends to be cheaper and easier to throw more metal or energy at a problem than to figure out a more efficient system.
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I don't think there's any conflict between our statements. The electricity costs for LLMs are huge. Other AI techniques are much less computationally intensive. And there will be a lot of work trying to get more out of other AI/machine learning techniques. Current LLMs are only possible as a solution because hardware has gotten so fast. Efficiency improvements will certainly come.
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Really? History teaches us that software developers just wait for faster machines and more memory rather than optimize. It's even a religious mantra: thou shalt not prematurely optimize; and the corollary mantra: It is always premature. Just take a look at Microsoft Word - a basic word processor that barely fulfills basic needs, yet creeps along at a slow pace while consuming all resources.
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Today, I found a text file on my computer. It was a response to a ZDNet article back in 2016 or some such. My computer remembered every word I wrote; I'd forgotten I made the post at all.
Today, I entered my time sheet at work for the different on-site appointments I made last week. I'd forgotten one of them already. My phone kept a GPS log that knew exactly where I was and was able to ensure completeness.
The human brain is incredible in may ways...but computers do things human brains cannot...and unless we
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Task: Recite as many digits of pi as you can.
Me: 3.14159. I know there are ways to get more.
AI: Arbitrary number of digits subject only to some hard-coded constraint, as well as able to tell you about all the algorithms for approximating pi along with their strengths and weaknesses, then run the algorithms for you.
Let's see 29 Watts do that.
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The average brain. Mine is being frugal on energy at the moment.
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The exhortations to save trees by avoiding printing need to be updated: save coral reefs and polar bears by avoiding stupid doodles on Dall-E!
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This seems like the ideal load for wind or solar. Just suspend processing when the power dries up and resume later
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OK...cheap shot as I know Python is not the reason why AI projects use so much electricity, but Python and JavaScript are extremely wasteful languages....waste is fine for a quick script, but when you write major backends in either language and they require twice as many servers as a JVM, GO, or CLR alternative, perhaps we should consider how much of an ecological impact programming decisions have...especially since young people seem to have this "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
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They're "getting into" power generation? That makes it sound like this is something brand new. I remember when Apple put in its first natural gas cogeneration plant to take its build infrastructure off the grid, back around 2002 or 2003, I think. Google has massive generators around a bunch of its buildings, presumably for the same reason. Big tech has been in the energy business quite literally for decades at this point.
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It's a goddam opinion piece!/. can do better.
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