Current estimates say that every prompt you give a generative "AI" system— not each session, every PROMPT— is like pouring a 16 oz bottle of water onto the ground.
This is a fact that goes somewhere in every talk i give, now, & i always see audience members looking it up… and then looking horrified
Annoyed by articles that go into great detail about what companies say they're doing with so-called "A.I." but do not ask what companies are doing about the technology's ecological impact.
Now for ChatGPT in specific it can range anywhere from 5 questions to 50 to hit that level of water consumption; depends on the density of representation of associated tokens in the training data (how much it's been trained on stuff connected to your prompt); but before you think "maybe not so bad"…
…stop a sec to remember how ChatGPT is being woven into the bachground functionality of EVERY Microsoft product, such that it may well basically ALWAYS BE RUNNING.
We're not just talking about water for cooling servers, people. You need water to turn into steam to run turbines, too, and the more energy you need, the more water you use for that process.
I mean fuck LLMs and all, but this isn't the most compelling argument. According these figures, each LLM query takes about 1/100th of a percent of a household's daily energy usage. So if you remember turn off the garage light before you ask it to ruin your lasagna, you'll come out ahead.
Sure, but what about all that wasted energy- about 500x the cost of the LLM query - used in cooking that inedible lasagna? Or driving to the ER after, God forbid, eating the lasagna? Consequences!
also, to be fair, you have to compare against the energy it would have taken you to search for a lasagna recipe and scroll past all the ads for diets, drugs and dictators (and the heartwarming story of that one golden autumn in Bologna)
I recently listened to a podcast where they were arguing ChatGPT was good as it helped students draft letters or emails. FFS there are templates ppl can use without scorching the planet.
I've gotten lazy and tend to use search engines to find recipes (DDG most of the time), and even then I usually have to look at 2-3 to compare them; asking ChatGPT for the One Perfect Lasagna Recipe when it doesn't know what food, lasagna, meat, cheese, or veggies are sounds kind of dumb.
because we are heading rapidly toward a future when tools like chatgpt outright replace search engines, and lest you think I'm kidding, I spend a LOT of time talking to undergrads and the use of chatgpt and google seems, at least at first blush, to be approaching parity.
That's it. They already are replacing. I saw this looking for something on Facebook. It's really complicating what used to be a straightforward process.
No it's fine, I see myself as the boomer or gen x comfortable with CDs or records. Like I can solve all of my problems so sometimes new things sound outlandish
I'm not against ai but it's high power consumption to me makes me feel like it should be restricted to only scientific fields at this point
Not only that, but the other day I was looking for a recipe on google and accidentally ended up on a site that posted ChatGPT created recipes. It had this human added disclaimer at the end of it that "we can't know if ChatGPT recipes are safe for consumption, use your best judgement."
For something that is literally a solution in search of a problem! I get that all infrastructure uses water even if only bc it uses power, but this stuff isn't even useful.
They were better. We still need to get very serious very fast about energy computing, but "AI" searching is for shit compared to Google from just a few years ago.
It's like copiers that argue with you that you don't have the right size paper or whatever, and want to negotiate about shrinking to fit or rotating. Back in the day copiers just put what they saw onto whatever paper they had, and it was on you to get it right. I preferred that.
Yes. Agreed. It's one thing to have a zoom function. It's an other for it to guess and get it so consistently wrong. This is I'd say 1/3 of the problem.
Once again, tech shows us what happens when you let your contempt for others, and your unloveability guide your designs.
They want a machine that will give them what they could already have if they would bother to invest any energy at all into relationships with other people.
It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if we were a smart species and used all the free energy that quite literally falls out of the sky every single day. But no, let’s keep burning rocks we have to dig out of the ground instead, makes perfect sense.
well yeah cause its 195M queries. i'm not making that many different lasagnes. (i still wont ask it because the answer will suck but the power consumption of inference isn't what people on here make it out to be)
