AI will be incompatible with anti-fossil energy activism

[Free]

AI will be incompatible with anti-fossil energy activism

Like it or not, the era of artificial intelligence has arrived, morphing from a science fiction fantasy to the cornerstone of the future world economy.

AI and other ground-breaking technologies like quantum computing will soon become so prevalent throughout society that we will wonder how we were able to exist without them. Like cell phones and the internet, AI will fundamentally change our world and the human experience — hopefully for the better.

As of now, the largest obstacle to the rise of AI is the misguided energy policy that governments across the West have embarked upon in recent decades. The march toward net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and the insistence that we replace fossil fuel-based energy sources with so-called renewable energy sources like wind and solar poses the largest threat to an AI-based future.

In other words, the massive, ill-advised push by climate alarmists to transition almost overnight from reliable and affordable energy sources such as oil, natural gas and coal to not-ready-for-primetime green energy is incompatible with the huge amount of energy that AI will require in the decades to come.

The dude I've never heard of before* makes some good points. </sarcasm>

* Another conservative/pseudo-libertarian from The Heartland Institute

 

[Free]

Anywho, let the planet die because we need AI!

 

[Noodles]

Yeah, this is like, a lot of my problem with AI.

The other half being the lack of any real "I".

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Reactive AI has to work when people want it, but there's no reason that training computation can't be variable, rising for solar, wind and tidal power peaks, and slowing down at night, call days and ?the turn of the tide? Or whatever. Server farms should be able to query supply rates dynamically and scale their use accordingly.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

the misguided energy policy that governments across the West have embarked upon in recent decades

ill-advised push by climate alarmists to transition almost overnight

...


...

recent decades

almost overnight

...???

 

[Beebo Brink]

Reactive AI has to work when people want it, but there's no reason that training computation can't be variable, rising for solar, wind and tidal power peaks, and slowing down at night, call days and ?the turn of the tide? Or whatever. Server farms should be able to query supply rates dynamically and scale their use accordingly.

That's not the issue. The total amount of energy that they use -- regardless of how efficiently -- adds a significant draw over and above our current energy usage. They are pushing up the energy demands at the time that our very existence is dependent on bringing them down. This puts brakes on what is an anemic effort already to lower our energy footprint.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Yeah, this is like, a lot of my problem with AI.

The other half being the lack of any real "I".

Personally I am thankful for that we don't have a real AGI, because I don't have much faith in humanity to handle such an entity well.

 

[Cristiano]

Personally I am thankful for that we don't have a real AGI, because I don't have much faith in humanity to handle such an entity well.

At the rate things are going with the arms race between Microsoft (OpenAI), Google and Amazon(Anthropic), we are barreling toward AGI faster than was imaginable even a few years ago. You are right, we are not ready for that to happen.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Texas is home to crypto farmers, AI servers, severe weather, and an unconnected state power grid that uses price spikes to control demand. That has led to consumers having to pay outrageous rates becasue of the capacity shifted to techbros who can bid up prices to keep operating instead of backing off during heat or cold.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Texas is home to crypto farmers, AI servers, severe weather, and an unconnected state power grid that uses price spikes to control demand. That has led to consumers having to pay outrageous rates becasue of the capacity shifted to techbros who can bid up prices to keep operating instead of backing off during heat or cold.

Well even Iran was intelligent enough to boot crypto farmers out of their power grid after China did. Texas, fuck yeah!

 

[Cristiano]

Texas is home to crypto farmers, AI servers, severe weather, and an unconnected state power grid that uses price spikes to control demand. That has led to consumers having to pay outrageous rates becasue of the capacity shifted to techbros who can bid up prices to keep operating instead of backing off during heat or cold.

Crypto farming is a fucking scourge.

 

[Free]

Crypto farming is a fucking scourge.

And yet, voilà.

 

[Free]

Possible helpful research.

Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs

Running AI models without floating point matrix math could mean far less power consumption.

arstechnica.com

Researchers claim to have developed a new way to run AI language models more efficiently by eliminating matrix multiplication from the process. This fundamentally redesigns neural network operations that are currently accelerated by GPU chips. The findings, detailed in a recent preprint paper from researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, UC Davis, LuxiTech, and Soochow University, could have deep implications for the environmental impact and operational costs of AI systems.

Matrix multiplication (often abbreviated to "MatMul") is at the center of most neural network computational tasks today, and GPUs are particularly good at executing the math quickly because they can perform large numbers of multiplication operations in parallel. That ability momentarily made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world last week; the company currently holds an estimated 98 percent market share for data center GPUs, which are commonly used to power AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

 

[Free]

Google’s carbon footprint balloons in its Gemini AI era

Google says “reducing emissions may be challenging” as it integrates AI into its products.

www.theverge.com

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have ballooned, according to the company’s latest environmental report, showing how much harder it’ll be for the company to meet its climate goals as it prioritizes AI.

Google has a goal of cutting its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But its total greenhouse gas emissions have actually grown by 48 percent since 2019. Last year alone, it produced 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution — a 13 percent year-over-year increase from the year before and roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 that 38 gas-fired power plants might release annually.

The jump in planet-heating pollution primarily comes from data center energy use and supply chain emissions, according to Google’s environmental report. Data centers are notoriously energy-hungry — those used to train AI even more so.

 

[Noodles]

Just open data centers in Antarctica.

 

[Free]

Just open data centers in Antarctica.

They'd need to build them, first. I suspect shipping all the supplies, equipment, and power infrastructure might be...costly.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Google’s carbon footprint balloons in its Gemini AI era

Google says “reducing emissions may be challenging” as it integrates AI into its products.

www.theverge.com

Google has a goal of cutting its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline.

It's a lie. Maybe it had a genuine intention when it first set this goal back in 2019, like Microsoft did, but (like Microsoft), it's now the AI age and Google doesn't intend to cut its pollution by anything. The goal is not merely "a challenge"; they have no interest in even attempting it anymore. They will cheerfully double and even triple their emissions output in pursuit of this new golden goose.

 

[Free]

 

[Noodles]

Don't worry, with AI, we can combine it with VR and just live in a fake pretty environment while the world goes to shit.

Maybe we could even use our body's excess energy from not actually traveling, to power the VR world. Like a sort of battery.

 

[Free]

Soon, your sleepy little neighborhood could be gobbling up more power needs than say the entire city of Chicago, thanks to the demands of AI!

OpenAI asked US to approve energy-guzzling 5GW data centers, report says

OpenAI stokes China fears to woo US approvals for huge data centers, report says.

arstechnica.com

OpenAI hopes to convince the White House to approve a sprawling plan that would place 5-gigawatt AI data centers in different US cities, Bloomberg reports.

The AI company's CEO, Sam Altman, supposedly pitched the plan after a recent meeting with the Biden administration where stakeholders discussed AI infrastructure needs. Bloomberg reviewed an OpenAI document outlining the plan, reporting that 5 gigawatts "is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors" and warning that each data center will likely require "more energy than is used to power an entire city or about 3 million homes."