Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjfd | Hacker News Reader

Well, these AI calculations also emit much CO2. It may be a luxury that we can only afford ourselves within measure. The vision of a society where AI plays a large role may only be feasible both ecologically and economically if/when we have fusion energy.

View on HN

I don’t buy that fusion is a prerequisite here, especially since just developing those reactors requires modeling on super computers.

Yes, we should be powering these things with renewables, but we should make cuts somewhere else before giving up on basic research.

I just can’t seem to relate to people who think we should all punish ourselves because society didn’t see climate change coming. Sure we need to do something, but it’s not practical for us to collectively put on hair shirts and wander into the woods.

I am not sure we should be punishing ourselves either but when I look at how things are currently going in my country, it seems we already are. There are climate plans that basically involve 25 centimeters of insulation to every house and heating by heat pumps. At the same time currently pretty much all building projects are on hold, not because of CO2 but because of nitrogen compounds. I am not really sure these are good things to do either. I am guessing maybe not. But in such a political climate the quite large amounts of CO2 emitted by training deep learning networks does feel like a frivolous expense.

The ideas that deep learning is meaningfully contributing to CO2 emissions seems dubious to me. Lots of data centers are powered by renewables. Furthermore I think advances in AI are probably critical to climate adaptation. “Turn off the computers to save the planet” strikes me as Luddite-ism.

We need to be switching off coal fired power plants not computers.

Training is expensive, but running trained models can be quite lightweight.

If you want to be that drastic, why not ban non renewables crypto mining first. Also, google cloud is 100% renewable, right?

In the US transportation emits more greenhouse gases than the entire US electricity production. AI easily pays for itself if it makes transportation or industrial processes even marginally more efficient.

A lot of data center power is hydro and wind.

If only the grid worked like that - case and point, Facebook Ft.Worth data center is there because of Wind Farms in Jacksboro TX. Reality, we really do not know the electrons are coming from Comonche Peak Nuclear or any other NG generators in the vicinity or the Wind Farms.

They just use a nice contract system - to make every one feel good about it and fund the wind farms that is it.

With Hydro its more predictable but even there no guarantees.

This is so ridiculous. Of all the things that emit co2 you’re focusing on AI calculations? Tell me you’re not serious.

I'm dead serious about this. I think we should weigh all large scale compute against its carbon cost. Granted, fang is starting to look for renewable sources for its DC's, but US data centers alone will use around 73 billion kWh in 2020 [1].

How much of that is ML? As someone pointed out in another comment, how much ML is actually useful? Some ML is "carbon good", such as route planning saving energy. But do we really need to spend billions of kWh just to get slightly better recommendations? Do we really need to increase margins a fraction of a percent for some company to show more ads and sell more?

And while we're on the subject of power, maybe if web pages weren't 300mb of crap and 1k of content, we could cut back on another few billion kWh on servers and routers.

This shit is serious, we're dying here, so yes, absolutely, let's do the math about how much AI costs. It's up to us, the computer people, to ask these questions and solve the part of this problem that WE own.

1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-e...

we're dying here

Who? Where? Why?

The point is the expenditure is unsustainable at the current rate, and we can do something about it.

So nobody is dying from this.

Are you doing something, personally, about this? My office is 100% solar, home about 20%, telecommute 100%; you?

It literally doesn't matter if it's co2 or not that powers it. Even if it's all wind, that energy could have gone somewhere else. We are wasting energy, by a lot. Fusion won't saves, there is already evidence that every extra energy we produce is used, having more green energy doesn't reduce fossil fuels energy consumed, it just makes more energy consumed overall. Don't waste energy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com