AI Is Facing a Crisis | Hacker News Reader

AI Is Facing a Crisis

savethe.ai

53 pointsn4ture58 comments

> 140Wh are needed to write a 100-word email, equivalent to 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max.

An iPhone can write a whole email in a few seconds using a local model.

Which, to be honest, is probably worse. When it comes to AI, I'm a lot more worried about "information pollution" than anything else.

Weird to be worried about a metaphor instead of something real?

What makes it not real?

Imagining that information exists in some pure unvarnished state (like a pristine mountain lake), until it is polluted by some bad actor (big bad logging company).

The metaphor doesn't work at all. It just more "the truth is under attack"

Exactly what I thought when reading this. And that's the moment I stop taking the (probably somewhat valid) claims seriously. This reminds me of the arguments against streaming we had a few years ago, that confused compression/decompression, completely disregarded local caching and calculated as if all network infrastructure in the world was just being used for streaming.

Awesome. We don't need server AI of any kind then.

Always good to have user feedback.

You heard him folks, lets turn off the big servers, local low power models are good enough.

It’s not going to be a good email.

the local model needs to be trained beforehand though, right? And that's where a lot of the energy and water consumption comes from.

They cite consumption during training as a separate bullet point.

As much as I love a good satire, my experience with the Internet makes me worry that a group of true believers are going to latch onto this campaign and treat it as real, and people playing along with the satire will just be contributing to them.

It took me a bit to detect the irony, and I'm not particularly bad at that. This website simply reads like a lot of serious "green" propaganda.

Literally just a few days ago there was the Ai 2027 posted here that was absurd. BTW, there's an actual researches that made a LinkedIn post about that Ai 2027 article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just...

> Literally just a few days ago there was the Ai 2027 posted here that was absurd. BTW, there's an actual researches that made a LinkedIn post about that Ai 2027 article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just...

Is that the right link? It seems mainly randing about Scott Alexander being a eugenicist and Rationalists.

Scott Alexander is one of the writers of the article I was talking about https://ai-2027.com/

To me as well that article reads as fan fiction, but it's no good that when reads like this are taken as truth they become hyperstition (is that a word in English? At least in italian it is. It means self fulfilling prophecy).

I wasn't talking about the original post, sorry for derailing the conversation

>As much as I love a good satire,

Are you sure it is satire?

Yes. One of the about pages calls it satire.

Go after computer games instead. There are millions of gamers around the world wasting electricity just for fun. You could generate several images and pages of text with the energy it takes to run a modern game for just a few seconds.

Go after Bitcoin. At least AI burns electrons and produces something moderately useful. Bitcoin, nothing but burnt electrons.

That's weird, because I have used Bitcoin many times and I found it to be very useful. So have many others.

This is the quality satire we need. Every glass of water you greedily consume to keep your meat engine going could be delaying the singularity. Would you do that to humanity?

Some here seem to think this is satire. Well, Sam Altman want us all to funnel 7 trillions of $ for AI, so, we[0] will have to make some sacrifices to satisfy his grand vision.

[0]common folks, because of course you don't want to tax or stop subsidizing the "job creators" (i.e. rich people).

The only reason I thought it was satire is that it literally says that it is on one of the pages.

That's like the whole point of satire, that it takes something true and exaggerates it to make a point in a humorous way. See "A Modest Proposal."

I've wondered this for a while, why does AI use so much water? Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain? Most computers I've seen use a closed loop and consume no water past the original filling up

> Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain?

basically yes. Closed loop systems require more energy and are more expensive investments. The main concern for data centers is Total Energy / Energy Compute.

There was a good talk about this at 37C3 https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11796-energy_consumption_of_data...

There are closed-loop datacenters, but the hyperscalers now use evaporation chimneys. Google used ~21bn litres of water in 2023-24.

Doesn't that fall back down again as fresh rainwater?

Sure. While lowering the recharge rate on the aquifer, the river flow, etc. Instead of being re-used downstream, it's re-used downwind. Snow melt original destined for the over-allocated Colorado might instead end up in the Mississippi.

All that irrigation water pumped out of the ground in the southwest falls back as rain too. While the land subsides, plants can no longer reach water, and towns have to build deeper wells.

at scale, data centers use cooling towers with fresh water, not a closed loop liquid cooling system.

https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume

Perhaps they use evaporative cooling towers?

Yes - it's going into the air. The water isn't removed from the water cycle, but the problem is that fresh water was removed from the upstream part of the cycle before it could be used by the land. The term is water diversion, where downstream ecosystems, agriculture, and other users are deprived.

In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate it and condense it, producing fresh water and salts as output.

There can be very little difference between taking fresh water from a major river that dumps into the ocean vs taking from the ocean. For example, if you took 0.001% of the flow of the St. Lawrence river and run it through an evaporative cooling tower you're doing very little harm and perhaps benefiting the local ecosystem through increased rainfall. If you took 50% of the flow it'd be a problem, but the St. Lawrence is massive.

People think water is scarce, but there are still parts of the world where water is abundant, where flooding is more of a concern than fresh water scarcity.

Combine with Quebec's cheap electricity, and it seems an ideal place to site data centers.

In which case it goes right back into the water supply and isn't "used" at all.

While this is satire, it's important to raise awareness of the resource consumption that "AI" comes with.

Also, this shouldn't be flagged -- it's satire, yes, but relevant.

Agreed, but I think some people on HN might actually feel threatned by such awareness. I wish there could've been a more constructive discussion around resource consumption rather than a war on "green propaganda".

There are links to an environmental campaign group's site so not actually satire, more of a badly thought out campaign idea.

It calls itself a satire if you find the right page. It's valid to use satire for environmentalism.

Can a similar site be done about saving the Bitcoin? Numbers should be a bit more extreme there, and for longer time.

Author: R. Basilisk.

And it is flagged.

Yeah wonder why that is... There is a serious group of University of Toronto researchers behind this project. I thought it was pretty cool!

Edit: Genuinely wondering why, I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about some of the less advertised sides of AI.

Good. The amount of autism in these comments positive that this is anything other than a joke is honestly pretty concerning.

you can also offer your body as fuel

How will that work, practically though? Could we perhaps contain human bodies in efficient gel filled bio-pods, effectively turning them into biological batteries?

That will be very boring for the humans thouhg. Perhaps a virtual reality simulation will keep them satisfied.

Let me know when you can start working on a neural jack interface to a brain.

Could be an honest effort to get in the good graces of AI. Not a bad strategy if so.

Similar to Trump cabinet meetings where they all take turns praising him.

> Writing a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).1

> 2 litres are needed for every 10 to 50 queries you make.2

Isn't this water reused? AFAIK it's just for cooling.

This smells like FUD.

It's not like a water-cooled computer that just uses water for heat transport. In a datacenter, I believe it's generally just evaporated off and lost to the atmosphere. This allows you to dump the energy into the vapor's latent heat.

So yeah, it's treated fresh water that is then lost. (It's not great, but I think the electricity waste is more compelling.)

Out of curiosity, why fresh water for cooling? Because the cost of making things saltwater-proof wrt corrosion is too great?

The short answer is “yes, saltwater ruins nearly everything thing it touches in fairly short order”. PVC pipe? Okay, that’s probably fine. Pumps, sensors, and a lot of other things aren’t quite so tolerant.

It should smell like a joke. Maybe you are congested or something?

I heard similar things about search engine back in 2012

This must be some form of sarcasm, right? All I see is reasons to stop the waste of resources to further develop AI

Would you go to a stand up comedy show and ask the person on stage if they're being serious?

i stopped to read BS like this to save the planet

Reply on news.ycombinator.com