Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.
Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.
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Cryptocurrencies have no real world applications. AI does.
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I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people I see actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.
Most people just either find it useful for some specific use cases or just don’t care. And a large part actually hate on it.
You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.
It seems like you missed the memo on reading comprehension. I literally quoted the exact part I’m criticizing, which clearly isn’t what you claimed.
And being overly emotional and telling people to STFU online? That’s a masterclass in civility right there.
Ohmahgosh you’re so right, I see it now, you telling them they were wrong to criticize AI was in fact the correct take all along. You’ve shown me the way, All Hail AI. ALL HAIL AI.
What a fucking shill.
Such as?
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I’ve used it to improve selected paragraphs of my writing, provide code snippets and find an old comic based on a crude description of a friend.
I feel like these interactions were valuable to me and only one (code snippets) could have been easily replaced with existing tools.
Yeah! Accelerating societal collapse!
You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.
That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).
Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always
always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.
Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.
(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)
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“aI AnD cRyPtO aRe ThE sAmE bRo”
You know that your take that they both must suck in the exact same ways just because tech bros get hyped about them, is literally just as shallow, surface level, and uninformed as most tech bros?
Like yeah man, tech hype cycles suck. But you know what else was once a tech hype cycle? Computers, the internet, smartphones. Sometimes they are legitimate, sometimes not.
AI is solving an entirely new class of problem that computers have been literally unable to solve for their entire existence. Crypto was solving the problem of making a database without a single admin. One of those is a lot more important and foundational than the other.
On top of that, crypto algorithms are fundamentally based on “proof of work”, i.e. literally wasting more energy than other miners in the network is a fundamental part of how their algorithm functions. Meaning that with crypto there is basically no value prop to society and it inherently tries to waste energy, neither is the case for AI.
Plus guess how much energy everyone streaming 4K video would take if we were all doing it on CPUs and unoptimized GPUs?
Orders of magnitude more power than every AI model put together.
But guess what? Instead we invented 4k decoding chips that are optimized to redner 4k signals at the hardware level so that they don’t use much power, and now every $30 fire stick can decode a 4k signal on a 5V usb power supply.
That’s also where we’re at with the first Neural Processing Units only just hitting the market now.
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Sure, uninformed tech hypebois suck in the same way, but the arguments around crypto and AI, especially around energy usage, are fundamentally not the same.
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Someone posted a shitty article about AI and power usage, someone pointed out that literally every industry uses a ton of power but AI gets clicks, you said AI and Crypto bros are the same.
If you don’t mean to imply that the counter arguments around AI and Crypto in terms of energy use are the same then write better given the context of the conversation.
And posting another shitty article that just talks about power usage going up across literally all types of industry, including just normal data centers and manufacturing plants, and then vaguely talking about chatGPT’s power usage compared to Google search to try and make it sound like those things are connected, is not having a serious discussion about it.
It’s skimming a clickbait headline of a clickbait article and regurgitating the implication in it like it’s a fact.
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Go on benefiting from the people who actually do stuff while simultaneously whining about it. You’ve been using AI for 20 years, you’re just too thick to know about it. There are millions of people in 2nd and 3rd world countries who have had their lives massively improved thanks to bitcoin, you’re just too spoiled and naive and to give a shit about them. Climb down off your soap box and go read something beyond the headline.
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To be fair, crypto will never stand a chance against fiat as a means for payments because governments ensure that it’s complicated to tax. However, the underlying blockchain technology remains very interesting to me as a means of getting around middlemen companies.