The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022.

It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...

There isn't an inflection point around 2022: it has been rising quickly since 2010 or so.

This is where the debate gets interesting, but I think both sides are cherrypicking data a bit. The energy consumption trend depends a lot on what baseline you're measuring from and which metrics you prioritize.

Yes, data center efficiency improved dramatically between 2010-2020, but the absolute scale kept growing. So you're technically both right: efficiency gains kept/unit costs down while total infrastructure expanded. The 2022+ inflection is real though, and its not just about AI training. Inference at scale is the quiet energy hog nobody talks about enough.

What bugs me about this whole thread is that it's turning into "AI bad" vs "AI defenders," when the real question should be: which AI use cases actually justify this resource spike? Running an LLM to summarize a Slack thread probably doesn't. Using it to accelerate drug discovery or materials science probably does. But we're deploying this stuff everywhere without any kind of cost/benefit filter, and that's the part that feels reckless.

"google has been brainwashing us with ads deployed by the most extravagant uses of technology man has ever known since they've ever existed."

"yeah but they became efficient at it by 2012!"

Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.

I've long wondered about this ratio! Does anyone know? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is "no".

I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy?

If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.

The ad industry is a quagmire of fraud. Assuming someone got value out of money spent is tenuous.

It isn't that simple. Each company paying for ads would have preferred that their competitors had not advertised, then spend a lot less on ads... for the same value.

It is like an arms race. Everyone would have been better off if people just never went to war, but....

That someone might be Google, though. Not all ad dollars are well spent.

Ads are a cancer on humanity with no benefit to anyone and everyone who enables them should be imprisoned for life

> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration

No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization.

Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.

No, but in this case it indicates some hypocrisy.

> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration

Data centers are not another thing when the subject is data centers.

It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer?

When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.

But mining all the tracking data in order to show profitable targeted ads is extremely intensive. That’s what kicked off the era of “big data” 15-20 years ago.

But making good people work on ads instead of something useful has an enormous cost to society.

What an odd way of framing this. Every bit of human generated content was served to you "against your will". You are making no sense.

> what value I derive from buying gasoline at the petrol station. None. I derive no value from it, I just spend money there.

The value you derive is the ability to make your car move. If you derived no value from gas, why would you spend money on it?

You have never received automated spam letters?

When the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter.

When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.

We’re well past that. Social media killed that first. Some people have a hard time articulating their thoughts. If AI is a tool to help, why is that bad?

I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication, that could just as easily be written by a LLM (and transcribed by a human onto paper).

Nope, that ship has already sailed as well. An AI-powered service to do handwritten spam: https://handwrytten.com

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash

I'm pretty sure both the plant and the DC have both "menial" jobs and highly-skilled jobs.

You don't just chuck ore into a furnace and wait for a few seconds in reality.

> that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI

That effort is completely abandoned because of the current US administration and POTUS a situation that big tech largely contributed to. It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.

"You can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time""

Revolutions always came with vague (or concrete) threats as far as I know.

> And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time.

I never asserted that AI is either of those things

[flagged]

They did also "assess the argument on its merits" though?

This thread is basically an appeal to authority fallacy so attacking the authority is fair game.

And it’s fair assume much of the time watching streaming would instead have been spent on TV

> Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.

Neither is comparing text output to streaming video

It would be less power efficient as some of the associated costs/resources happen per request and also benefit from scale.

This is a subjective value judgement and many disagree.

Doubtful. If you look at viewed content it’s probably 90% views from brainrot content.

To adults? Certainly. But keep in mind that many children are now growing up with this crap glued to their eyes from age 2:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animal...

(That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)

Not for me.

Astroturfing means a company is paying people to comment. No one in this entire thread was paid to comment.

Buddy it's not astroturfing if people hate your favorite thing.

He literally apologized for any part he had in it. This just makes me realize you didn’t actually read the post and I shouldn’t engage with the first part of your argument.

I used to work in fast food, Golden Arches.

I noticed a pattern after a while. We'd always have themed toys for the Happy Meals, sure, sometimes they'd be like ridiculously popular with people rolling through just to see what toys we had.

Sometimes, they wouldn't. But we'd still have the toys, and on top of that, we'd have themed menus and special items, usually around the same time as a huge marketing blitz on TV. Some movie would be everywhere for a week or two, then...poof!

Because the movies that needed that blitz were always trash. Just forgettable, mid, nothing movies.

When the studios knew they had a stinker, they'd push the marketing harder to drum up box office takings, cause they knew no one was gonna buy the DVD.

Good products speak for themselves. You advertise to let people know, sure, but you don't have to be obnoxious about it.

AI products almost all have that same desperate marketing as crappy mid-budget films do. They're the equivalent of "The Hobbit branded menus at Dennys". Because no one really gives a shit about AI. For people like my mom, AI is just a natural language Google search. That's all it's really good at for the average person.

The AI companies have to justify the insane money being blown on the insane gold rush land grab at silicon they can't even turn on. Desperation, "god this bet really needs to pay off".

If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.

It all stinks of resume-driven development

If that's all you can complain about, you agree with the parent comment for 99.99%.

And companies do force it.

If creations like art, music and writing ends up all being offloaded to compute, removing humans from the picture, its more that relevant, and reasonable.

Unless your version of reason is clinical. then yeah, point taken. Good luck living on that island where nothing else matters but technological progress for technology's sake alone.

Are you okay? You ventured 100x and that's wrong. What would you know about the last time I checked was, and in what context exactly? Anyway, good job on doing what I suggest you do, I guess.

The reason why it all rounds to 0 is that the google search will not give you an answer. It gives you a list of web pages, that you then need to visit (often times more than just one of them) generating more requests, and, more importantly, it will ask more of your time, the human, whose cumulative energy expenditure to be able to ask to be begin with is quite significant – and that you then will have not to spend on other things that a LLM is not able to do for you.

Google web search is incredibly efficient

While I appreciate the irony in the trend of using AI to discredit people making positive claims about AI, it's a pet peeve of mine when it's used as a lazy way to avoid citing the original claim made against AI. It's reminiscent of the 'no you' culture from early 2000s forums. There's some meta-irony here too in that it often has to be debunked by humans, maybe that's the point, but it doesn't diminish my opinion of LLMs, it just makes me think that the Luddites may have had a point.

For instance, in the Gemini screenshot, the claim for 100-500x more resource usage for AI queries comes from water usage, however it's not clear to me why data center water usage for AI queries would be 100-500x more than a Google search when power usage for an AI query is supposedly only 10-30x more than a Google search. Is water usage and CO2 footprint not derived from power consumption? Did the LLM have to drink as much water while thinking as I did while researching the original claim?

The 10-30x more power consumption claim seems to come from this scientific paper [0] from late 2023 which cites a news article which quotes Alphabet's chairman as saying 'a large language model likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search, [though fine-tuning will help reduce the expense quickly]'. Editorialising the quote is not a good look for a scientific paper. The paper also cites a news letter from an analyst firm [1] that performs a back of the envelope calculation to estimate OpenAI's costs, looks at Google's revenue per search, and estimates how much it would cost Google to add an AI query for every Google search. Treating it like a Fermi Problem is reasonable I guess, you can get within an order of magnitude if your guesstimates are reasonable. The same analyst firm did a similar calculation [2] and came to the conclusion that training a dense 1T model costs $300m. It should be noted that GPT-4 cost 'more than $100m' and it has been leaked that it's a 1.8T MoE. LLama 3.1 405B was around 30M GPU hours, likely $30-60m. DeepSeek, a 671B MoE, was trained for around $5m. However, while this type of analysis is fine for a news letter, citing it to see how many additional servers Google would need to add an AI query to every search, taking the estimated power consumption of those servers, and deriving a 6.9–8.9 Wh figure per request for the amount of search queries Google receives is simply beyond my comprehension. I gave up trying to make sense of what this paper is doing, and this summary may be a tad unfair as a result. You can run the paper through Gemini if you would prefer an unbiased summary if you prefer :-).

The paper also cites another research paper [3] from late 2022 which estimates a dense 176b parameter model (comparable to GPT-3) uses 3.96 Wh per request. They derive this figure by running the model in the cloud. What a novel concept. Given the date of the paper, I wouldn't be surprised if they ran the model in the original BF16 weights, although I didn't check. I could see this coming down to 1 Wh per request when quantised to INT4 or similar, and with better caching/batched requests/utilisation/modern GPUs/etc I could see this getting pretty close to the often quoted [4, from 2009 mind] 0.3 Wh per Google search.

Google themselves [5] state the median Gemini text prompt uses 0.24 Wh.

I simply don't see where 100x is coming from. 10x is something I could believe if we're factoring in training resource consumption as some extremely dodgy napkin maths is leading me to believe a moderately successful 1T~ model gets amortised to 3 Wh per prompt which subjectively is pretty close to the 3x claim I've ended up defending. If we're going this route we'd have to include the total consumption for search too as I have no doubt Google simply took the running consumption divided by amount of searches. Add in failed models, determine how often either a Google search or AI query is successful, factor in how much utility the model providing the information provides as it's clearly no longer just about power efficiency, etc. There's a lot to criticise about GenAI but I really don't think Google searches being marginally more power efficient is one of them.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...

[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-...

[2] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-ai-brick-wall-a-pr...

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02001

[4] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-sear...

[5] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...

Your data must be on local storage or if it's in the cloud encrypted with keys only you control, otherwise it's not your data.