Why mix units? Match 1.3billion for water. Why not say match 1.95 billion for power, instead of 3x650 million.
Maybe they did the text with an AI.
Once again: stop letting them use potable fucking drinking water it makes no sense
I thought the majority of their water consumption is indirect via electricity consumption. If we could stop burning freaking coal that would be a start.
But yes, also stop using potable water for evaporative cooling!!
a majority use closed loop water systems. they use like an 8th of the water almond farming uses. its all marketing, the hype and the hate. they both need to go away
A majority? Do you have a source?
Hey, making food is something we need. Hallucination bots are a new, unnecessary use of water in a time when water is already becoming scarcer due to global warming. Stop sane washing their massive waste, thanks!
Just because other sectors/industries use more doesn’t mean what AI data centers use isn’t a horrible waste of a limited resource we need to survive.
A note: “AI” doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s not using evaporative cooling out of necessity. It’s just the absolute cheapest, fastest way to cool en masse. Just like slamming a gas generator down on a site, or housing servers in tents:
They could take an extra second to build something efficient, and they did not.
Or, they could just not use waste so many GPUs on “intelligence scaling” that does not scale. Like most non-US firms do, just fine. But FOMO.
In other words, non technical decision makers, who don’t understand how transformers models even work, dictated this would happen. It’s not even a sane business planning decision, and they’re too rich to face any consequences now.
Fuck this.
I remember in the 00s imagining what AI might be like.
I did not imagine soulless chat bot that was going to steal all the water.
Because it’s not real ai. It’s just marketing.
There’s no guarantee, that team AI wouldn’t be even worse.
You play too many video games if you think AI means Cortana. Computer scientists have been building artificial intelligence since the 1950s
Algorithms and expert machines a weren’t and aren’t AI. Can’t say that I’ve ever played Halo so have no idea about that. This is Lemmy though, so you shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve watched most if Trek, read The Culture and the Asimov robot books.
Thanks, gatekeeper! Is margarine real butter? Is saccharine real sugar? Is Lemmy real Internet? Is baseball real sports?
I bet it’s all marketing, all the way down. Nothing is real.
No
No
Yes well part of it
It’s just rounders. A primary school game.
It makes sense with the context in the article, but “triples that of 650 million” is a very strange way to say “almost 2 billion”.
Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well
Why don’t they make this the first problem AI should solve?
Don’t forget to shower less and only use paper straws
What if we as a society decided to just not?
Good use of our resources
Makes no sense. (I know that there are countries without proper regulation, but) around here they would simply not be allowed to use that much water.
They would need to build them in a way to not use that much water for cooling, and this would be controlled by officials during planning,build and operation.
Many states with proper regulation would never allow this for literally any other industry without extensive permitting, and rightfully forcing the company to build its own treatment plants to support the increased load on existing systems
But somehow, nope. Fuck all that I guess.
Yeah the billionaires just bribe the state government. Easy.
Therefore there are (or: need to be) laws and courts who can check even the actions of governments.
The courts and the law makers are owned by the same billionaires.
… in countries which I call “unregulated”
Tech bros in general always seem to do it anyway and deal with complaints afterwards, preferably after lobbying or sueing to remove regulations.
do it anyway
Not possible here, cowboy.
It’s stupid how much they are pouring into hardware that might be vastly obsolete. By the time AI becomes truly intelligent, there may be specialized chips that are efficient at running models that blow GPUs out of the water.
Look at how it happened to bitcoin mining. Nobody serious is using a GPU to mine when ASIC is available.
However, I don’t see all this hardware hitting the second hand market once a better solution is found. I’m sure they will keep trying to make compute hard to get for the average person so they can rent out their servers for a crazy price.
By the time AI becomes truly intelligent, there may be specialized chips that are efficient at running models that blow GPUs out of the water.
Truly intelligent? What?
Its worse. The expected life span of the compute server hardware is 2 years. The processors cannot be re-purposed and the memory needs to be re-packaged in a non-novel way. They will most likely send it too ewaste processing to get the precious and rare earth metals back.
Drinking needs or net water usage?
