AI Is Facing a Crisis (opens in new tab)

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

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.

> 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.

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?

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...

>As much as I love a good satire,

Are you sure it is satire?

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.)

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

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

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."

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.

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".

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

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.

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