Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat.

The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030.

It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage.

Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

> Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.

How much of that compute was for the ads themselves vs the software useful enough to compel people to look at the ads?

You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model.

There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.

Someone paid for those ads. Someone got value from them.

The ad system uses a fairly small fraction of resources.

And before the LLM craze there was a constant focus on efficiency. Web search is (was?) amazingly efficient per query.

What makes you think he didn’t mind it?

We weren't facing hardware shortages in the race to shovel ads. Little different.

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

Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society?

I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.

That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.