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azakaiyesterday at 4:21 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


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lambdayesterday at 6:05 PM

I think you're referring to Figure ES-1 in that paper, but that's kind of a summary of different estimates.

Figure 1.1 is the chart I was referring to, which are the data points from the original sources that it uses.

Between 2010 and 2020, it shows a very slow linear growth. Yes, there is growth, but it's quite slow and mostly linear.

Then the slope increases sharply. And the estimates after that point follow the new, sharper growth.

Sorry, when I wrote my original comment I didn't have the paper in front of me, I linked it afterwards. But you can see that distinct change in rate at around 2020.

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techjamieyesterday at 5:03 PM

Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.

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