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tonmoyyesterday at 8:55 PM5 repliesview on HN

Im not sure I follow. AI barely consumes energy compared to other industries and instead of focusing on the heavy hitters first wasting time on the climate impact on AI doesn’t seem useful


Replies

elbastiyesterday at 9:19 PM

This is wrong. AI uses ~4% of the US grid, and projections are that it will grow to 10%+ in the next 6 years.

And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018.

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Insanityyesterday at 9:05 PM

Pretty large amounts of energy go towards training large language models. Running them is also a non-negligible energy cost at scale.

But yeah, there's way worse industries out there when it comes to climate change impact.

datsci_est_2015yesterday at 9:13 PM

? Am I misunderstanding the push for nuclear energy and record energy prices in locales with new “data centers”?

hirako2000yesterday at 9:16 PM

Before large models things were starting to move to micro VM, lean hardware, firecracker cloud platforms running thin containers.

Ai buzz and now we are building giga factories. It stands for gigawatt usage, no less target.

surgical_fireyesterday at 9:26 PM

Which is why talk about AI datacenters typically involve energy supply constraints, and possibly the need to build power plants along with it.

It is, of course, because it barely uses any energy.