alt Hacker NewsI don't understand the point of this, why just now when it comes to llms. Why wasn't anyone enraged with the environmental costs of kids playing video games. I would not be surprised the environmental cost of that is an order of magnitude bigger than what llms have.
Edit: for context, just Steam alone has ~200million monthly active users.
Replies
Considering Nvidia's hard shift to crypto and now AI, I doubt videogames are even in the same ballpark.
How many DCs are devoted solely to gaming?
If you recall history past the last 5 minutes, you will remember that people have indeed been enraged with the environmental costs of things for a long time. Its just that AI seems to have induced a mass amnesia, and people tend to forget about what happened pre 2024.
I don't think video games consume nearly as much power. A PS5's power consumption is apparently around 200W. That's not enough to run even one GPU, let alone the armada it presumably takes to run Astra.
Even then people do care about the power consumption of non-AI things. Look at the energy label on your TV or tumble drier for example.
Because people find video games fun, though I suppose there's some vocal people that think of them as bad for society. In contrast the AI companies are promising a torment nexus future.
I'd be curious as to how much of internet infrastructure is dedicated to gaming though.