How much energy AI really needs. And why that's not its main problem.
How much energy AI really needs. And why that's not its main problem.
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Artificial Intelligence consumes a lot of energy, both during training and during operation. We’ve heard a lot about this. Indeed, Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI recently said that we’ll need small modular nuclear reactors just to power all those AIs. Well, hold that thought. Today I want to look at how much energy these AIs really need and explain why I think this isn’t the main problem.
The new paper with the energy estimates is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16863
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You are not including the cost to cool all of those "compute" machines. Assume that for every Watt of compute you will need between 1.5–2.2 watts of cooling based on optimum to average Data Center efficiency Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). BTW tethering these sites to the power grid makes them vulnerable to outages and backup Generator Systems would have to be on a massive scale.
So doing more will cost more, what a drag 🙂 🙂 🙂
…PS: when the rich get richer also the poor get richer …only the difference between the two increases; again, what a drag..
So AI is causing global warming. Creating the electricity to operate the computing machinery. The heat produced from the energy conversion. All the energy used to create the housing for the computing and storage . Then cooling all the stuff we just created energy to heat up. And so on and on
So let me get this straight, we have a Energy Issue because of the FLOOD of FAKE Video’s Photo’s & Avatars/Bots used to flood Social media Channels with crap which is helping to break-down Society, with addition of Crypto making Fraud & Blackmail Crime un-trackable, and we have to find more Power for these sort of things ?
The main problem of AI is that it follows the GIGO rule : garbage in, garbage out. In other words any AI is as dumb as its dumbest designer
No worries! AI can just use the energy from humans in energy pods and boot up an AI simulation in the humans’ brains… Oh, wait… That’s the "Matrix" movie.
I forget… WHY do humans "need" AI in the first place???
Seriously…
🌎✌🌱🎶
There is something wrong with a German doing internet memes
All these highly energy intensive technologies being pushed without massive investment in reliable energy is just making me raise an eyebrow.
I do not get the comparison criteria between training and execution while they claim training resource consumption is way higher. NO, in a normal case it is way lower when you well established your trained model and it became widely used and value generating model. You have billions of users using the model tens of time in average and this goes on for years until it is decided to be re-trained with new data or update the AI structure all together. If training cost being the major cost of all AI operations was the base rule, then using AI would be a fools errand but nothing else. Those firms are obviously are not value generating stage, if they ever will be of course. They generate money via inflating their stock prices value via hype
If even half of what is in the lawsuit document is true someone neded to sue them to keep them honest and publicize currently unknown documents.
such waste of resources and for what? depressing!
You forgot to mention the obvious solution to the energy problem: turning off these unethical industrial theft-based "tools"
poor E.
The energy consumed by artificial intelligence, along with all the energy consumed for data centers and the Internet, is minuscule compared to the energy consumed for the production of weapons of mass destruction.
Also note how much time and energy AI is going to save. It’s gonna make our life so much better overall…
What about the amount of water the data centers need? Huge amounts of water.
Interesting. It’s all about how, not why. Maybe we should be asking why we are doing this.
Using conventional computing of AI is generating high energy.
💡 But human brains are being used in China which makes energy use more effective?
We should use AI generated from human brains or create💡quantum computers linked to AI to make the energy more effective.😮
why not use geo-thermal – one time setup in same location for decades, and free cooling. Or…. why not locate some of these massive data farms in the arctic – same reasoning
🤣🤣🤣 The elon bit at the end 😂😂😂 you could have become a comedienne that face gets me every time!
Given that the amount of available energy is finite, at some point we will need to make a tradeoff between intelligence (AI) and transportation
Y like your videos, except when the final conclusion is "the result is the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer".
I truly like your videos and I respect you as a scientist, but on political matters and understanding how science is going to impact on society, you are thinking sometimes like a plain (and simple minded) communist.
Saying that premium AI is going to make the rich richer and the poors poorer is like saying that people with the lastest Iphone is going to be richer than people with the cheapest cellphone.
Both phones have access to mostly the same apps, the same AI tools, and to an infinite ocean of information. The breakthrough of AI is already being pretty democratic from the start, and you can use it on any phone or computer.
What matters the most is what one is doing with your phone or with the AI, not how fancy those tools are.
Ah, this video makes me feel guilty due to writing a useless and meaningless prompt.
Oat may I?
The good part about being hopeless is there’s nothing left to worry about. Enjoy what you can while you still can.
All this and no mention it is dirty tech. The problem. isn’t cost it is destroying our planet with dirty energy water demands all so corn bots can bring in $.
why do we need to waste so much energy on ai that tells us that we will have nuclear fusion power plants within 10 years, we knew it since 30 years!
Quantum Computing is the big energy sucker. A company that develops AI has occupied an island to specifically provide energy to operate the computers whose technology operates optimally at 0 degrees Kelvin
If they don’t know how to get the human mind down to a couple hundred watts they should throw out everything they have now and start again. Nothing in the human mind requires a lot of power and to make all the parts better does not either. If it does… throw it out and start over.
What’s the problem here? We don’t want normal good wages, so now an AI assistant can charge all the money? We trade inefficient humans for expensive hallucinating energy tanking AI?😂
If AI poses existential threats, couldn’t we just pull the plug on it and save money in the process?
Extrapolating the current uptick in AI, due mostly to training, will project a Blackwell in every closet. It won’t happen, just like a Cisco router didn’t end up in every garage, circa 2001. The inevitable market rationalization and segmentation will reflect total cost of ownership constraints. There are huge emerging niches already.
130 homes? that’s not alot. maybe 130k?
AI doesn’t have to use a lot of energy. On Nvidia at home, a 70B model uses around 750 watts for inference and 125 idle. That same model on my Mac uses 150 watts for inference and 10 while idle for nearly the same speed. I expect for home use AI will likely settle on RISC with fast unified RAM and use very little energy. It’s just right now compute has typically been optimized for AI workloads(high RAM usage that needs to be fast) so using GPU hardware and powering through the work load is what we’re doing today.
holy shit, that’s almost more than Taylor Swift uses
Interesting. So an image IS worth a thousand words.
You have an a.i generating this animation of you (odd distortion around the mouth during speech) and another mimicking your speech (pronunciation tells).
Maybe you should put that in your description.
So a picture is worth a thousand words, and as many watts? It’s incredible how that metaphor has scaled into reality.
Love the phone call bit. They always crack me up.
Global Energy Consumption is going upward year by year . No limit ahead ?
Seems not feasible human have to face a infinite Energy demand , is really no reasonable to be accomplished . Until collapse entire nature system
I think human must return to simplicity for preserve nature and avoid a collapse !!!!
What is happening is a repeat of the 1920s when there was technology given to the general public that made life easier. AI will figure out these problems for itself and in the process make people’s life better with new tech or something like free energy to free up money from going to paying for the electric bill. This is how they get people to embrace AI. This is how they get us to love our new satanic master.
Powering AI, along with charging lithium batteries simply relocates carbon units. Energy is not free no matter where it comes from. Laws of physics. Environmentalists are so dang dumb. There is no such thing as going green unless we return to the Stone Age. Still not carbon free in the Stone Age.
OMG! "Matrix" was reght, sort of. In movie, people was turned into battery to power machines. In reality people will pay a lot for energy so AI could have it free. So we are entering times where human is for technology not other way round.
Musk is no saint but I don’t think he’s quite the villain you’ve depicted him to be here. Otherwise a decent video 👍
we need that big boy juice 🧃 power for ai. nuclear.
andameng requirements pa ng a.i., what about also my day to day nutrition man lng?
I have a solution. I once heard a story about some super metal made from silver that would allow electricity to circle the globe on a single wire. Meaning a power company on one side of the country could easily send power to the other side without a need for breaks in the line. Then I never heard anouther story about it again. Ask AI how we could scale materials like this. Even making the chips out of this super metal. For anyone who understands how chips work and how electricity flows, this super metal basically removes 80% of the resistance on the metal so atoms flowed faster and cooler.
Power? Sabine Hossenfelder and Meredith Whittaker? The real problem? And not bad intellectual humanoid analysis and insight. And: that is the real problem! The theoretical emotional and material nightmare of the Ai’s. Thanks! At the stake with the witches my stocks are currently rising.
I am so glad you enjoy teasing Elon Musk. God knows he deserves it even from an atheist like me.
Damn, f#cking more nuclear Power again