I know how machine learning “AI” works, and there, the training is the costly part, using it is close to free.
Could someone knowledgeable explain what’s the difference with those more recent large language models used by ghatgpt etc. ?
Tax pollution and pay the revenue as cash to poor people, it’ll figure itself out
The first statement is not even wholly true. While training does take more, executing the model (called “inference”) takes much, much more power than non-AI search algorithms, or really any traditional computational algorithm besides bogosort.
Big Tech weren’t doing the best they possibly could transitioning to green energy, but they were making substantial progress before LLMs exploded on the scene because the value proposition was there: traditional algorithms were efficient enough that the PR gain from doing the green energy transition offset the cost.
Now Big Tech have for some reason decided that LLMs represent the biggest game of gambling ever. The first to find the breakthrough to AGI will win it all and completely take over all IT markets, so they need to consume as much as they can get away with to maximize the probability that that breakthrough happens by their engineers.
Yeah, I ran some image generators on my RTX2070, and it took a solid minute at full power to do it. Sure, it’s not a crazy amount, but it’s not like it’s running on your iPhone.
you can get a very small generator running on a modern phone if you want a grainy 400x400 piece of anime trash
Nothing more than playing a game for that minute
there aren’t many games that tax your gpu like inference, where it’s pegged for the entire time. i have a power usage tracker on my desktop because my gpu is stupidly powerhungry, and it uses way more power doing inference than playing a modern graphics-intensive game.
How much energy does AI really use? (zdnet) Seems like queries aren’t that expensive, so I guess the enormous energy cost of AI must be mostly from training. I reckon this is why apologists try to minimize it.
That was a shit “article” IMO. “What is a data center” lol, and no figures or explanations. Or did I miss something when I speed read the SEO crap?
Here’s google’s environmental impact report, then.
You have more brians than any AI shill will ever be able to emulate.
brians
You rang?
Only takes two brians to summon you?
Convenient!
Thirty Brians agree…
Cue badass bass intro song
Uh uh…
Brian’s World! Brians World!
Radical!
I don’t use autocorrect, because misspellings and misstypes are usually more legible than what ever ‘other’ word autocorrect picks.
… though I’m leaving this one in. A gaggle of Brians is better than any AI shit.
God autocorrect is so bad on my phone
My autobanana works perfectly fine.
I had it turned off for the longest time and it got reset recently back to on and I’m giving it a few days to see if anything has improved.
It sure likes changing words it doesn’t have saved to other words instead of just doing an underline or something helpful.
Yeeep.
Autocorrect will out whole ass entirely wrong words in and significantly change the conveyed meaning, often into gibberish.
Maenwhlie, yuo cn proably. rea d this quirt ealisly.
Ah, Muphry’s law at work
At the moment AI is consuming about 3x as much total power as gaming (60 terawatt hrs/yr vs 20), so presumably 3x more environmental impact. So my question is, if one thing is 3x worse does it make the other thing okay? I mean, it seems fair that the power consumption should make us roughly 1/3 as outraged by gaming as we are by AI.
B-b-but…
The outrage is no comparable because games aren’t forced down your throat. I’ve never once asked for an AI summary of something, yet I see them constantly if I don’t actively avoid them, so I’m indirectly incurring those costs.
Outrage for other people’s environmental effects because they’re “forcing it down your throat” but not your own because you’re doing it willingly? Yeah, that sounds super morally impeccable!
I never said i was outraged or not. But at least when i game and being morally deplorable, I’ve actively chosen to do so with intent. That’s still way better than them deciding for me to waste the energy when i don’t even use the result. If you don’t see the difference there isn’t much to talk about here.
Youi’re right that there isn’t much point in this conversation, but completely wrong about the reason. I’m saying if people are upset about the amount of power AI is using they should be at least 1/3 as upset about the power gaming uses. You’re saying the bigger issue is AI doing something on your behalf without asking. I don’t even know how to address an issue-dodging mentality like that. Oh well.
Don’t use services with AI summaries
Hence why I said if I don’t actively avoid them. I used those services before AI was a thing. So it was not my decision.
Not sure why I missed that line! The enshitification is tragic
AI training is less energy than AAA game development of which dozens come out each year.
Hmmm, is this true? The fact that AI corpos are talking about standing up brand new power plants just to keep their GPU farms running makes me a little dubious of this claim. I don’t remember Ubisoft ever being that desperate for wattage
If you do the math, which I’ve posted here, you can see it’s true. This is a situation where hundreds of SUV drivers are sitting in traffic, see a large bus bellow out a large puff of diesel smoke, and think, “Wow buses are bad for the environment.”
People are bad at math. They don’t see their individual contributions add up to really bad things.
Damn, I didn’t realize video games were so bad. I guess we should ban both, then. Whether for AI or Gran Turismo, people just shouldn’t have a graphics card newer than 2008.
It’s that something you have a source on, or do you just have a feeling about it?
Gpt 4 had a training cost of $78 million. Gta5 cost $300 million. 4000 developers each with the latest GPU burning hundreds of watts per employee to create the assets. A rough estimate of 750watt pc, 4,000 developers, 8 hour a day, 300 days a year, 5 years = 36 giga watt-hours.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4
https://gamerant.com/rockstar-games-with-longest-development-cycles-ranked/ https://www.tweaktown.com/news/88292/over-6-000-people-worked-on-grand-theft-auto/index.html https://www.sportskeeda.com/gta/how-long-take-make-gta-5-a-brief-history-game-s-developmental-cycle
Off topic: while trying to find my post where I did the math I discovered that Blue Morpho is the name of an AI company. God damn it. AI ruined my Venture Bros reference.
Except their GPUs wouldn’t be at 100% power all the time. Most of that time will be with programming, texture artistry, planning mechanics etc. I have a feeling that “back of the napkin” calculation is incredibly inaccurate.
100% power all the time
A gaming PC uses more than 750 watts. Plus there’s AC cooling for that which doubles the total power usage. So 750 watts includes not using the CPU all the time. Then there’s the testers on the development team which greatly outnumber the coders. Testers are using the GPU the entire time they’re working.
Lastly the cost comparison of the Rockstar developing GTA5 vs OpenAI training ChatGPT includes all the energy costs because they had to pay for everything. OpenAI is 2k developers compared to Rockstar 4k so it’s not just salaries that make up the difference.
No, a gaming pc ‘can’ use 750 watts. But it won’t be using 750 watts 100% of the time.
Power supplies only draw what they need, not their full rated capacity.GPU’s also downclock and lower their power draw when they aren’t being stressed to their limits.
Lunch breaks cut 30-60 minutes out of those 8 hours.
And that article estimated 5000 employees internationally, which includes management, marketing, programmers, visual artists, musicians, sound engineers, voice actors, qa, translators, external consultants/contractors, and many more.
These are all people who have helped make the game at some point, and does not mean these people were in-office or employed for the entire development process.Very few of those roles require top-end machines, and even fewer require their systems to be running at full speed 100% of the time.
Even if we ignore that that gaming companies have a larger energy footprint, it’s still less energy. Let’s assume its a regular corporation with only accountants and laptops:
6k employees 20 kwatt hours per square foot https://esource.bizenergyadvisor.com/article/large-offices 150 square feet per employee https://unspot.com/blog/how-much-office-space-do-we-need-per-employee/#%3A~%3Atext=The+needed+workspace+may+vary+in+accordance
18,000,000,000 watt hours
vs
10,000,000,000 watt hours for ChatGPT training
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/
Ignoring the shitty quick maths. Those are energy costs of employing people. Those programmers and artists won’t stop needing AC and a computer if you get rid of the videogame industry, they’ll move to another industry with AC and computers.
Yeah, but Game development does use more energy than a typical office worker. However even treating it as a regular office worker, the training costs are equivalent to 3k office workers but the results of the training are used by far more than 3k. So the energy use of the training is divided by millions of users.
So you’re saying that GTA VI is only going to be used by the developers?
And how does tech companies putting AI results on every interaction of mine count as a user? I never read their bullshit, yet it’s all over my screen, wasting both insane amounts of energy and valuable screen space.
I’m claiming that chat chatGPT is used by more than gamers.
deleted by creator
I’m skeptical that those 4k developers are using their entire GPU for 8 hours a day. I would be surprised if even 10% of the
brainGPU was being used. Though there are CI servers running ontop of that, but typically much fewer than there are developers. I would estimate 5 GWh as a liberal upper bound.If you scroll further down, I did the math assuming that it wasn’t even a gaming company and got 18 GWh.
^ whataboutism
Seems more like “putting things in scale” than “whataboutism.” I’m not sure I agree with the premise, but I don’t think it’s whataboutism at all. Whataboutism would be “it’s fine, because something else is worse,” whereas I think the commenter is trying to say “it’s not much, since it’s less than something else that isn’t much either.”
They give analogies elsewhere about buses blowing big fat gas loads in front of SUV drivers, so if this is what they’re doing at all, it’s only because they’re floating between opinions, happily landing on whichever one happens to be more useful.
I believe they would say both are insignificant—but also!—video games are worse, so… you know, if you think electricity waste is bad, really you’re the problem, hippie.
Is it wrong to point out hypocrisy? Is also it wrong to mock SUV owners who complain that buses burn gasoline/diesel?
Arguments from hypocrisy are lazy jabs made by people too cowardly to take a strong stance on anything. Be affirmative: Do you think buses burn too much gasoline?
Something that sucks is slightly less bad for the environment than something that also sucks. Wow very good argument
People do bad things for the environment all the time. It’s hypocritical to drive around in a big SUV (4080 gaming GPU) and mock people driving a minivan because cars are bad for the environment.
Congrats on the award!
Insults aren’t a rebuttal. You didn’t explain your hypocrisy.
You just copy and pasted the same crap you gave to everyone who replied without even reading what I said, there was no hypocrisy in what I said, therefor you missed the point and I have no reason to explain myself to you.
Stop lying. Using the same car analogy isn’t a copy and paste.
Doing something that sucks more while complaining about those that do things that sucks less is hypocrisy.
You have yet to read my original comment, lmao. Not a surprise, you probably let AI think for you.
Don’t listen to them.
sure, while we’re splitting hairs let’s ban all computers worldwide because they are the cause of the huge increase of energy needs.
Neo-neolithic age, here we come.
Good point, we should probably stop doing that. Reject modernity, return to ASCII
我该如何用ASCII写这个句子？
At least human beings get paid to do that and presumably at least some of the people playing the games enjoy the experience.
The concept of a video game also isn’t fundamentally built on consumer deception, either.
