It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.
I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )."
Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.
"Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclsoure of the increase."
Alternatively, one could argue the increase shows their commitment to profit at the expense of the environment and the voluntary disclosure shows a commitment to greenwashing.
It's funny how that happens sometimes. Reminds me of the United Nations' "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples". The only four countries that didn't sign it initially were the ones that actually looked at it and thought about whether they could really achieve it.
That’s a charitable description of the states that voted against and an uncharitable description of the ones that voted for. A less loaded description would just observe that the opposed countries were the ones where the indigenous peoples would have the greatest claims and the governments would have the greatest resources to claim.
How do you know it isn't so much worse than what they're saying that this is actually part of the cover up? I'm not saying I believe that, just following your own logic.
> It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.
Didn't they just learn a lesson about the additional bad press you can be subjected to if you try to hide the severity of your security issues instead of just owning up to what's happening?
Can you think of any ulterior motives behind the oligarch's actions? Such as how global warming is causing increasing insurance rates worldwide as both severe and more mundane weather events cause more and more property damage to their extensive property portfolios?
Let’a assume the hypothesis that they believe that to be true. Why would anyone that believe that shut off nuclear plants that emit zero CO2 in Germany and burn wood as well as gas instead?
Are you saying that the ones holding up the ESG cartel that incentivize businesses to do communist climate justice are all morons that just happen to have incredibly competent execution? It’s the UN, EU, BlackRock, vanguard, the state department, all the WEF oligarchs etc
I suppose that might be more related to left wing populism as embodied by the German Greens who worked for decades to get nuclear energy out of Germany. Also because the plants would have had to be decommissioned anyways and modern nuclear is not SO competitive for practical concerns to outweigh political expediency.
I truly don't think it was a result of the actions of a centralised oligarch elite that drove this anyways.
They are also forbidding fossil fuel derived fertilizers and heavy machinery used to produce cheap food.
BRICS is allowed to build coal plants to replace the industry that dies in the west. This Marxist climate justice is like how DEI achieve equity, redistribution of outcomes, to favored activist groups or in this case the communist CCPs rule.
For communists like the greens it’s about destroying the west to put their oligarchic tyranny in place by destroying middle class economic independence, the issue never happened the revolution did.
How do you suppose, keeping in mind we're trying to avoid emitting carbon in the process, and keeping in mind 3 of them have nukes, we're to disallow BRICS from building coal plants?
It's also simply the case that if all Co2 production stopped tomorrow that countries like the United States would have all the stuff, as a consequence of a history of more overall pollution, so the resistance to stopping all coal production is naturally higher in poorer places.
Basically the only card one can pull is to decide not to reduce Co2 oneself, which ultimately does nothing directly to solve the problem.
ESG which is used to enforce climate justice is a a cartel environment that creates a total top-down, public-private sector controlled by a Stakeholder Soviet that determines the parameters of doing business.
This model was pioneered in China under Deng Xiaoping. The ultimate vision here is that the West, after "Degrowth" (Communism), and the East/South, after the full implementation of PRC/CCP hegemony and the Belt and Road Initiative, will dialectically synthesize into a single global system. Both the CCP and UN think they'll control it.
So both China and western oligarchs behind this are interested in western degrowth through energy & food & job poverty as a tool to destroy individual liberty that holds capitalism up and introduce communist religious rule.
The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy. Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively.
The US currently has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1160 GW of generation capacity in total [2]. We could almost double our countries generation capacity if we could just hook up the power to the grid.
Unfortunately it takes 10 years to build new transmission lines in the US [3]. Changes are going to need to be made to the permitting process, which may include giving more responsibility and agency to FERC to oversee the review process.
> Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively.
The 947 GW is the total proposed capacity for solar projects that are in various planning stages. They have not been built yet, and most of them will never be built -- historically only about 14% of proposed capacity ends up entering service [1].
This isn't to say that it's not important to invest in the grid to handle future needs. But it's not like there's a bunch of renewable energy just sitting there idle.
I know nothing about this topic, but it seems like maybe this comment and the parent don't disagree.
If most power generation is blocked by a lack of connectivity to the grid then it would stand to reason that most projects are abandoned or fail as they've no path to entering service (unless I've misunderstood).
I had the same reaction as the comment you are replying to.
I read the first comment quite literally. That there is over 900 GW of power that currently exists but just needs to be “hooked up”. i.e. a solar farm that is built, but through some bureaucracy there’s no line running from it to the grid.
With the context of the reply, that is not the case. Most of the cited 900GW isn’t even built yet. This seems like an important distinction when considering the scope of work needing to be done.
Is that 14% different with solar? I’m just bringing this up, because solar is dead simple compared to engineering studies and infrastructure required to build something like a new nuclear plant. I wonder if the simplicity of solar and storage will start to change how power generation is approached.
Microsofts datacenters already use mostly renewable energy. Those emissions are down 6% compared to 2020 and are negligible overall.
What went up 30% is what they call Scope 3 (indirect emissions from suppliers, transport, construction and customers):
"Indirect emissions from all other activities up
and down the value chain such as upstream and
downstream transportation, materials, and end-of-
life impacts, as well as all suppliers’ direct Scope 1
and 2 emissions.
Scope 3 represents over 96% of Microsoft’s
annual emissions in FY23. Our Scope 3 emissions
result primarily from the operations of our tens
of thousands of suppliers (upstream) and the use
of our products across millions of our customers
(downstream).
Tackling Scope 3 means decarbonizing industrial
processes such as steel, concrete, and other
building material production for use in our campus
and datacenter construction, as well as jet fuel for
business travel and logistics."
> The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy.
That would only mean that this renewable energy would no longer be available for other uses. Like, for instance, replacing or reducing the use of fossil fuels.
We're not (for now) limited by how much energy the sun puts out. We're limited by how much of that energy we can usefully capture. There's a limited number of solar panels, wind turbines, and water turbines (plus all necessary accessories like inverters and transformers) being manufactured each day.
> The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy.
This is not the case. As long as electricity is fungible on the grid, and there's some fossil electricity production close enough for transmission, changes in renewable electricity use mean increases/decreases in fossil electricity use at the margin.
> At the end of 2022, there were at least 947 GW of utility-scale solar power capacity within the interconnection queues across the nation, 456 GW of which include batteries.
Seems more likely to me that the utilities are expecting a large growth in consumption in the coming years and built out capacity ahead of time. Seems reasonable.
Sounds easy, but thinking about it seems to make it out to be a "last mile" problem. Broadband adoption in the US is still, relatively, extremely horrible.
Huge waste of CapEx for those expensive training GPUs if you can only use them 8 hours a day (same goes for all other data center hardware). Nevermind data availability and other hard problems if your DCs don't run 24/7.
You do spot pricing or preemptable instances at the margins to help maximize revenue while minimizing excess carbon.
I assume that most cloud venders are over-provisioning because their margins are so good that they'd rather overspend on inventory than miss out on revenue most of the time.
Somebody needs to run the real numbers ... what activities cost the most energy ( training to get weights, answering queries using weights, etc ), cost of types of energy in terms of external effects (fossil based energy Vs wind|sunlight) demand, bandwidth use, etc.
It's not inconceivable that there's an answer that meets needs based on only running the most energy consuming operations during daylight and migrating those operations about the globe during sunlight hours while having less demand operations run at night.
There's a real issue that needs addressing surrounding ever increasing global emissions, giving lip service while continuing to increase emission related activity is double think.
According to other comments, the data centers are less than 5% of the emissions in question. The data centers simply aren't relevant to this discussion.
The article suggests that data centers are the majority of energy consumption and more or less explicitly says they're not running on renewable sources.
> The vast majority comes from Scope 3 (96%), which includes the supply chain, data centers, and "the use of our products across millions of our customers."
> Yet the data centers remain an issue with no easy answer. The race to secure them is in full swing, and it would take years to switch them to renewable energy, experts tell PCMag.
Sounds good. Reciprocally though, my skepticism in various green credit programs has only grown over time. It seems unclear how many efforts out there are green washing credits, to not yet mine or make some display that doesn't help greatly. But I do think if there's any hope for green economy, a $3T company probably has swagger & personel to eventually refine & drive towards effective spending. Hopefully. If they can be true to these declarations. Let us hope.
It's very easy to be "carbon neutral" when all you do is to write software. I doubt they would be this public if they were in a heavy industrial field, for example. Now that they're in the datacenter business things will be different.
Does Microsoft have a history of buying fake carbon credits? And by that I mean, do they buy carbon credits from disreputable sources more often than reputable ones on average in recent years? Or do you simply believe that all carbon credit systems are fake?
I'm pretty firmly in the latter camp. Carbon credits essentially measure how much co2 emissions were prevented by the carbon credits existing. Not only is that pretty much impossible to measure, every company offering carbon credits at market rates is using a form of measurement which is BS.
Carbon credit schemes may do SOMETHING to offset climate change but less than they advertise.
Gates is an investor in some carbon dioxide removal companies and seems to be involved in decarbonization, so at least he has an incentive to have Microsoft do the right thing.
That being said, maybe Microsoft won't, and will buy the low quality "we totally were going to cut this forest but now we won't pinky promise" kind of credits, but I'd at least give them the benefit of the doubt over the average greenwashing corporation.
Those systems should get built out because they make sense to build out. Having a company feeling justified in releasing tons of extra co2 in the process seems like it nullifies some of the good the plant would bring.
Suppose many of those projects would not be built out without channeling significant capital to it, and carbon credits being an effective means of securing that capital. Would that change the calculus for you?
Note that I recognize many (possibly most?) carbon credits programs are bogus or worse, but trying to draw attention to circumstances where it's not always so cut and dry.
I think for renewable energy to win it has to be financially viable on its own. If it requires carbon credits to get started, is it going to be viable without them?
I think the most cut and dry situations is which they capture concentrated emissions from something like an O&G refinery or a cement plant, since it's an effort which ONLY exists for the sake of reducing emissions.
Even some of these, hilariously enough, despite how insanely quantifiable their benefits are, you see phenomenon like phantom credits like where Alberta, Canada gave Shell double credit for each tonne of Co2 they actually reduced.
I'm sure subsidies for green energy projects do reduce emissions, I just think the accounting is BS.
"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising"
As there's a huge crowd who seems very convinced of the idea that the solution to handle our resource problems is to be found in various growth and tech oriented solutions.
AI isn't the most efficient way to retrieve accurate information or to generate quality content, it's the most efficient way to retrieve plausible information and generate poor quality art and code. And that's really interesting.
There is a group of people that trust LLMs for all searches but most tech-literate people know they hallucinate, and understand roughly how an LLM works and that hallucinations are indistinguishable from the truth to the model. And so we still Google things and read books.
The same applies to AI-generated art, music, voiceovers, and code. They are technically impressive, but rarely meet client expectations in any industry. And so most artists and programmers still produce the work themselves.
AI is fantastic for low-quality content, and this explosion of AI is emblematic of how people often lack a filter for quality of information they put in their brains. This isn't new; YouTube has always had more low-quality content than high-quality pieces, probably 1000:1 if not a higher contrast. However, AI shows the scale like no tech has shown it to us before (and maybe this was known by some people at Google or Bing but not so publicly). Almost everyone consumes AI work — blogs, movie posters, art, music, and code. The market is massive but all AI does is reproduce the existing work it was loss-minimized on and the loss of quality is mathematically necessary unless the model is not a neural net, but a database of literally the entire dataset itself that is being searched.
So this is very interesting. When did we become so okay with feeding ourselves a fast food diet of content? Isn't that causing more harm than good? The scale of this phenomenon is truly (and literally) industrial. I myself can hardly imagine what the modern life would look like if people turned to the internet, let's say, only to look up facts and information they already seek. We are so far from that. And AI both illustrates it, and exacerbates it.
I see people frame generative AI this way a lot, as if they're strictly worse than alternatives in all dimensions (inaccurate, low quality). But I think there's several important dimension where they're strictly better, including flexibility, interactivity, and accessibility. I can ask an LLM a very specific question about my specific development environment, codebase, and tools and get a specific answer back that works. If it doesn't work, I can chat with the LLM about what happened to make changes. I don't even reach for LLMs that often compared to most engineers these days (maybe a couple times a month), but when I do, it's basically always the fastest and best way to deal with my particular situation.
I think a lot of people drastically underestimate how much the LLMs mislead the user with plausible-sounding answers. I would say that whatever % of queries you found them not to give you correct answers, the actual percentage is materially higher.
In my work niche, which at least 10,000 other software engineers do each day, ChatGPT 4 and 4o almost never give correct answers. Usually, they are misleading. I do find myself trying the LLMs when I'm faced with a challenging problem, but in that scenario they have not been helpful once.
Granted, there are areas of work that are much more popular and LLMs will be more helpful there. But these are individual scenarios, and we can find many where LLMs are fantastic and many where LLMs are awful if we wanted to cherry-pick.
Overall, the quality of the content is lower than what a human professional would do in their area of work, including flexibility, interactivity, and accessibility. This extends to books written by professionals and lectures given by them, as well as work carried out by them. It applies to home carpentry as much as it does to neurosurgery.
The more specific the knowledge has to be, the more this is true. The more generic, the less. But all-in-all, I think it's still very evident humans produce higher quality knowledge and content. And any quantized model of that content and knowledge will be unable to reproduce it at the same fidelity or quality.
With that said, I hope I expressed this enough — I do see your point in some circumstances. Just not overall.
It feels like you mostly view generative AI as a system that produces finished products, which you don’t like. And for some reason that is how they are marketed, but it’s a terrible use for them. To me the point of generative AI is as a tool for an expert user to use en route to achieving some larger goal. I can personally attest that it works really well for me in this regard, as can many others. I think if I tried to use LLMs as surrogate experts I would be very frustrated, since they are totally unready for that purpose.
This conversation has drifted slightly off-topic. It was originally about the efficiency of producing good quality outputs akin to products or services with generative AI.
I work in an industry adjacent to generative AI, so my views are very specific, and kind of beside the point. But I think the broader public does think what you describe. Much (and probably most) of AI-generated content that ends up on the internet is very barely changed by a human.
I am not saying gen AI is not useful, but that it's not efficient in the process of making high quality content. It's simply not steerable enough in practice. In creative industries, people are going pretty wild about how much work AI can replace, but all I've seen is mediocrity and failure when it is involved. Or frustration, as you say, that what it outputs is very difficult to turn into a high-quality product.
I agree. The state of the art of gen AI systems is well below a typical human expert in every domain. Here human expert is well below the bar of 'world class', more like 'some one with 2-5 years of professional experience in that area.' So, if you have access to someone like that, it's a no-brainer to use their work instead of gen AI system.
The interesting use case which has emerged is that there are a lot of times where it would be really helpful to me to have a short conversation with an expert on a topic adjacent to my own expertise. And it turns out that for those conversations, talking to ChatGPT is much better than talking to no one; it can help me with the kind of things someone would learn in the first few months on the job in that area, things a little too hard to google but where a human expert is not readily available.
I think this is the best, maybe the only, professional use case for GenAI right now -- advice and limited assistance in areas just outside your area of expertise, such that you don't need to depend directly on its output and can easily check/integrate the work.
I concur. I'm notca huge user of AI, but it does make a good search tool when my search term is verbose.
For example I was looking for the name of a windows API command. I "knew" the command must exist, but didn't gave a clue what it was called. Asked Cgpt for an example program, and there's the name of the API. (Which I can then Google for docs.)
I also had a complicated-to-ask question about sun movement which it explained to me, along with site links to actual data.
I'm not using it as a Google replacement, but more of a Google supplement when the question is long-winded to write.
The positive side is supercomputers help us analyze the climate, the Atlantic current, and so forth. The negative side is they also help locate oil. Is it a win or loss on net? Hard to know.
Thinking of entertainment, it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Supposedly a GPT-4 query costs 0.01kWh - meanwhile, a Tesla consumes 0.35kWh a minute at freeway speed.
I would be very interested in the breakdown of how they conclude it's 0.01kWh (10Wh) per request, and what that does and doesn't include.
I expect that if you were to calculate "incremental energy per request" - how much "extra CPU compute" each request adds, you could probably get to that sort of value.
But odds are good that figure ignored all the training data collection, all the processing on that, storage of that digested information, retrieval of it, etc, and that sort of number tends to also skip things like "storage systems running to have the information available."
If I've got an entire datacenter running to provide services, and the request consumes, say, 3 GPU-minutes of time across all the nodes, sure. This is a sane value. It just ignores a lot of the other resources dedicated to the task at various points.
Microsoft isn't using 30% more energy than their current footprint on 10Wh/request AI answers.
Math like this is very much a "Tell me what answer you'd like, and I'll make it work out!" sort of scenario. An increase in data center use by 30% is harder to fudge.
'Is 10w/h per request the marginal cost of a request? Or does it factor in the fixed energy cost of the whole facility? Does it include training costs'
I'm inclined to lean towards it including at least some fixed costs. It seems rather high to be marginal cost. I have no gut feel for training costs though.
So, assuming it does include at least some fixed cost, using it more will reduce 'cost per use' while at the same time driving up actual consumption.
> it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world.
Nope.
Look back to the GP's paradox and the energy consumed watching even just the single most popular youtube video . . .
That isn't "energy saved" from "otherwise people would be flocking miles in cars to watch Despacito and Baby Shark Dance in theatres.
The AI training loads are over and above the already existing supercomputer modelling of land|sea|air fluid flows vie regular means - it's questionable whether LLM's et al even add anything of values in that domain (despite a plethora of papers asserting it to be so).
A good reminder to everyone that global CO2 emissions are higher than they have ever been [0]. Again: 2024 was the mos polluting year in history.
A lot of feel-good articles and tweets will often talk about the plummeting costs of solar, or how the share of renewables is higher than ever, or stuff like that, which is, from a global warming point of view, absolutely irrelevant.
The only thing that matters as far as warming is concerned is how much CO2 is there in the air. The cumulative number. It doesn't matter if the growth is slowing, it doesn't matter if there's more solar than ever, etc etc.
So yeah, we're producing more clean energy than ever, but we're also using more carbon than ever.
No. You're right about the company case: when you look at a company, you only care about its profit today (and in the future). You don't really care about how much money it spent to get here.
But for purposes of global warming, you care about the total amount of carbon in the air. The cumulative sum. The integral.
If a company becomes profitable today, it survives.
If emissions were to magically stop today...warming continues!
I saw the point of things of the carbon tax as flattening a plateau more than stopping co2 emission growth. I never really had any delusions about that being politically viable, I can't even convince most around me that it's worth it to put a price on carbon that is several times less than its actual impact on the environment and economy.
Relieving some latent demand is a great thing, especially when you’re the one needing that last new hospital bed, traffic lane, or supercomputer time slot to predict who the hurricane endangers. More throughput is wonderful. When unsure, best to endorse meeting demand rather than judging it as unworthy.
One sentence from The Economist seems to explain more than TFA: "Microsoft reported a 31% increase in its indirect (Scope 3) emissions last year from building more data centres (including the carbon found in construction materials) as well as from semiconductors, servers and racks."
So no, it's not about lack of renewable electricity.
Sure, we may be heading right into a massive climate crisis in the next few decades, but what about the hypothetical post-humans who will dig up spent nuclear fuel 10_000 years from now?!
Transportation and storage are still issues we have to deal with today, though.
There was definitely a window, maybe fifty years ago, where widespread adoption of nuclear energy would have stopped and reversed climate change. We may have had an increase in Chernobyls with the proliferation of non-modern reactor designs, but in this hypothetical reality maybe people would have been OK with that.
The problem today is that renewables are getting too cheap and too good, and the storage problem shrinks every day. Meanwhile, it takes upwards of a decade to license and build a single reactor. France's fancy new reactors won't be online until 2040. Nuclear is just too slow.
I feel like 10 years from now it won't even be a debate or a contest, nuclear will just be the most expensive option by a country mile. Greenhouse gases will peak within the next 2 years[0]. The nuclear lobby missed their chance, which does mean we'll have to deal with some effects of climate change we could have avoided.
My feeling right now (and I kinda flip-flop every few years) is that nuclear lost and it's economically infeasible to try again. Change my mind?
Is inside an abandoned salt mine really the same as "under the carpet"? I don't see what scenario people have in mind when they're worried about nuclear waste storage.
Do you realize it can be reprocessed yes? It's not like we don't know how to deal with it, there are both working reprocessing plants and breeding reactors for it. Only about 5% of it is actual waste and it's dangerous for much less that 10k years and can be solidified if needed...
Amazon already have a datacenter with an attached nuclear power plant, and Microsoft have contracted with Helion for future delivery of a fusion power plant (assuming it materializes).
Zuckerberg says part of the problem is not just the amount of power needed for a SOTA AI-training datacenter (~1GW), but the fact that you need the power at that particular location which makes co-locating a power plant the best option. The biggest solar power plants in China put out over 2GW, but the biggest in the US is Solar Star in CA, wihch occupies 12 km^2 and only puts out 58MW.
Thank god for comments like this. I find it truly disturbing how much people are treating LLMs like fact-machines. They are pattern matching machines that match using whatever information they have that matches best.
It's closer to improv jazz than to factual authority; still super wonderful, and worthwhile listening to, but not really for the purpose of learning how the original sounded when it was first recorded. Sure, you might get a sense of the original, but that's all it is: an impression. When you ask for facts, you get an impressionist render of facts, which sometimes, maybe even often times, accurately depict the Truth. But sometimes they depict the Truth the way an artist depicts the truth: if it feels right, it's right.
Which indicates (correctly or not) a current capacity of 314MW for Solar Star 1 (still less than the 1GW needed for Zuckerberg's projected SOTA data center).
Google search for "largest solar farms" or similar, but my bad - should have checked the date of the source.
The point I was trying to make, echoing Zuckerberg (who noted that power, not chips or data, is the constraining factor for further LLM scaling), is that power needs to be near to the data center, else the lead time and red tape will be even longer. If we're considering clean power then solar is an option, which limits datacenter location to where that is viable on this 1GW scale.
It's funny that you're the second person in this thread to assume that just because the data was wrong (out of date as it happens) it must have come from an LLM (which it didn't). I guess this is the world we are moving into, where all content is suspect of being AI generated and therefore suspect!
I was curious how Helion were coming along and found quite a good youtube "Will the Helion Fusion Reactor ACTUALLY work? - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Real Engineering." The answer seems to be maybe eventually but not for quite a while. (vid https://youtu.be/lb7GXi0ZvYw)
The huge solar power plants in China are in western China, aka deserts and frozen desert mountains, aka you can't build data centers there either. And shipping that power across thousands of KMs is as hard for China as it is for the US.
Hence China is still building coal plants, and won't really stop. Especially if it means the future of AI is being bottlenecked by it.
PRC is attempting to optimize large compute clusters near renewables via "East Data West Computing" / "Eastern Data, Western Computing". Peak coal is expected in the next few years, new "cleaner" plants mainly replacing old plants. But there's is very much ongoing project to colocate computing/data closer to renewables. If choice is between coal + bottleneck AI, they'd chose coal. But with renewable projected to be 15-30% cheaper than coal in coming years, especially with PRC indigenous semi nodes behind (more power ineffecient per unit of compute), they'd go with renewables + shuttling data around.
To those who are drinking deep of the AI kool-aid, know this: this is not remotely sustainable.
Anyone who is thinking AI will replace writers and artists and voice-overs and who knows who else ... it's going to cost more money than you think, and it's all getting added to the considerable bill we're running up that will end up costing us everything.
I tried to find the source of the 29% figure, but it's defined as data center usage. I understand machine learning is resource intensive but how much is it really? Are the numbers for this available to the public?
Perhaps my question was worded poorly. I'm saying is: the premise of the article is wrong. It attributes the 29% figure to AI but the source attributes the 29% to new datacenters. It seems unlikely to me that 100% of new datacenter usage would go to AI.
Remind me how much carbon is emitted by workers being forced to commute to serve coffee to social media managers who are selling fast fashion to influencers?
Whataboutism is when two entities are doing shitty stuff with roughly commensurate negative impact.
Versus dinging an endeavor that might have net positive impact (AI might REDUCE environmental impact) against forces that 100x larger and have no positive direction, it's actually just: pointing out when journalism uses a relative value to make a tempest in a teapot and distract from the big picture.
We can't just zoom in on 1% stuff that's working for the common good (at least in principle, if not, let's make THAT issue the article) as a scare story, and not talk about how it's a fraction of what is really up.
Replace "remind me" with "what about" and the sentence reads perfectly. That is usually a good test for what about'ism
> Whataboutism is when two entities are doing shitty stuff with roughly commensurate negative impact
I have different view. What about'ism can be akin: "oh, you don't like that i drive a ar, what about the millions of cars driven everyday? And what about al gore! I will not stop driving until he stops flying"
Perhaps my understanding is wrong of what-aboutism, wanted to point out that there not be common ground on the definitions of terms.
FWIW, while AI might reduce carbon impact, as you have stated, so far it has not. Data centers use a lot of electricity, they are significant, and have a lot of projected growth ahead. With that said and news the impact has ramped up, so far we have only increased the challenge.
I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )."
Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.