8 ms·

The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

18 points by electic 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LewisVerstappen 4y ago
Energy source > Energy consumption. Energy consumption is not a bogeyman and we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier. We need to pivot to cleaner sources, so the focus should be on that. Would be great if the journos could stop demonizing the wrong thing.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  [dead]
- lovemenot 4y ago
  >> we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. No argument that changing energy sources is crucial. But I would not dismiss a plan to also reduce overall energy consumption while maintaining or improving quality of life indicators.
  - LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    > I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. Okay, you're dismissing the argument without proposing any counter arguments. J. Storrs Hall lays out the case for the relationship between energy usage & quality of life. What are your specific rebuttals?
    - lovemenot 4y ago
      It is not self-evident to me that QoL improvements are necessarily driven by increased energy consumption. Not having read J. Storrs Hall, I do not have any specific rebuttals to that. When I have heard such assertions before, I dug a little and found it was based on extrapolation. Sorry, if that isn't implicit in yours or J. Storrs Hall's thinking. Ultimately, any system that seems to grow exponentially will eventually be found to have been on an S-Curve. We can argue the timing of reaching the plateau after the fact, but it is certain that no system can continue to grow exponentially indefinitely. Nor should it have to. Global human population for instance should start to reverse centuries of growth this century. In the case of population flattening, perhaps we can agree this is to the good. I would argue much the same about energy consumption.
      - lovemenot 4y ago
        I just looked at J. Storrs Hall page on Wikipedia and saw Kurzweil in the References there. Would it be fair to call J. Storrs Hall a Singularitarian ? If so, it figures. We can argue the merits of such arguments, but it is a reach to state them axiomatically.
    - palata 4y ago
      Not the OP, but fossil fuels are not unlimited, until now we don't have anything close to them, and anyway more energy consumption tends to go with more loss of habitat (talking biodiversity). I think there is a case to make about reducing energy consumption.
- graeme 4y ago
  That’s all well and good to say, but we currently have no system to do that. What we ought to have is a carbon tax. Then if some activity such as bitcoin or ai or driving or flying uses carbon, you pay extra. Whereas if you manage to fuel your activities with nuclear/wind/solar you don’t. There are loads of complexities to this but simply saying “consumption is necessary for riches” while ignoring that we have not managed to lower our carbon usage is not quite hitting the mark.
  - kragen 4y ago
    we do currently have a system to pivot to cleaner sources; it's the photovoltaic module industry, which has undercut the price of fossil-fuel energy by almost a factor of two in much of the world, though not in polar regions
    - palata 4y ago
      A photovoltaic industry that mostly depends on fossil fuels, doesn't it?
      - kragen 4y ago
        no, it mostly depends on energy the production processes for the key materials involved, like silicon, aluminum, and glass, can use any convenient energy source the exception is the carbon dioxide emissions from the carbon electrodes in aluminum smelting pots, but this is a tiny fraction of the total
        andromeduck 4y ago
        That convenient energy source needs to be stable, which most renewables are far from.
        kragen 4y ago
        there are some advantages to it being stable, but even today, pv plus batteries is still cheaper than coal in much of the world
- water-your-self 4y ago
  Until the sources are clean I will blame the consumers that do so without regard for the source.
- albertopv 4y ago
  That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    This is the abstention-only of climate management.
  - LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    > That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction. 1) That's not a fact 2) That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically 3) Consumption reduction = lower quality of life & health for poor people (the rich have 0 interest in consumption reduction... do you see the davos crowd turning in their private jets?)
    - orwin 4y ago
      Having a house with better insulation reduced my mother energy costs from 6k to 2k, with 2022 being a year where the electricity was more expensive. She does not have weirdly distributed heat islands in her house, and supported this winter way better than past years. She reduced her consumption by 3, increasing her quality of life.
    - albertopv 4y ago
      "That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically" I'm sorry, still trying to learn a foreing language, thank for your caring advice. "Consumption reduction = lower quality of life " That's false, see LED lights.
      - andromeduck 4y ago
        Efficiency has it's limits and many industrial processes are already pretty close.
        albertopv 4y ago
- KarlKemp 4y ago
  This used to be true, but changed dramatically. The relevant term is „energy intensity“, measuring how much energy is needed per unit of GDP. It has been improving for quite a while now, see, for example https://www.aceee.org/blog/2015/12/what-energy-intensity-and-how-does-it https://www.aceee.org/blog/2015/12/what-energy-intensity-and...
- nl 4y ago
  I'm 100% in the "let's make clean energy too cheap to meter" camp. Get rid of anti-dumping legislation and let China subsidise as much solar panel production as they can! Build wind farms everywhere! Long distance HV transmission between climate zone should be so common that people don't keep thinking it isn't in use now! (And yes, it would be great if we can get fusion working) But we aren't there yet. Until we are we need to both increase efficiency and increase renewables. Google in particular should be praised for their work in subsidizing renewable energy generation[1] by guaranteeing energy purchases from renewable projects[3]. This guaranteed income stream is often what gets them off the ground, and the higher carbon-free energy usage from Google's data centers than the energy markets they are in is great to see[1]. However, that shouldn't preclude journalists from keeping that energy usage in people's minds. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-... [2] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2021-carbon-free-energy-data-centers.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2021-carbon-f... [3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/clean-energy-projects-begin-to-power-google-data-centers https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/clean-en...
- jrockway 4y ago
  I think people are always looking to dismiss emerging technologies. AI is especially scary to many people that read newspapers (and this site); it's going to listen to press releases and write newspaper articles, it's going to illustrate them, and it's going to write the FactoryFactoryInterfaceAdaptor that serves the content to the public. So pretty much everyone involved in this discussion has to fight it or lose their career. (I think that's pretty far away, but I can't blame people for being paranoid here.) What happens in these cases is that people look for reasons why the emerging technology is objectively bad, and then throw out arguments and see which ones stick. Electricity usage implies climate change, and that's a popular fear to play on right now. "This thing that's going to kill your career is also why hurricanes are stronger now!" Of course, that is only partially true; maybe AI isn't the problem and driving 60 miles a day in stop-and-go-traffic to go to work is what we really need to crack down on. But, that sort of thing is 70 years old and people are comfortable with it, so there isn't much persuasion left to do; people know it's bad and do it anyway. Meanwhile, climate change was a huge problem before the phrases "Bitcoin" or "deep learning" were ever coined, so it's kind of weird to blame them. This sort of complaining is also easy. Sure, with more electricity users coming online, we worry about the cost going up. The cost going up is good for killing energy intensive activities that you don't like; eventually it won't be profitable to mine Bitcoins or train AIs. But the cost going up also affects other industries that we DO like; poorer people heating their homes can't absorb the cost, or industries like aluminum smelting can't absorb the cost. So now we want to distribute resources with some system other than "the highest bidder wins", and you know what that means! Time to involve the government! But the government is terrible at reacting to things like this, and even though regulation is obviously the globally optimal path forward, it moves too slowly to really make a difference. By the time we charge data centers more for electricity, AI will have taken your jobs and the East Coast will be underwater. (Meanwhile, many data centers are powered by cheap renewable hydroelectricity anyway and so aren't causing climate change. They can build their AI training data centers near a hydroelectric dam, but people aren't going to move their family so they can get cheaper electricity or spend less energy commuting to work or whatever. I'm not sure where this all leads, but it does feel like appointing a boogeyman to blame instead of actually fixing the problem. This goes back to my opening argument about seeing which argument sticks. If you don't look into things too deeply, you have a nice set of rules that leads to an obvious action. I don't like Bitcoin because the existing system works OK. Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. Some energy use changes the climate. The changing climate kill us all. So we'd better kill Bitcoin. A simple path from "I don't like it" to "kill it before it kills us". Get out your pitchforks!)
- bee_rider 4y ago
  ML training also seems like it ought to be fairly dispatchable, right? Pause the training if there isn’t excess wind or solar. We’ll want to overbuild on renewable power capacity, so that if it not at peak, the lights can stay on. Having a use for that excess power seems like it ought to help economically incentivize the building.
yowzadave 4y ago
Has someone already made a cryptocurrency that requires that miners train an AI to demonstrate proof of work?
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  I kid you not, I read a scheme such a thing a year ago. But now I cant find the source... video encoding mining seems to have gained more traction :/.
- NBJack 4y ago
  sigh Web4 hype train, here we come....
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    We're not done with Web3
- janalsncm 4y ago
  Could be interesting. One way to do it would be to have a training set and a hidden test set, and mining a coin means arbitrarily high performance on the test set. In order to keep the test set hidden from miners (otherwise they could just memorize it) they would need to upload their weights to be validated. The main issue I see is that many of these models are massive. Dozens of gigabytes. You’ll quickly DDOS your validator nodes before getting anything useful.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
siliconc0w 4y ago
I kinda hate these articles about the carbon cost of compute- it's utterly short sighted, gpt3 is infrastructure that creates huge efficiencies - the cost is a bargain. Not to mention this is like early days and we're driving down the costs everyday.
- palata 4y ago
  Sources for the "creates huge efficiencies" part?
lovemenot 4y ago
Isn't it the case that training a ML model consumes vastly more power than using the trained model for inference? If so, the problem may be somewhat overstated. Training is a dispatchable power load. It can be scheduled for periods of surplus power in regions where surplus power is periodically abundant. Training a ML model could literally follow the sun.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  At Big Tech scale, the same model is used for inference so many times that most of the energy is probably from inference.
- palata 4y ago
  Note that if you have surplus of power, maybe you want to use it more wisely :).
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    Perhaps, you are right about utility, but I can think of few power loads as well suited to dispatch. Bauxite has to be shipped to Iceland to take advantage of their abundant geothermal and hydro power for Aluminium smelting. Data moves with much less friction.

18 points by electic 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Energy source > Energy consumption. Energy consumption is not a bogeyman and we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier. We need to pivot to cleaner sources, so the focus should be on that. Would be great if the journos could stop demonizing the wrong thing.

kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
lovemenot 4y ago
>> we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. No argument that changing energy sources is crucial. But I would not dismiss a plan to also reduce overall energy consumption while maintaining or improving quality of life indicators.
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  > I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. Okay, you're dismissing the argument without proposing any counter arguments. J. Storrs Hall lays out the case for the relationship between energy usage & quality of life. What are your specific rebuttals?
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    It is not self-evident to me that QoL improvements are necessarily driven by increased energy consumption. Not having read J. Storrs Hall, I do not have any specific rebuttals to that. When I have heard such assertions before, I dug a little and found it was based on extrapolation. Sorry, if that isn't implicit in yours or J. Storrs Hall's thinking. Ultimately, any system that seems to grow exponentially will eventually be found to have been on an S-Curve. We can argue the timing of reaching the plateau after the fact, but it is certain that no system can continue to grow exponentially indefinitely. Nor should it have to. Global human population for instance should start to reverse centuries of growth this century. In the case of population flattening, perhaps we can agree this is to the good. I would argue much the same about energy consumption.
    - lovemenot 4y ago
      I just looked at J. Storrs Hall page on Wikipedia and saw Kurzweil in the References there. Would it be fair to call J. Storrs Hall a Singularitarian ? If so, it figures. We can argue the merits of such arguments, but it is a reach to state them axiomatically.
  - palata 4y ago
    Not the OP, but fossil fuels are not unlimited, until now we don't have anything close to them, and anyway more energy consumption tends to go with more loss of habitat (talking biodiversity). I think there is a case to make about reducing energy consumption.
graeme 4y ago
That’s all well and good to say, but we currently have no system to do that. What we ought to have is a carbon tax. Then if some activity such as bitcoin or ai or driving or flying uses carbon, you pay extra. Whereas if you manage to fuel your activities with nuclear/wind/solar you don’t. There are loads of complexities to this but simply saying “consumption is necessary for riches” while ignoring that we have not managed to lower our carbon usage is not quite hitting the mark.
- kragen 4y ago
  we do currently have a system to pivot to cleaner sources; it's the photovoltaic module industry, which has undercut the price of fossil-fuel energy by almost a factor of two in much of the world, though not in polar regions
  - palata 4y ago
    A photovoltaic industry that mostly depends on fossil fuels, doesn't it?
    - kragen 4y ago
      no, it mostly depends on energy the production processes for the key materials involved, like silicon, aluminum, and glass, can use any convenient energy source the exception is the carbon dioxide emissions from the carbon electrodes in aluminum smelting pots, but this is a tiny fraction of the total
      - andromeduck 4y ago
        That convenient energy source needs to be stable, which most renewables are far from.
        kragen 4y ago
        there are some advantages to it being stable, but even today, pv plus batteries is still cheaper than coal in much of the world
water-your-self 4y ago
Until the sources are clean I will blame the consumers that do so without regard for the source.
albertopv 4y ago
That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  This is the abstention-only of climate management.
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  > That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction. 1) That's not a fact 2) That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically 3) Consumption reduction = lower quality of life & health for poor people (the rich have 0 interest in consumption reduction... do you see the davos crowd turning in their private jets?)
  - orwin 4y ago
    Having a house with better insulation reduced my mother energy costs from 6k to 2k, with 2022 being a year where the electricity was more expensive. She does not have weirdly distributed heat islands in her house, and supported this winter way better than past years. She reduced her consumption by 3, increasing her quality of life.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    "That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically" I'm sorry, still trying to learn a foreing language, thank for your caring advice. "Consumption reduction = lower quality of life " That's false, see LED lights.
    - andromeduck 4y ago
      Efficiency has it's limits and many industrial processes are already pretty close.
      - albertopv 4y ago
KarlKemp 4y ago
This used to be true, but changed dramatically. The relevant term is „energy intensity“, measuring how much energy is needed per unit of GDP. It has been improving for quite a while now, see, for example https://www.aceee.org/blog/2015/12/what-energy-intensity-and-how-does-it https://www.aceee.org/blog/2015/12/what-energy-intensity-and...
nl 4y ago
I'm 100% in the "let's make clean energy too cheap to meter" camp. Get rid of anti-dumping legislation and let China subsidise as much solar panel production as they can! Build wind farms everywhere! Long distance HV transmission between climate zone should be so common that people don't keep thinking it isn't in use now! (And yes, it would be great if we can get fusion working) But we aren't there yet. Until we are we need to both increase efficiency and increase renewables. Google in particular should be praised for their work in subsidizing renewable energy generation[1] by guaranteeing energy purchases from renewable projects[3]. This guaranteed income stream is often what gets them off the ground, and the higher carbon-free energy usage from Google's data centers than the energy markets they are in is great to see[1]. However, that shouldn't preclude journalists from keeping that energy usage in people's minds. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-... [2] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2021-carbon-free-energy-data-centers.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2021-carbon-f... [3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/clean-energy-projects-begin-to-power-google-data-centers https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/clean-en...
jrockway 4y ago
I think people are always looking to dismiss emerging technologies. AI is especially scary to many people that read newspapers (and this site); it's going to listen to press releases and write newspaper articles, it's going to illustrate them, and it's going to write the FactoryFactoryInterfaceAdaptor that serves the content to the public. So pretty much everyone involved in this discussion has to fight it or lose their career. (I think that's pretty far away, but I can't blame people for being paranoid here.) What happens in these cases is that people look for reasons why the emerging technology is objectively bad, and then throw out arguments and see which ones stick. Electricity usage implies climate change, and that's a popular fear to play on right now. "This thing that's going to kill your career is also why hurricanes are stronger now!" Of course, that is only partially true; maybe AI isn't the problem and driving 60 miles a day in stop-and-go-traffic to go to work is what we really need to crack down on. But, that sort of thing is 70 years old and people are comfortable with it, so there isn't much persuasion left to do; people know it's bad and do it anyway. Meanwhile, climate change was a huge problem before the phrases "Bitcoin" or "deep learning" were ever coined, so it's kind of weird to blame them. This sort of complaining is also easy. Sure, with more electricity users coming online, we worry about the cost going up. The cost going up is good for killing energy intensive activities that you don't like; eventually it won't be profitable to mine Bitcoins or train AIs. But the cost going up also affects other industries that we DO like; poorer people heating their homes can't absorb the cost, or industries like aluminum smelting can't absorb the cost. So now we want to distribute resources with some system other than "the highest bidder wins", and you know what that means! Time to involve the government! But the government is terrible at reacting to things like this, and even though regulation is obviously the globally optimal path forward, it moves too slowly to really make a difference. By the time we charge data centers more for electricity, AI will have taken your jobs and the East Coast will be underwater. (Meanwhile, many data centers are powered by cheap renewable hydroelectricity anyway and so aren't causing climate change. They can build their AI training data centers near a hydroelectric dam, but people aren't going to move their family so they can get cheaper electricity or spend less energy commuting to work or whatever. I'm not sure where this all leads, but it does feel like appointing a boogeyman to blame instead of actually fixing the problem. This goes back to my opening argument about seeing which argument sticks. If you don't look into things too deeply, you have a nice set of rules that leads to an obvious action. I don't like Bitcoin because the existing system works OK. Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. Some energy use changes the climate. The changing climate kill us all. So we'd better kill Bitcoin. A simple path from "I don't like it" to "kill it before it kills us". Get out your pitchforks!)
bee_rider 4y ago
ML training also seems like it ought to be fairly dispatchable, right? Pause the training if there isn’t excess wind or solar. We’ll want to overbuild on renewable power capacity, so that if it not at peak, the lights can stay on. Having a use for that excess power seems like it ought to help economically incentivize the building.

yowzadave 4y ago

Has someone already made a cryptocurrency that requires that miners train an AI to demonstrate proof of work?

brucethemoose2 4y ago
I kid you not, I read a scheme such a thing a year ago. But now I cant find the source... video encoding mining seems to have gained more traction :/.
NBJack 4y ago
sigh Web4 hype train, here we come....
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  We're not done with Web3
janalsncm 4y ago
Could be interesting. One way to do it would be to have a training set and a hidden test set, and mining a coin means arbitrarily high performance on the test set. In order to keep the test set hidden from miners (otherwise they could just memorize it) they would need to upload their weights to be validated. The main issue I see is that many of these models are massive. Dozens of gigabytes. You’ll quickly DDOS your validator nodes before getting anything useful.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

siliconc0w 4y ago

I kinda hate these articles about the carbon cost of compute- it's utterly short sighted, gpt3 is infrastructure that creates huge efficiencies - the cost is a bargain. Not to mention this is like early days and we're driving down the costs everyday.

palata 4y ago
Sources for the "creates huge efficiencies" part?

lovemenot 4y ago

Isn't it the case that training a ML model consumes vastly more power than using the trained model for inference? If so, the problem may be somewhat overstated. Training is a dispatchable power load. It can be scheduled for periods of surplus power in regions where surplus power is periodically abundant. Training a ML model could literally follow the sun.

brucethemoose2 4y ago
At Big Tech scale, the same model is used for inference so many times that most of the energy is probably from inference.
palata 4y ago
Note that if you have surplus of power, maybe you want to use it more wisely :).
- lovemenot 4y ago
  Perhaps, you are right about utility, but I can think of few power loads as well suited to dispatch. Bauxite has to be shipped to Iceland to take advantage of their abundant geothermal and hydro power for Aluminium smelting. Data moves with much less friction.