6 ms·

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the stor

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading. I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x

NeutralCrane 2mo ago
What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous
- scarmig 2mo ago
  The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.
  - QuercusMax 2mo ago
    Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol
  - agentultra 2mo ago
    Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them! They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes. The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped. I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
    - luckydata 2mo ago
      some might call it "perspective"
      - agentultra 2mo ago
        Well the other thing is that agricultural uses are generally on a different scale and use different sources. And at least you can eat almonds and alfalfa. Probably more useful than asking an LLM to autocomplete your homework. Depending on your needs. Even amongst municipal water usage, it seems hard to figure out how much DC usage factors in to other uses because often they’re not required, and therefore don’t, disclose their usage. All I’m saying is that it’s not a closed case and not everyone complaining about DC water usage is a Russian propaganda bot.
    - rdedev 2mo ago
      Putting things into perspective is not minimising the problem. We literally have to do this to prioritise where our efforts can be useful. Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense. Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for
      - yubblegum 2mo ago
        I am guessing (not asserting) that there is a sort of cap on water used for agriculture. It's possible we've already reached it. (?) So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough. On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear. On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?
        luckydata 2mo ago
        what is the utility of alfaalfa? Because as it stands it's essentially just a way to export enormous amounts of water from a place where there's little (California) to a place where there's none (the Arabian peninsula). This is bullshit to be charitable.
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice. Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices. This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.
    - jayGlow 2mo ago
      let's compare ai water usage with something even more useless, water leaking out of pipes. the United States currently loses about 2 trillion gallons of water annually to leaking pipes. this is in comparison to around 230 billion gallons used by data centers. we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.
      - gordian-mind 2mo ago
        It's because spilling water doesn't do anything: water evaporates, becomes cloud, rains down etc. Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.
  - jimmygrapes 2mo ago
    I prefer to use the hospital analogy. Locally, the water concerns are a big deal but a lot of people in my community are riled up about the potential need for diesel backup generators because of the noise pollution. They are not wrong and it's good to consider, but they are at this point grasping for reasons that would not (and have not) been concerns for other large footprint projects like hospitals with similar infrastructure needs.
    - fluoridation 2mo ago
      And you don't understand why what's tolerated of a hospital may not be tolerated of other kinds of buildings?
      - yellowapple 2mo ago
        Here in Reno the anti-datacenter crowd has been extending that tolerance to the local casinos and golf courses (of both of which there are many more than we arguably need). If the choice is between running servers to keep the Internet going v. letting poor schmucks get swindled out of their money on the slots, I'm picking the servers over the slots any day.
  - yellowapple 2mo ago
    > Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger. To drive this point home: if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year, it would entirely offset the annual water consumption of all US datacenters (including, therefore, the water footprint of AI).
    - zzrrt 2mo ago
      > the annual water consumption of all US datacenters How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?
      - yellowapple 2mo ago
        I would expect within the same order of magnitude. Worst-case, skipping a burger once a month instead of once a year is hardly some insurmountable sacrifice (and I say that as a fatass who loves himself a good burger).
    - heresie-dabord 2mo ago
      > if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year I fear that you have unwittingly led us further into the inevitable Environmental Hamburger-Cost Continuum. Wherein we will use EHCC units to inform the hamburger voters about a) the nobility of even the smallest hamburgerian sacrifice, and b) the gentle, loving hand of industrialisation.
- simonw 2mo ago
  This is a useful piece on that: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
  - thx67 2mo ago
    How do you know this doesn't suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia? The first version had so many glaring errors that have been "corrected" (removed), and I don't have the energy to comb through this one. I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.
    - simonw 2mo ago
      Andy has a good track record for writing about this. He shares plenty of credible citations - more so than most other people commenting in this space. He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
      - thx67 2mo ago
        The thing that is off putting about how he uses rhetoric is that it feels like and-you deflection (tu quoque). > Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve found on my own, and to my knowledge I’m the first person to notice it. Yeah, she might be wrong. But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating. We also have a base rate fallacy, we don't know know how well or how poorly they are using water. Nearly all criticisms of AI data center criticisms boil (no pun intended) down to yeah, but what about almonds or rice or xyz. That isn't a healthy way to adjust how we talk about data center water consumption. It is a classic debate tactic. Someone makes an argument, then buttresses that argument with a number. You attack the number, pretending that you didn't just correct the number, but also invalidate the original argument. We shouldn't be using these tactics to talk about the tragedy of the commons. I worked for a hyperscaler, I poked around a bit about water usage both internally and externally and it wasn't good. There was little to no thought other than, "we can pay X to have water delivered, doesn't matter if it sourced responsibly." (to glibly paraphrase, company policy is to never write the honest part down) Look at how hard Google fought to not have water data released in The Dalles Oregon for their DC there. Many DCs are supplied by water that is meant for humans, sourced from aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill, that are being depleted faster than they are filled, already. I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.
- arthurjj 2mo ago
  I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/ https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak... And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173 https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173
- lukewarm707 2mo ago
  in my agi doomer opinion the water argument is akin to a concern that dropping a nuke may endanger certain rare species in the area
breppp 2mo ago
[flagged]
- arthurjj 2mo ago
  I missed that thread when it came out, it's really a wild read. The difference between how people describe her vs how she's normally portrayed in the media is really startling
  - breppp 2mo ago
    People generally get fed the stories they already believe to be true So that's why "Brave minority woman unfairly fired by evil AI corporation" sells better than "Self-entitled minority woman is terrible bully to colleagues"
sureglymop 2mo ago
What is interesting about it for me is: why would someone working on AI ethics choose to work for Google at all? Did she really think Google cares about ethics? Such positions seem purely performative, we all know that ethics go out the window first to make room for more profits.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

NeutralCrane 2mo ago

What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous

scarmig 2mo ago
The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.
- QuercusMax 2mo ago
  Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol
- agentultra 2mo ago
  Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them! They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes. The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped. I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
  - luckydata 2mo ago
    some might call it "perspective"
    - agentultra 2mo ago
      Well the other thing is that agricultural uses are generally on a different scale and use different sources. And at least you can eat almonds and alfalfa. Probably more useful than asking an LLM to autocomplete your homework. Depending on your needs. Even amongst municipal water usage, it seems hard to figure out how much DC usage factors in to other uses because often they’re not required, and therefore don’t, disclose their usage. All I’m saying is that it’s not a closed case and not everyone complaining about DC water usage is a Russian propaganda bot.
  - rdedev 2mo ago
    Putting things into perspective is not minimising the problem. We literally have to do this to prioritise where our efforts can be useful. Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense. Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for
    - yubblegum 2mo ago
      I am guessing (not asserting) that there is a sort of cap on water used for agriculture. It's possible we've already reached it. (?) So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough. On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear. On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?
      - luckydata 2mo ago
        what is the utility of alfaalfa? Because as it stands it's essentially just a way to export enormous amounts of water from a place where there's little (California) to a place where there's none (the Arabian peninsula). This is bullshit to be charitable.
- shimman 2mo ago
  Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice. Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices. This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.
  - jayGlow 2mo ago
    let's compare ai water usage with something even more useless, water leaking out of pipes. the United States currently loses about 2 trillion gallons of water annually to leaking pipes. this is in comparison to around 230 billion gallons used by data centers. we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.
    - gordian-mind 2mo ago
      It's because spilling water doesn't do anything: water evaporates, becomes cloud, rains down etc. Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.
- jimmygrapes 2mo ago
  I prefer to use the hospital analogy. Locally, the water concerns are a big deal but a lot of people in my community are riled up about the potential need for diesel backup generators because of the noise pollution. They are not wrong and it's good to consider, but they are at this point grasping for reasons that would not (and have not) been concerns for other large footprint projects like hospitals with similar infrastructure needs.
  - fluoridation 2mo ago
    And you don't understand why what's tolerated of a hospital may not be tolerated of other kinds of buildings?
    - yellowapple 2mo ago
      Here in Reno the anti-datacenter crowd has been extending that tolerance to the local casinos and golf courses (of both of which there are many more than we arguably need). If the choice is between running servers to keep the Internet going v. letting poor schmucks get swindled out of their money on the slots, I'm picking the servers over the slots any day.
- yellowapple 2mo ago
  > Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger. To drive this point home: if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year, it would entirely offset the annual water consumption of all US datacenters (including, therefore, the water footprint of AI).
  - zzrrt 2mo ago
    > the annual water consumption of all US datacenters How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?
    - yellowapple 2mo ago
      I would expect within the same order of magnitude. Worst-case, skipping a burger once a month instead of once a year is hardly some insurmountable sacrifice (and I say that as a fatass who loves himself a good burger).
  - heresie-dabord 2mo ago
    > if every American ate exactly one less hamburger per year I fear that you have unwittingly led us further into the inevitable Environmental Hamburger-Cost Continuum. Wherein we will use EHCC units to inform the hamburger voters about a) the nobility of even the smallest hamburgerian sacrifice, and b) the gentle, loving hand of industrialisation.
simonw 2mo ago
This is a useful piece on that: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
- thx67 2mo ago
  How do you know this doesn't suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia? The first version had so many glaring errors that have been "corrected" (removed), and I don't have the energy to comb through this one. I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.
  - simonw 2mo ago
    Andy has a good track record for writing about this. He shares plenty of credible citations - more so than most other people commenting in this space. He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
    - thx67 2mo ago
      The thing that is off putting about how he uses rhetoric is that it feels like and-you deflection (tu quoque). > Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve found on my own, and to my knowledge I’m the first person to notice it. Yeah, she might be wrong. But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating. We also have a base rate fallacy, we don't know know how well or how poorly they are using water. Nearly all criticisms of AI data center criticisms boil (no pun intended) down to yeah, but what about almonds or rice or xyz. That isn't a healthy way to adjust how we talk about data center water consumption. It is a classic debate tactic. Someone makes an argument, then buttresses that argument with a number. You attack the number, pretending that you didn't just correct the number, but also invalidate the original argument. We shouldn't be using these tactics to talk about the tragedy of the commons. I worked for a hyperscaler, I poked around a bit about water usage both internally and externally and it wasn't good. There was little to no thought other than, "we can pay X to have water delivered, doesn't matter if it sourced responsibly." (to glibly paraphrase, company policy is to never write the honest part down) Look at how hard Google fought to not have water data released in The Dalles Oregon for their DC there. Many DCs are supplied by water that is meant for humans, sourced from aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill, that are being depleted faster than they are filled, already. I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.
arthurjj 2mo ago
I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/ https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak... And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173 https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173
lukewarm707 2mo ago
in my agi doomer opinion the water argument is akin to a concern that dropping a nuke may endanger certain rare species in the area

breppp 2mo ago

[flagged]

arthurjj 2mo ago
I missed that thread when it came out, it's really a wild read. The difference between how people describe her vs how she's normally portrayed in the media is really startling
- breppp 2mo ago
  People generally get fed the stories they already believe to be true So that's why "Brave minority woman unfairly fired by evil AI corporation" sells better than "Self-entitled minority woman is terrible bully to colleagues"

sureglymop 2mo ago

What is interesting about it for me is: why would someone working on AI ethics choose to work for Google at all? Did she really think Google cares about ethics? Such positions seem purely performative, we all know that ethics go out the window first to make room for more profits.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]