This again? Terribly misleading. It includes data centres and cryptocurrencies:
> Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence.
Also no mention of any energy usage that might be displaced by AI. Pretty sure firing off a bunch of LLM API calls is less energy intensive than hiring workers who will drive to the office, etc.
I also think that there’s a vast number of things that qualify as “using as much energy as a small country”. What’s the energy usage of the Vatican?
It’s not like the workers that got their jobs replaced by an LLM cease to exist. Unless LLMs caused people to work more from home, or have fewer kids, I can’t see how they affected the environment positively.
Small countries: Blockchains were at the level of The Netherlands at some point. So we’re not talking city state, but real, industrialised country.
> It’s not like the workers that got their jobs replaced by an LLM cease to exist. Unless LLMs caused people to work more from home, or have fewer kids, I can’t see how they affected the environment positively.
Say you're improving computer vision detection of material defects. If you replace an old inefficient CPU-based algorithm running on a server drawing 500 watts with a detector network on an NVIDIA Jetson drawing 5 watts - in isolation you have drastically improved energy efficiency.
But what if, instead of being decommissioned, that server's CPU cycles are reallocated to some other task that still needs them? Was what you did still an improvement?
I don't have a definite answer for how we should think about it, but my gut feeling is yes. You've taken the energy requirements of a task from 500W to 5W, and thus decreased energy required per abstract unit of overall productivity. It happened to be realized as an increase in productivity (old job + new job now take roughly same energy as old job alone) rather than a decrease in energy usage, but even if only considering the environmental impact I think that's now a better position to be making progress towards green solutions.
My analogy starts with the case where this is true and the energy efficiency gain is clear, but only as a comparison point from which to consider the case where "instead of being decommissioned" the server's CPU cycles are used for something else (corresponding to humans choosing different jobs, or even just recreation). I argue that even in this case it's an environmentally positive change.
> Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence.
Also no mention of any energy usage that might be displaced by AI. Pretty sure firing off a bunch of LLM API calls is less energy intensive than hiring workers who will drive to the office, etc.
I also think that there’s a vast number of things that qualify as “using as much energy as a small country”. What’s the energy usage of the Vatican?
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