I call bullshit. Stable Diffusion XL has energy footprint of about 0.29 watt hours per image while generating. That is roughly equivalent to running a 0.5 Watt energy LED light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes. Even for training the costs are not that extreme. Stable Diffusion needed 150,000 GPU hours. At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
I don’t like that first article, it gives contradicting information about the energy usage per image, saying 0.29kWh/image then saying 0.29kWh/1000 images.
Good point. I just tried it on my M1 macbook with 16 gb ram to get better data (but used SD 1.5 though). It took roughly 2 minutes to create an image at roughly full power load (which I would conservatively assume to be roughly identical to the 96 Watt max load of my power adapater.). So i’s 3.2 watt hours per image (with my inefficient setup)
The article is way, waaaaaaay off. My PC generates images at a rate of about one per second (SDXL Turbo) with an Nvidia 4060 Ti which uses 160W (~12W when idle). Let’s assume I have it generate images constantly for one hour:
- 3,600 images per 0.16kWh
- About 22,500 images per hour.
In other words, generating a single image is a trivial amount of power.
How are you able to generate images so quickly? When I tried to run Stable Diffusion on my nominally comparable GPU (RX6800M, similar to 6700XT, 12GB VRAM), it took over a minute to get halfway to generating a medium sized image before my entire computer crashed.
SDXL Turbo I guess. This needs only one diffusion pass per image, while SD 1.5 needs 8 for most images.
At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
My guy. That is over 15 years of daily driving and the occasional long haul trip, 1.5x the average lifespan of an EV. Consumed in under 2 years. For ONE iteration of ONE AI model. Nevermind how many thousands of people are running that “light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes” every second, with the vast majority of what it spits out not even being used for anything of value except to tell the prompt writer what they need to tweak in order to get their perfect anime waifu out of it.
Still not much on an industrial scale. For example, you can compare it to the aviation industry. There are roughly 550 transatlantic flights per day and each one consumes about 5000kg of fuel per hour for 6 to 10 hours straight. A kg of jet A1 has roughly 11 kWh. So a single transatlantic flight consumes roughly 385,000 kWh of energy. So training one model still consumes a lot less energy than a single one of the 550 transatlantic flights daily.
Oh good job, you found another thing we need to reduce!
Not sure why people rip on commercial air travel so much.
Some “back of the napkin math here”.
A380 can hold 84,545 gallons of fuel, and has a range of 9200 miles, giving it a fuel economy of roughly 0.1MPG…
Except it can carry 853 people at a time. At 1/3rd capacity, it exceeds the average fuel economy per person per mile than a car with a single person in it in the US. (26mpg). At full capacity it’s around 85 mpg/person.
Nothing about that sounds reasonable.
You are kinda missing the point.
It’s not about how energy efficient or inefficient a single ChatGPT prompt is.
It’s that A/C is arguably more important to an individual than your ability to use AI. But while the government asking people to reduce AC usage is not new, AI is.
So we’re introducing new and unnecessary ways to draw power while asking people to tolerate higher temperatures within their homes.
My personal take is that we should be investing in nuclear power so we continue evolving as a society. But I guess we can hold back progress in the name of puttering along with other technology as the world slowly burns and people cook inside their homes
Okay, but corpos aren’t training one model and being done with it. They’re training thousands of models, tweaking hyperparameters to find the correct fine tuning needed.
Also, putting the scale at 180,000 miles of driving makes it sound more insane to me. The earth is like 25,000 miles. If you could drive on the ocean, you could circumnavigate the globe seven times over!
Yeah but only with a fairly efficient EV in the TESLA model 3 class. With a typical gasoline car you’d be closer to only one and half circumnaviagtions with 45.000 kWh. The average american car can apparently drive 25 Miles per Gallon. A gallon of gas has roughly 33 kWh of energy in it. That’s only 34090 miles on the energy used train stable diffusion.
You aren’t making it sound bettter 34,000 miles is still a lot of miles.
That’s a fraction of the life of a single car, for an AI model used by millions of people. AI isn’t that big of an energy consumer if done right it seems. Look at how much energy data centers used before the AI shenanigans, or how much Bitcoin uses.
I, for one, welcome our hot, five-titty future
1 AI search uses the equivalent of 10 google searches…
Just imagine how much power you’re using up browsing the web lol.
AI is not making or breaking power grids, water sources, or any other bullshit alarmist prop you’re peddling like AI isn’t being used all over from image generation, checking your shitty grammar, or saving us all time from writing bullshit proper emails every day.
LLMs are 5 tits of awesome that I’ll be suckling on every chance I get.
You sound very angry and defensive. And you will continue to do so after evidence shows that AI has had a negative impact on the environment. On the bright side, the end of humanity will mean that people being angry and defensive won’t exist either, which will be nice.
The environmental impact is interesting, if an AI search being as environmentally impactful as 10 Google searches is true.
I don’t know about you, but it often takes a number of Google searches for me to find the right information, whereas with AI and Google combined I usually get the info I need in 1/2 Google searches.
That means that, based on my personal experience, AI is probably more environmentally efficient at getting me the correct info than google search alone.
Try using the duckduckgo search engine. I switched recently and the search results are way better than Google now. I get what I’m looking for first try more often than not.
I have the opposite issue with DDG and it’s been my default search engine for a year now. I frequently have to try bing or Google or cheat and just use reddit for specific info just like I did with Google.
DDG is terrible at indexing certain info though and really only hits some of the biggest sites.
Trying to vaguely search for stuff is an absolute crapshoot on DDG.
That’s interesting, I’ve been having way better luck digging around on ddg. Google just seems to serve up ads when I’m trying to research a company or something and won’t give me what I’m looking for.
Maybe its the types of things I search for though. It’s really hard to sayI think a large part of it is whether you know what you’re searching for already. If you have a good idea of what it is already then you can generally find it. If you’re already good at using search terms or syntax it’s always helpful but it was the same for Google.
Simply put though Google just scrapes waaaaaaay more data so it’s going to have more to index from.
Either way it’s just one tool. Just like I’m using Bing for porn over either lol.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
DDG is bing though, is it not?
The ai results from Google I have been getting are less helpful than two specific searches. It could be because of how we search for things and it is definitely getting messed with because of seo weighting and ai targeting those tools, so I think a better option would be to teach people how to actually use the search engines properly instead of just sitting back and letting ais pick up slack.
My scenario is that I use chatgpt to get context and terminology in the area I’m researching.
I then know how to do more specific Google searches (only 1/2).
So effectively 11-12 searches vs 2.
I guess it adds up to 12 searches worth of environmental impact with chatgpt+Google (10 searches worth from chatgpt, 2 from Google)
When I use Google alone it’s often the same as that if not more. Sometimes it’s less if I already know the subject matter, but in those scenarios I would usually give just Google a go first anyway.
Basically chatgpt often either gives me the answer or a much better starting place for what to Google.
I don’t understand the chatgpt bit still. When you say you need more context on the subject matter, you could search for the wiki or a forum and get the same information chatgpt is pulling without the impact.
Angry and defensive? Sounds like they are saying AI is ten times less efficient than what we’ve already built but they are fine with that because of the convenience the new tool offers them. They seem like they are attempting humor more than expressing anger to me.
They seem like they are attempting humor
Ha, yes, “bullshit alarmist prop” truly is a very funny phrase!
AI has a negative impact on the environment today (because of energy use) but it could also result in breakthroughs in battery and power generation technology that enable us to overcome our energy problems. It’s already having a huge impact with things like medicine and was a key component in recent advancements in fusion reactor design (which would be the thing that saves us from our energy problems).
It’s not all LLM and image generation.
but it could also
If the last 20 years has taught us anything, I think it should be to hold back on assuming that technology makes the world better without significant drawbacks.
That does not sound angry in the slightest.
How about instead of strawmanning their emotional state, why don’t you be a better person?
Agreed, there is no sound, because this medium is purely text-based, so we have limited information. This is why saying things like “be a better person” can come off as silly.
Yep, I’m familiar with it. More from previous comments since these disingenuous memes get pedaled here regularly. People love to spout stats about AI in data centers that aren’t just used for AI without having any sense of how much CO2 is produced from really really common stuff lol. Let alone it being contingent on being run in non-renewable powered areas.
1 AI search = 10 google searches. https://www.snexplores.org/article/green-artificial-intelligence-less-energy-ai-climate
How about watching TikTok? 30 minutes of video daily = 28kg of carbon a year. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/social-media-emissions-carbon-footprint/ or https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/energy/features/social-carbon-footprint-calculator/ or https://yoast.com/carbon-footprint-of-website/
Oh no 1/5 a city’s water! They use 770,000 gallons a day… So it uses 154,000 gallons of water for an entire piece of critical infrastructure that keeps the internet running. For the entire data center lol.
https://www.newsweek.com/why-ai-so-thirsty-data-centers-use-massive-amounts-water-1882374
A real common citation is how much carbon it takes to initially train these too. 500 tons of carbon dioxide… That’s the only 33/334,000,000 Americans worth of CO2 for the year lol.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-ton-carbon-dioxide
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-climate-impact-goes-beyond-its-emissions/
Large Language Model searches are distinct from text-to-image generative “AI” image processing. Generative image AI uses more energy.
Also Google searches are AI searches now.
Data centers with AI won’t be in cities.
Hosting will be where it’s cheap, and that’s not in Phoenix or Vegas, except those things that must be near-line. Deep thought shit will be in rural Oregon or Virginia, where juice more plentiful and trouble is not.
Sooooo, false equivalence.
Yeah, there’s a bunch of DCs in Vegas.
Texas power grid is a special case though.
It’s the same issue with all power grids, the one in the city isn’t separate from the one in rural locations, hell over here the longest main line is over 1000km long, that’s a whole lot of locations getting their electricity from the same place
Do your goalposts have wheels?
The bulk of datacenters in Virginia are not in a rural area at all. The Northern Virginia area is the datacenter capital of the world, and they are all in urban/suburban areas. Check it out for yourself.
How long would anyone even live at 79 degrees though?
Assuming °F, you can survive that indefinitely as long as you wear light clothing, you’re not in direct sunlight, you don’t have a medical condition that affects things, and it’s not too humid.
While doing normal work or while at rest? Real big difference there.
While doing anything… 70F is pretty much perfect temp for most people. You’ll cool down fairly quickly after any heavy activity and will be safe during said activity unless you’re in direct sun, not drinking, and not taking breaks, but all that is true in nearly any temp.
70F is roughly 20C
Cool, but that’s 70 and not 79. Sure it’s only a few degrees swing but that still matters. We’re also looking at water shortages in a good number of places so counting on that being a ready supply is not necessarily true.
65 is a real nice temperature to survive at too though a little on the cooler side but it’s not what we were talking about.
79 is still pretty nice. Depending of the humidity, you might not even need AC, just fans
Cool, that’s still not answering the question. What level of work can a body do under standard conditions at 79 F, without overheating? That changes with humidity so at break points of 40, 60, and 80% how does that affect the body? What you think feels nice is not what I was asking.
Have you… not been outside before? 79 isn’t very hot. Shocking fact: A/C was invented in the 20th century. Humans and summers were invented way, way before that. Do you think farmers just spontaneously combusted every summer before the advent of A/C? I know many farmers that don’t have A/C to this day, and they work sun up to sun down all summer long with no problems.
79 degrees would barely be considered hot in large swaths of the world. You can live and work in relative comfort at 79 degrees. It’s pretty absurd to me that you even need to ask this question. People run 135 mile ultramarathons in Death Valley where temperatures get up to 130 degrees.
Not everyone sits inside an air conditioned cube on a computer or console all day.
if they’re american: until they’re 70, if they’re not american: no
Hey they could also be Liberian
Like that works in a Liberi?
I don’t get yer joke.
70c is 158f, steak is well done at that temp.
I’m not a food scientist, but I thought 165 was safe temps for meat.
165 for birds and wild game, 145 for beef and pork.
Now I’m wondering how you draw a girl with 5 text-to-speech (tts) programs.
draw a Hatsune Miku
ASCII
All I see are dwarves in a fortress, how about you?
Same with water usage. Everybody has to reduce water, not wash cars while industry and agriculture who use like ¾ of the water don’t do anything
Last I ran the numbers, industry and agriculture used 98% of the water. This being in CA.
Yes because washing cars is much less important than growing food
The US massively overproduces food. We absolutely can afford to not water some of those crops.
The US massively overuses cars. You can absolutely afford to not wash your car.
We can do both.
You can just… not wash your car. It literally doesn’t matter. If water rationing is in effect, washing your car should be the least of your concerns.
Not washing cars results in long term damage to the car. If you have a 200k mile shitbox with peeling clear coat, sure, you don’t need to wash it because it probably won’t matter.
If you have something nice with good paint, washing is an important maintenance item
I don’t care about washing my car. I care that they’re moderating our car washing while allowing foreign businessmen to use as much water as they want on hay that gets exported. And that could be fine if they were doing it in the Mid West. No, they’re doing it in Phoenix, Arizona. A region that knows it’s counting down to a zero day.
So while I’m not washing my car, they shouldn’t be watering those crops.
If you don’t wash your car and you’ll get corrosion from the salt on the road. If you live where it snows of course.
This person is talking about being from the desert, so yeah, no sympathy here. The Fremen could figure out that water shouldn’t be wasted when it’s scarce.
If you wash a car it uses less fuel. Dirt makes cars less aerodynamic.
If the cars are overused that means they require more maintenance, not less. I want walkable places but that’s not the argument to make lol
lol fresh food is like all public health and wellbeing is non existent unless its been heavily industrialised to make as much money out of it as possible.
Juts search for “AI water consumption” or “data center water consumption”. I’ll agree that “we could be using this to wash our cars” is a silly argument, but water shortages affect between 2 and 3 billion people every year (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imminent-risk-global-water-crisis-warns-un-world-water-development-report-2023). We could be doing more with this water than cloud computing and AI.
Wait a sec, how do they consume water for cooling, i thought it’s in a closed loop as its purpose is only transferring heat
Half a liter per kilowatt hour. That’s the average water use
It’s like the idea of recycling plastics with water.
Not all of it is reusable to the same degree. A good portion of water has to be evaporated off to cool down the exterior towers plus water isn’t really infinitely usable in these loops. It gets gross or full of materials.Another thing that people need to remember is generating electricity uses the water here as we literally don’t use many methods that don’t involve water, we are not on a green grid and neither are these huge data centers for the most part. We boil it for the electricity then have to use additional to clean the system after.
On a standard PC, you can easily have a loop because the radiator is big enough to exhause all that heat. But when your computer or cluster puts out multiple thousands of watts of heat, eventually you need to get rid of tge hot water and replace it with cold water. And when it gets even hotter, you need a steady stream of cold water that immediately gets dumped.
Some facilities is do this. They’re not 100% efficient, so some is lost to evaporation, some must be dumped because it has too much mineral content (and too much conductivity) to go back through the cooling system. Reusing is only about 50% efficient (according to Google’s numbers).
Right, so agricultural was a bad example.
If you can’t imagine a world without eating meat, yes.
Not really. Look at California agriculture. You’ve got immense and unsustainable amounts of water going to almonds, pistachios, and other cash crops (not to mention animal feed for the Saudis) with voracious demand for more water, despite it causing damage to the water sources.
Sure but growing water intensive crops in the desert is also not logical.
Why don’t humans migrate with the seasons? Are we dumber then birds?
People who live in the desert and then complain about not spraying their giant hunk of metal with water are definitely dumber than birds
Yep… phoenix, Tucson, LV, all of those need to be vacated and the populations moved somewhere useful like the Midwest where they can help grow crops somewhere that makes sense
79 °F (26 °C)?! That’s the unbearable temperature you need the AC for. If that was the limit, there’d be no point in having it, at least where I am. 20 °C (68 °F) is room temp and comfortable, although I’d prefer 18 °C (64 °F).
It was near 100 °F across most of the US last week lol
Holy shit! That’s insane!
Yeah it’s a really good thing global warming is a liberal conspiracy, otherwise I’d be starting to get reallllll nervous right now.
I prefer it colder when I sleep, but am usually comfortable up until about 72°F (22°C) during the day. But I live in the Southeastern US, so hot (and humid) is something you adapt to.
Outside, it’s currently 93°F (~34°C), humidity of 55% and the “feels like temp” is 105°F (40.6°C). We’re under a heat advisory until 19:00, which is common in the summer
Unfortunately… the new place I’m renting has an A/C that can’t keep up. Sometimes, it’ll reach 79°F (26°C) with the A/C just running up my electric bill non-stop. It’s somehow bearable though, and doesn’t feel as hot as I would expect, so that’s good. Blackout curtains, some fans, and a portable A/C in one room if you need to cool back down (like after a shower); it’s manageable/comfortable enough, until we can find something else.
It’s not my preference, but I guess being acclimated to the heat down here at least helps a bit. Can’t wait to move somewhere a little more arid, maybe with a true 4 seasons kind of weather
Why would you need to cool down after a shower? Showers have usually have the possibility to dispense cold water.
No, that’s the temp they recommend to set the AC too in order to save power.
And I’m saying it’s insane that that’s where we’re at.
79 is where I set my air to be when it’s 105 outside. Gawd I wish it was 79 outside.
In the Caribbean, people laugh at you if it’s 26C and you turn a fan on.
But that’s where it’s hot to slightly cool for the entire year. You can get used to that. Where I live, it can go anywhere from 35C to -17C throughout the year. As soon as you’re used to one extreme, it’s over and you head towards the other extreme.
The problems start when you don’t get a stable enough period of either to acclimate
My balls would freeze off in 18C mate what the hell
26 is okay, 30+ is hot
We have different origins, I guess.
I’m built for the artic, I run a window a/c at night set at 62 even though we have central air, and I use it in the winter too. I work too hard to be uncomfortable in my home.
I feel you. We don’t have AC, but have the bedroom window open at night from April and a fan on all night from May.
I guess it would depend of humidity level. I lucky enough to not have very humid warmer temperature where I am, but I could imagine how it could be a problem in other part of the world.
My electricity company says 76 is a good target, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. If sedentary, it actually feels a little cold. People acclimate to their local climate (last summer, daily highs were 100-110 for something like 3 months straight where I live).
God I hate global warming. 76 °F (24.5 °C) would traditionally be the hottest summer temp overall. Now we get above 30 sometimes even here in Scandinavia, and it’s absolutely unbearable when you’re not used to it.
79F is a cool summer day in my part of the US.
That’s the low during summer.
Where i live in central Europe most houses dont have ACs and 20 years ago during the hottest times of summer you’d reach that indoors with keeping blinds shut and airing out at night. Nowadays 30°C+ indoors as hottest summer temperatures is pretty common. At 26°C you can still function somewhat. Especially when you are used to these temperatures it is still fine for office work.
I will push the grid raw evey august. Fuck you LA.
Kinda wish the people I rent from would do this. They keep theirs at like 65 and I’ve been freezing my nuts off in their basement all summer. It’s their house and they deserve to be comfortable in it but damn. It’s a good excuse to keep active I guess.
Can we stop with the AI misinformation? AI is not slurping up consumer power. All major tech companies use privately generated, non-consumer power.
It’s bitcoin. Bitcoin is still causing these power grid issues, and has been causing them since 2019.
That power and HVAC in those data centers is still being used though, regardless of if it’s from the same supply consumers would use
It’s from solar and wind power. It’s not the same thing.
How does this work exactly?
They buy power plants and run it themselves. It improves reliability. For example, Google owns its own solar and wind farms.
People are downvoting because they want to hate AI. And hating AI is valid. There are many reasons not to like AI. Environmental and power reasons are not one of them.
But they are probably still using the power grid in cases where there is no wind or sun for their wind and solar farms, right?
To paraphrase another Twitter post, “AI uses the same amount of power per day as Guatemala for the sole purpose of making kinda acceptable slide decks for consultants to use when telling other corporate types how many people to fire”
I keep mine at 80 24/7. Not too warm not to cold, and keeps the humidity out so no sweat
Not too warm? How do you sleep at 80? At 74 I’m calling to get the A/C checked, 72 is the highest ‘acceptable’ temp indoors.
Maybe for you. I have worked and lived in 100+ degree temps dor decades so i guess have become used to it. 72 actually brings me to shivers if im not moving around in it.
I guess we all operate a little differently, been in tx and surrounding for decades too. I’d trade, I wish I wasn’t sweating at 80, would save on my electric bill
Damn that’s hot.
Californian here, the fuck it is. Hot is at minimum high 80s but thats only with high UV low UV an the minimum is low 90s.
Swede here, even 23 degrees (Celsius of course) is pretty hot when it’s in the sun and it’s not windy.
It’s not terribly hot or anything but it’s still hot.
If there is no wind and it’s very sunny it’s hot and on the edge of being uncomfortable in normal clothes.
26c?
laughs in Australian
Its only hot when youre used to living in the northern climates. Here in texas its quite comfortable after a long day outside
I absolutely live in a Northern climate
A girl with 5 tits?!
That’s disgusting. Where?
I can be your friend whom you are asking this question for
Whats her contact?? also amen and godbless
Makes me wish I had five hands.
Your face, both feet, both hands
So you can give them tiddies five thumbs down?
you can say tits online
You can’t, many social media now has OCR that read text from image and if it discovers no no words, it’ll censor the post
Ahh yes, you can’t ever use swear words and eurasia has always been at war with eastasia.
But “you can’t see tits on the radio”
Depends. I just asked my wife to put her tits on our radio, and she was nice enough to do so, but now she’s wondering what the hell I’m looking at on the internet, but I CAN see tits on the radio.
I appreciate the play on words. I was referencing a song, but now I can only see someone (literally) resting their tits on a radio… and it’s a pretty funny image lol
Fortunately my wife is a good sport about these kind of things. She’s used to my odd requests after all this time.
I can’t see the image. My instance must be broken.
You cant see fucking anything on the radio me thinks
The various platforms with their various advertiser-friendly stances have all but maimed the english language. Had someone I know talking about a death in their family and they legit said “unalive” once without realizing it.
I know people who go by nicknames in some places because their name is apparently censored.
I think a lot about Nassa being censored to N***a in some game lol.
Police!
Momma says you can’t
That’s it momma and I are going for a long train ride
Momma says trains are the devul
tots online
Dammit! It doesn’t work. They lied to me.
And if you are going to censor it don’t censor one letter with a line that looks like the letter.
