I want to let people know why I’m strictly against using AI in everything I do without sounding like an ‘AI vegan’, especially in front of those who are genuinely ready to listen and follow the same.
Any sources I try to find to cite regarding my viewpoint are either mild enough to be considered AI generated themselves or filled with extremist views of the author. I want to explain the situation in an objective manner that is simple to understand and also alarming enough for them to take action.
AI data centers take up substantially more power than regular ones. Nobody was talking about spinning up nuclear reactors or buying out the next several years of turbine manufacturing for non-AI datacenters. Hell, Microsoft gave money to a fusion startup to build a reactor, they’ve already broken ground, but it’s far from proven that they can actually make net power with fusion. They actually think they can supply power by 2028. This is delusion driven by an impossible goal of reaching AGI with current models.
Your whole post is missing out on the difference in scale involved. GPU power consumption isn’t comparable to standard web servers at all.
I really don’t think they do take up a lot more power but more how quickly they’re being built. At least in the US, power usage has been effectively flat, with datacenters and other growing power needs balanced with increasing efficiency…… but a lot of people want a lot of new datacenters at once
And the growth of power usage for ai data centers isn’t really all that high except that we’re structured for zero power growth. This really seems like the other side of the same issue we’ve been having with renewables: no infrastructure investment. We’ve been building effectively zero transmission lines for a couple decades. That equally means we have trouble bringing renewables online and we have trouble powering a data center that pops up. There’s every chance we already have plenty of power for the new datacenters but can’t get it there
You can think that, but you’d be wrong. A ChatGPT search uses 10x the power of a regular Google search.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about#%3A~%3Atext=A+request+made+through+ChatGPT%2C+an+AI-based%2CGoogle+Search%2C+reported+the+International+Energy+Agency.
Google has quietly removed their net-zero pledge from their website:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/google-quietly-removes-net-zero-carbon-goal-from-website-amid-rapid-power-hungry-ai-data-center-buildout-industry-first-sustainability-pledge-moved-to-background-amidst-ai-energy-crisis
This stuff isn’t being built with renewables.