Comment by acheron
2 months ago
Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
2 months ago
Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat.
The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030.
It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage.
Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022.
It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
There isn't an inflection point around 2022: it has been rising quickly since 2010 or so.
I think you're referring to Figure ES-1 in that paper, but that's kind of a summary of different estimates.
Figure 1.1 is the chart I was referring to, which are the data points from the original sources that it uses.
Between 2010 and 2020, it shows a very slow linear growth. Yes, there is growth, but it's quite slow and mostly linear.
Then the slope increases sharply. And the estimates after that point follow the new, sharper growth.
Sorry, when I wrote my original comment I didn't have the paper in front of me, I linked it afterwards. But you can see that distinct change in rate at around 2020.
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Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.
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This is where the debate gets interesting, but I think both sides are cherrypicking data a bit. The energy consumption trend depends a lot on what baseline you're measuring from and which metrics you prioritize.
Yes, data center efficiency improved dramatically between 2010-2020, but the absolute scale kept growing. So you're technically both right: efficiency gains kept/unit costs down while total infrastructure expanded. The 2022+ inflection is real though, and its not just about AI training. Inference at scale is the quiet energy hog nobody talks about enough.
What bugs me about this whole thread is that it's turning into "AI bad" vs "AI defenders," when the real question should be: which AI use cases actually justify this resource spike? Running an LLM to summarize a Slack thread probably doesn't. Using it to accelerate drug discovery or materials science probably does. But we're deploying this stuff everywhere without any kind of cost/benefit filter, and that's the part that feels reckless.
"google has been brainwashing us with ads deployed by the most extravagant uses of technology man has ever known since they've ever existed."
"yeah but they became efficient at it by 2012!"
> Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
How much of that compute was for the ads themselves vs the software useful enough to compel people to look at the ads?
Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.
Have you dived into the mountains of informative content that youtube also makes available to everyone on earth?
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This is like saying libraries are bad because people a lot of people check out 50 shades of gray
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Sorry what does this have to do with the question you're responding to?
How does the compute required for that compare to the compute required to serve LLM requests? There's a lot of goal-post moving going on here, to justify the whataboutism.
The real answer is the unsatisfying but true “my shit doesn’t stink but yours sure does”
I've long wondered about this ratio! Does anyone know? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is "no".
You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model.
There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.
I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy?
If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.
Someone paid for those ads. Someone got value from them.
The ad industry is a quagmire of fraud. Assuming someone got value out of money spent is tenuous.
Agree, but I'm speaking more in aggregate. And even individually, it's not hard to find people who will say that e.g. an Instagram ad gave them a noticable benefit (I've experienced it myself) as you can who will feel that it was a waste of money.
It isn't that simple. Each company paying for ads would have preferred that their competitors had not advertised, then spend a lot less on ads... for the same value.
It is like an arms race. Everyone would have been better off if people just never went to war, but....
There's a tiny slice of companies deal with advertising like this. Say, Coke vs Pepsi, where everyone already knows both brands and they push a highly similar product.
A lot of advertising is telling people about some product or service they didn't even know existed though. There may not even be a competitor to blame for an advertising arms race.
That someone might be Google, though. Not all ad dollars are well spent.
Ads are a cancer on humanity with no benefit to anyone and everyone who enables them should be imprisoned for life
A monetary economy can't function without advertising or money.
You're tilting at windmills here, we can't go back to barter.
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“this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization.
Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.
This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
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No, but in this case it indicates some hypocrisy.
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
Data centers are not another thing when the subject is data centers.
The ad system uses a fairly small fraction of resources.
And before the LLM craze there was a constant focus on efficiency. Web search is (was?) amazingly efficient per query.
What makes you think he didn’t mind it?
We weren't facing hardware shortages in the race to shovel ads. Little different.
Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society?
I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer?
When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.
I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive
Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
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