Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.
AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.
I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.
Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.
AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.
I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.
it doesn't have to be agreed upon but even the largest estimates don't come even close to how much corn farms use
> The water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn farms, equivalent to 1% of America’s total irrigated corn.
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...
Roughly 1% of corn is used for actual food consumption btw.
Compared to the fair market cost of human labor? It might be thousands of times more efficient.