Comment by adjejmxbdjdn
8 hours ago
You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger.
You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions.
There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
How many gallons of water are you assuming are in that burger patty? Because, while cows do drink water that falls from the sky and lands on fields where it was going to land anyway, they also urinate most of it back out.
Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.
To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.
Depends on the prompt. Do a video prompt and one 30 second video will use as much electricity as running your microwave on high for 15 minutes.
source?
My guess is that's off by a bit, but sure let's assume that's true.
Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).
Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.
Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.
Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.
From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.
But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.
Are these companies going toss a $500b+ infrastructure investment away in next 6 years? Whats the average lifespan of a AI compute node?
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Water I agree. C02 (which is really a tangential metric if energy consumption which will vary by energy mix) I'd want some citations.
Also agree there are other ways we should pursue in parallel regarding emissions.
Obviously, there's different options and variables and bla bla bla, but considering how consolidated and highly industrialized and standardized meat production is, this data is very likely close enough to true for the wast majority of beef burgers eaten by the people complaining about AI resource consumption: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I was moreso asking you about your data on how much AI is tied to CO2...
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Ok great let's get rid of non-renewable powered AI _and_ stop eating animals.
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Source? Meat can be "produced" in a location where water is not as scarce. Rural areas. Datacenters "like" to grow in urban areas.
This source says that a 100 prompt spends half a liter of water https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
I remember this year google reported one google search spend a drop of water (or 5 drops, around that)
Your source cites https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-... which in turn claims to be based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 but uses 0.14 kWh as the energy consumption for a 100-token request to GPT-4, which is an order of magnitude larger than any figure in that paper. Based on a speed of 18 tokens/s https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-4/performance the implied power draw is ≈91 kW, about two thirds of a 72-GPU rack https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet_SuperCluster_... I somewhat doubt that the model is large enough to require an entire rack's worth of GPU memory, but even if that were the case, a single request is going to get batched with hundreds or thousands of others at the same time, so the true energy consumption should be much smaller than that.
This beef industry organization cites 3 studies: https://www.beefresearch.org/resources/beef-sustainability/f...
> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.
So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.
It's kinda crazy not accounting for precipitation. In fact in my country (Argentina) irrigation for livestock farming is basically non existent.
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Let's look at Almonds which _could be_ produced where water is not scarce, maybe, but instead is grown in central valley CA based on quickly depleting ground water.
Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I think good faith would request that the source used for these kinds of questions is not one of the VC firms at the root of these questions.
Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not.
To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, and YCombinator.
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I have a few cows and rarely ever give them water. In the winter they get enough from snow and when it’s rainy we have a small pond that forms with a stream. They also prefer either of those to drinking well water from a cattle waterer. They are grass fed and rarely get fed stuff like corn.
For for thousands of pounds of beef, I’ve barely used any water at all. Don’t notice the extra consumption on my well at all, and I have a very low producing spring fed well (1 gallon per minute).
“Vegan” crops on the other hand line corn which are irrigated in many parts of the country use a great deal of water and often very inefficiently so.
Well, I've got a small server rack and roof top solar, therefore data centers don't actually use water.
In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.
A third perspective here, but maybe small ownership of these things allows for best practices (i.e. small farmers are greener and care about passing arable land to the next generation, small server owners care more about total system ownership which necessitates alternative energy production and making use of hardware that would otherwise be trashed). I think you're both onto something, now kiss!