Comment by catlikesshrimp
6 hours ago
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.
one of the main drivers of deforestation of Amazon is turning it into land suitable for crops to feed livestock. Most other places can’t use that as a model for growing crops that need irrigation. Two of the main areas in California and the areas used in Utah and Arizona for crops are either deserts or close to deserts.
1 reply →
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.
Ourworldindata basically just uses data from published research papers and makes interactive graphs that are easy to understand. They also cite their source in every graph and every article. Trying to paint them as disingenious is pretty baseless, you would have to take it up with the authors of the source data and not owid.