Why is the article using “match” and “triple” in the same sentence for things that are pretty much in the same order of magnitude?
Then they’ll “lay off” those people.
You’ll tell people that and then they keep using AI…
Yes … Or maybe the bubble will collapse, and it won’t. I’m thinking the latter is more likely, but who can say what the future will bring.
That depends how much control of the world we all surrender to our betters.
This completely ignores that fresh water production is regional. I’m tired of that shit. It’s something else to use x amount of water in Amazon jungle and something else to use same amount in the desert. The notion that you could just provide third world countries with water from US is moronic.
triples that of 650 million
Wouldn’t saying
nearly as much as 2 billion peoplebe the same and more efficient?Not if they’re referencing a specific 650 million. North America has about that many people but punches well above its weight in power usage per capita.
In other news, 20% of people use 3 times as much water per year as the other 80% do in a month.
Perhaps it was written by AI
Why mix units? Match 1.3billion for water. Why not say match 1.95 billion for power, instead of 3x650 million.
Probably because they refer to the bottom 650 million and the number gets less impressive as you move to people who actually have daily access to a power grid.
Maybe they did the text with an AI.
Once again: stop letting them use potable fucking drinking water it makes no sense
I’m dumb as a brick - why can’t they build the AI centres in very cold regions and just pump air in and out?
Countries in cold regions have governments and laws.
The infrastructure thats needed isnt always there, nor the people to run or build it.
You cant power it only off solar now because its so far north the array would need to be crazy big, and wouldn’t be enough in the winter.
Also even as you go far north summers can still be hot and you’d still need a way to cool it during those times which will require the same water flow capacity even if its for less overall days, so you now need to build 2 cooling systems instead of 1.
It still seems crazy to build these things where they often do, but going somewhere really cold isnt simple.
Edit: also sovereignty of the data center. A US company would prefer to keep it in the US which would give Alaska as an option.
The answer is always money
I thought the majority of their water consumption is indirect via electricity consumption. If we could stop burning freaking coal that would be a start.
But yes, also stop using potable water for evaporative cooling!!
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Almond farming is also bad. There, what now?
sorry fornthebdelaued response. my main point is most people dont care about water usage. if someone all their life was xoncerned about it. fought against golf courses, almond farming, lawn watering and then when data caenters came along and got angry there too, i would never respond.
in all honesty, i think data centers are a waste. i always thought the futire was local models because 90% of the uses are chat bots and dont need all that power. the science fields and health can rent data center time. i thought it would take over 5 years to get there but with nvidia’s new rtx spark, i think we may gwt there sooner.
data centers are the real bubble, but people who use water as their main reason is full of shit. the new data centers are closed loop. microsoft’s new one wont need new water forntheee years.
Hey, making food is something we need. Hallucination bots are a new, unnecessary use of water in a time when water is already becoming scarcer due to global warming. Stop sane washing their massive waste, thanks!
Just because other sectors/industries use more doesn’t mean what AI data centers use isn’t a horrible waste of a limited resource we need to survive.
A majority? Do you have a source?
And it will be our fault that there aren’t enough resources for the data centers just like it’s our fault the climate is changing. If only we didn’t use AC when it was needed, we could have saved the world /s
The Epstein class will never be at fault.
It makes sense with the context in the article, but “triples that of 650 million” is a very strange way to say “almost 2 billion”.
Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well
Written by ai?
Fuck this.
I remember in the 00s imagining what AI might be like.
I did not imagine soulless chat bot that was going to steal all the water.
Because it’s not real ai. It’s just marketing.
There’s no guarantee, that team AI wouldn’t be even worse.
You play too many video games if you think AI means Cortana. Computer scientists have been building artificial intelligence since the 1950s
Indeed. The current AI salespeople never define their terminology, and this is intentional. If they did, they would instantly lose all funding, the bubble would burst, and they’d need to go find real jobs.
It’s always the same story… Say you have a new amazing “AI thingy” and then when your specific tech looks like it’s vaporware, pivot and point to traditional tech development and claim that there’s substance. Classic bait and switch deflection tactics.
Algorithms and expert machines a weren’t and aren’t AI. Can’t say that I’ve ever played Halo so have no idea about that. This is Lemmy though, so you shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve watched most if Trek, read The Culture and the Asimov robot books.
Expert machines are AI, genetic algorithms are AI, state machines are AI, and the perceptron was AI.
That’s because AI stands for artificial intelligence, and all of those technologies are attempts to artificially produce intelligence.
Your definition is, in fact, wrong. Read the textbooks. Read the dictionaries… But I don’t blame you for having an incorrect definition; that’s what the snake oil salesmen want you to believe.
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/artificial-intelligence
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.
Applications and devices equipped with AI can see and identify objects. They can understand and respond to human language. They can learn from new information and experience. They can make detailed recommendations to users and experts. They can act independently, replacing the need for human intelligence or intervention (a classic example being a self-driving car).
But in 2024, most AI researchers, practitioners and most AI-related headlines are focused on breakthroughs in generative AI (gen AI), a technology that can create original text, images, video and other content. To fully understand generative AI, it’s important to first understand the technologies on which generative AI tools are built: machine learning (ML) and deep learning.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/artificial-intelligence
artificial intelligence (AI), the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Since their development in the 1940s, digital computers have been programmed to carry out very complex tasks—such as discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess—with great proficiency. Despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match full human flexibility over wider domains or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge. On the other hand, some programs have attained the performance levels of human experts and professionals in executing certain specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this limited sense is found in applications as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, voice or handwriting recognition, and chatbots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in engineering, mathematics and computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.[1]
High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines, chatbots, virtual assistants, autonomous vehicles, and play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go). Since the 2020s, generative AI has become widely available to generate images, audio, and videos from text prompts.
The traditional goals of AI research include learning, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language processing, and perception, as well as support for robotics.[a] To reach these goals, AI researchers have used techniques including state space search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics.[b] AI also draws upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields.[2] Some companies, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta, aim to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI that can complete virtually any cognitive task at least as well as a human.[3]
Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956,[4] and the field went through multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history,[5][6] followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winters.[7][8] Funding and interest increased substantially after 2012, when graphics processing units began being used to accelerate neural networks, and deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques.[9] This growth accelerated further after 2017 with the transformer architecture.[10] In the 2020s, an AI boom has coincided with advances in generative AI, which allowed for the creation and modification of media. In addition to AI safety and unintended consequences and harms from the use of AI, ethical concerns, AI’s long-term effects, and potential existential risks have prompted discussions of AI regulation.
You are technically correct.
But non-technical people assume AI to be AGI, which LLMs are not nor ever will be.
That’s because non-technical people watch far more movies than computer science lectures. They think AI is that thing from the movies.
Thanks, gatekeeper! Is margarine real butter? Is saccharine real sugar? Is Lemmy real Internet? Is baseball real sports?
I bet it’s all marketing, all the way down. Nothing is real.
No
No
Yes well part of it
It’s just rounders. A primary school game.
A note: “AI” doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s not using evaporative cooling out of necessity. It’s just the absolute cheapest, fastest way to cool en masse. Just like slamming a gas generator down on a site, or housing servers in tents:
They could take an extra second to build something efficient, and they did not.
Or, they could just not use waste so many GPUs on “intelligence scaling” that does not scale. Like most non-US firms do, just fine. But FOMO.
In other words, non technical decision makers, who don’t understand how transformers models even work, dictated this would happen. It’s not even a sane business planning decision, and they’re too rich to face any consequences now.
Makes no sense. (I know that there are countries without proper regulation, but) around here they would simply not be allowed to use that much water.
They would need to build them in a way to not use that much water for cooling, and this would be controlled by officials during planning,build and operation.
They don’t use that much water through cooling. Or rather, evaporative cooling is rarely used because it’s unreliable outside of dry, desert climates.
Rather, most of the water footprint comes from electricity generation (e.g. coal, gas, nuclear) which evaporate freshwater to spin turbines.
Normal radiators are the goto option to cool down heated water which can then be re-used.
Tech bros in general always seem to do it anyway and deal with complaints afterwards, preferably after lobbying or sueing to remove regulations.
do it anyway
Not possible here, cowboy.
Many states with proper regulation would never allow this for literally any other industry without extensive permitting, and rightfully forcing the company to build its own treatment plants to support the increased load on existing systems
But somehow, nope. Fuck all that I guess.
Yeah the billionaires just bribe the state government. Easy.
Therefore there are (or: need to be) laws and courts who can check even the actions of governments.
The courts and the law makers are owned by the same billionaires.
… in countries which I call “unregulated”
Good use of our resources
What if we as a society decided to just not?
That would be truly a modern miracle then
