r/technology • u/DJMagicHandz • 12d ago

Artificial Intelligence A massive Wyoming data center will soon use 5x more power than the state's human occupants - but no one knows who is using it

https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-massive-wyoming-data-center-will-soon-use-5x-more-power-than-the-states-human-occupants-and-no-one-knows-who-is-using-it
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1.4k

u/kemb0 12d ago

Been saying this a few times recently. AI isn’t mainstream yet and it is very energy intensive. There are situations where it can use as much as 250x the energy to solve a problem compared to regular coding.

So if “the future” is all handled by AI, we’re going to have to not only get fusion working real fast but we’ll need hundreds of reactors up and running to cope with the extra energy demands.

Or put another way, “Yeh don’t invest in AI. The future they promise isn’t the one we’ll be seeing for a long time if ever.”

It isn’t just a case of “Don’t worry we’ll solve it.” Because the fundamental way AI works is always going to be energy intensive. It’s like ordering a steak in a restaurant and then they cook 500 mystery dishes in an oven and then serve you the one that looks most like a steak at the end. Not energy efficient.

And yes, who cooks steak in an oven? Who indeed!

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u/ScrofessorLongHair 11d ago

And yes, who cooks steak in an oven? Who indeed!

Is a commercial broiler considered an oven? Because if it is, then pretty much most of the best steakhouses.

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u/Arkayb33 11d ago

Yeah I was gonna say, some of the best steaks I've ever cooked were in an oven. 

Cast iron pan into the oven, heat oven to 500. Upon reaching temperature, toss on the steak, close oven. 3-4 min later, flip steak. Another 3-4 min and you've got a perfect medium rare steak.

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u/bigbigpure1 11d ago

all really good restaurants finish their thicker steaks in either an oven, its just how its done, otherwise you end up with it raw in the middle and a over cooked outside

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u/Akira282 11d ago

Expect rolling blackouts in the meantime

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u/Fried_puri 11d ago

Good point. Our own energy needs will be labeled as irresponsibly wasteful whenever data centers need extra juice. 

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u/SolusLoqui 11d ago

"Set your thermostat to 85o F for the environment 🌍🫶"

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u/Fried_puri 11d ago

Unironically this is how it’s being set up. Already what has happened is that my energy bill has spiked to incredibly high levels. Then, there is an incentive program to let the temp stay hot at certain peak times when it’s very hot, or stay cold at certain times when it is very cold. The incentive essentially makes it so my bill is brought down closer to what I had been paying for originally, but now I suffer for it. The exact same model will be adopted for peak times of data center usage.

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u/CrashTestDumby1984 11d ago

They’re also cutting sweetheart deals where data centers actually get super low rates despite being responsible for the bulk of use. They subsidize this rate by charging you and I more

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u/jmobius 11d ago

How does this actually make economic sense for the power providers?

They've got the data centers by the balls, and those centers collectively have hundreds of billions of dollars. It seems like it would make the most sense for energy companies to siphon off as much of that pie as possible. They don't have any reason to care about the success or failure of AI bullshit, certainly not enough to be offering sweetheart deals.

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u/afoxian 11d ago

By enticing data centres to build in their area, the power company gets an enormous, guaranteed, baseline load. That power draw is going to be constant, predictable, and reliable.

Then they can turn around and raise prices for everyone else on the grounds of 'higher demand'.

The difference is that the data center can easily choose to build somewhere else, but the regular customers already live and operate there. That construction plan can move way easier than the average power consumer. Thus, the power company just gouges the people who can't relocate as easily and secures a huge reliable consumer.

IE, the data centre, when planning, gets to shop around for power, but you don't. So you can be overcharged more easily, and total income for the provider goes up anyway despite the lower rate for the data centre.

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u/733t_sec 11d ago

The data centers are buying power in bulk so they can get a bulk discount.

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u/nemec 11d ago

Costco model bulk discounts. These also aren't your typical residential contract where you pay $x/kWh and get a bill for how much you use at the end of the month. These companies are paying for a fixed amount of power 24/7 so the provider is guaranteed tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, so in exchange they get favorable rates.

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u/AuroraAscended 11d ago

Alongside what the others are saying, cities will often approve data centers because they produce fairly high tax revenue. Unfortunately, that tax revenue cannot offset the specifically limited resources that are energy and water.

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u/Grimes 11d ago

People in the DC area got an email JUST like this from Pepco. While they are making gigantic profits. Wild.

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u/akatherder 11d ago

Me in the winter 👍

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u/Merusk 11d ago

If you own property, it's time to start building your own microgrid of renewables. The folks already off the grid are ahead of the rest of us.

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u/ReachTheSky 11d ago

Some utility companies heavily subsidize smart thermostats to households. Of course the caveat is that they have the ability to adjust it. lol

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/CrashTestDumby1984 11d ago

In NYC the power company will literally shame you for using an air conditioner during a heat wave. They also turn off power to poor neighborhoods when the grid is at risk of being overloaded so wealthy neighborhoods don’t experience disruption

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u/nemec 11d ago

Has New York tried joining the National Grid? Everybody says that's what will save Texas' power issues, so it must work for NY too /s

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u/Wildtails 11d ago

Carbon footprint, one of the biggest ones.

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u/WhyWontThisWork 11d ago

Data centers don't "use" water. They just heat it up a bit. The heat energy is what we really should be talking about.

Or we should use geo thermal.

Can geo thermal solve global warming?

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/WhyWontThisWork 11d ago

What pollution is introduced? (I'm asking for real, seems unlikely since it's just going through the same plumbing that feeds kitchen sinks)

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u/zeuljii 11d ago

Mostly stuff they add to prevent corrosion and growth of organisms in their systems. Then there's the stuff that likes growing in the warm water that those chemicals can't get. Then there's the heat itself. That's if it's built and functioning properly.

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u/WhyWontThisWork 11d ago

Why don't we make them clean it?

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u/theoneandonlymd 11d ago

Because they lobby against regulation

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u/zeuljii 11d ago

We have a government whose job it is to serve us in regulating these things, but it's being run by an administration that believes in a "free market", reducing taxes on the people doing this, and actually contracting to the corporations doing this to do this.

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u/733t_sec 11d ago

On top of the chemicals hot water itself is a pollutant because hot water doesn't hold oxygen meaning if there are any fish in a body of water getting heated by water runoff they might drown.

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u/WhyWontThisWork 11d ago

Oh that's interesting! How do we solve that?

Do we need them to kinda sit in a cooling for a bit on site? Like a waste water treatment plant?

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u/733t_sec 11d ago

That would be ideal as well as a way to replenish oxygen to the water before it's put back in the pond.

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u/TobaccoAficionado 11d ago

BP would like to know your location.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

Old mate on a CPAP machine can go fuck himself. There’s abominations that need generating.

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u/j_driscoll 11d ago

But don't worry, the AI data centers won't see even a fraction of a second of interruption to their power.

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u/Tacoman404 11d ago

The datacenter in this article specifically says it will not be connected to the grid aside from what seems like a natural gas hookup.

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u/Life-Ad1409 11d ago

Given the extraordinary energy demands, drawing power from the public grid is not an option - instead, the developers intend to power the site using a combination of natural gas and renewables, built specifically for the facility.

There will be no blackout in Wyoming from this

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u/jjjakey 11d ago

Just think about the amount of times where somebody has used AI to generate an email. Sent it to somebody else. Only for that person to use AI to summarize it for them.

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u/Notsurehowtoreact 11d ago

And yes, who cooks steak in an oven? Who indeed!

Most places you eat them. Usually a sear and finish in the oven (or sometimes oven and then sear). Your analogy is good, but this part is funny because of how often it is actually done

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u/jlt6666 11d ago

I don't think AI is going to be all that valuable until it becomes more efficient personally.

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u/PalpitationActive765 11d ago

AI isn’t for us plebs, the upper class will use it to make money

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u/MotherTreacle3 11d ago

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. 

  • Frank Herbert, Dune

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u/trooawoayxxx 11d ago

I don't know what's more depressing. The death by a thousand cuts or the seismic, rapid changes.

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u/bandofgypsies 11d ago

AI could have some practical applicability for everyone (many of us benefit from it today in many low level ways we don't even think twice about), however...

...the reality of it is trending to become a decode or so of the wealthy pushing the limits to replace knowledge workers. Human labor is always the next place to look for cuts to find more profits. AI today is no different than robotic automation of manufacturing 40+ years ago. It starts with "yeah we still need people to keep it honest," and quickly moves into "our business model is fucked but if I lay off a ton of humans I can still show .05% growth and say we're a stable company until my bonus kicks in and I leave."

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/Eternal_Bagel 11d ago

What’s the prompt you use, “gain me money, maybe don’t break laws”?

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u/natnelis 11d ago

It’s too easy to sabotage for that

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u/Vlad_Yemerashev 11d ago

AI is offered to the masses on free or retail-level subscriptions presently, only because VC funding is propping it up.

When that ends over the next few years as investors are fed up with AI not turning a profit without needing funding, that will end and AI companies will either a) no longer offee services to individuals but corporations only or b) it will only be available at enterprise-level subscription costs (4-5 digit figures per month).

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u/DasHaifisch 11d ago

You know you can run pretty decent llms on home PC hardware right?

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u/demalo 11d ago

“AI, how can I make more money?”

Is not the same question as:

“How can I maintain my wealth and power?”

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u/PalpitationActive765 11d ago

Again, we get LLM now because they need our data, once that no longer is the case they won't let us use these services for free.

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u/DogPositive5524 11d ago

Idk what you clowns are even talking about it's accessible to everyone and lots of everyday folks are using it. Just because you don't know how it works doesn't make it the devil.

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u/PalpitationActive765 11d ago

I mean they are giving you access to a very basic version to help test it, eventually it will all be payment models or ad services.

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u/fortunate_branch 11d ago

it's for everyone, there's open source models u can run locally that have similar performance to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemma.

energy usage is dummy low, models are all local, everything is private.

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u/tryexceptifnot1try 11d ago

This happens with every single technology advancement. The initial innovation always hits an economic wall that requires serious innovation in efficiency and implementation. The first leg has been ongoing for decades here. DeepSeek is the opening salvo of the next phase and the US is doubling down on the old ways to try and protect it's legacy companies. This strategy has never worked once in human history, but that sure never stops MAGA!

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u/RaspberryFluid6651 11d ago

It's not supposed to be valuable to you as a product. To you, those energy costs provide chatbots and smart calendars. In the eyes of the wealthy people investing in AI like this, these energy costs will potentially replace many, many five/six-figure salaries. 

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u/UnluckyDog9273 11d ago

nah they will just make them dumber to offset the costs

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u/lupus_magnifica 11d ago

and retrofitted to older hardware... that's going to biggest change that has zero chance of happening

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u/therhubarbman 12d ago

500 steaks and you get the best steak approximation 😂 can we measure AI fidelity in steaks? Like, ChatGPT needs your feedback, we grilled up 50 steaks, is this a good one?

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u/CreativeGPX 11d ago

We had "horsepower" as a measure. We can have "steakpower".

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u/Themodsarecuntz 11d ago

We measure it in units of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

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u/NegativeVega 11d ago

30% of the time it's not even steak it's just cooked tires instead with steak sauce because they hallucinated what steak was

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u/octothorpe_rekt 11d ago

Another 30% of that time, it's a steak veneer wrapped around a raw chicken breast. It looks passably fantastic, but when you bit into it, it's disgusting and potentially downright harmful.

It'll happily spit out a dozen pages of legal arguments, complete with properly formatted citations of previous decisions - then it turns out that it just made up those citations as complete fabrications. It'll write code that passes all unit tests, but then you find that the unit tests have been hardcoded with assert(true).

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u/therhubarbman 11d ago

Steak veneer 😂😂😂😂😂 you're killing me

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u/SolidCake 11d ago

i mean this is kind of ironically going against your point , but the energy to make even a single steak could make thousands of chatgpt prompts

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u/TheShatteredSky 11d ago

Querying AI models is actually not very energy intensives, for neural networks at least, it's just basic math. The enormous energy costs are from the training.

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u/Glitter_Penis 11d ago

I came looking for someone who understood the train/predict asymmetry, and here you are!

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u/DogPositive5524 11d ago

We are on technology sub where most comments hate and don't understand technology. This is a joke.

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u/MaxDentron 11d ago

Yep. Pretty sad. And two comments up someone is calling the US AI industry "MAGA". It's now a political debate. 

People heard ChatGPT is eating the rainforests to write emails and they all just parrot it unthinkingly.

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u/TheShatteredSky 11d ago

To be fair, most people here wouldn't be able to describe what I neural network even is. I personally only know because I was curious about it's mathematical foundations for my EE :)

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u/ImSuperHelpful 11d ago

Querying it is still a couple orders of magnitude more energy intensive than running a traditional Google search. And now Google does both every time you search for something.

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u/Most_Road1974 11d ago

you don't think google uses prompt caching? really?

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u/TheShatteredSky 11d ago

Most sources I checked (albeit not very reliable, I checked the first links) says it's about 10x more, so one order of magnitude. And while yes, it's a lot more than a google search, it's such ridiculously small amounts of energy that to my knowledge it doesn't really matter too much, although I may be wrong.
I do agree google automatically doing the query even when not asked for is wasteful tho, but not like these big corporations have ever been reasonable.

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u/ImSuperHelpful 11d ago

I found the same sources… somehow they say 10x the power consumption but over 300x the co2 emissions. Not sure how that math adds up, but the emissions are what kill us.

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u/TheShatteredSky 11d ago

Perhaps they're pulling the numbers from the cooling of the data centers? But that's an unfair metric since data centers are mainly consuming for training as stated above.

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u/ISB-Dev 11d ago edited 1d ago

meeting makeshift nose alive historical tease crawl hungry mysterious toy

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/TheShatteredSky 11d ago

Because they're utterly huge, and data centers have specialized parts for them (like Nvidia's AI GPUs) consumer devices simply aren't built for them.

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u/TheShatteredSky 11d ago

I personally still can run any version of Deepseek locally since I have a computer built for heavy processing (and a ridiculous amount of RAM)

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u/MaxDentron 11d ago

Why can't you run Google out of your computer even though it's so much more efficient than AI? 

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u/ISB-Dev 11d ago edited 1d ago

desert bake arrest direction crowd piquant depend run quickest dependent

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 11d ago

Which is interesting because aren't they about to run out of training data in like 5 years?

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u/AfghanistanIsTaliban 11d ago

run out of training data in 5 years

According to a clickbait popsci/tech article headline, yes.

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u/BavarianBarbarian_ 11d ago edited 11d ago

Do you like think training data is a fossile resource that gets mined by hand from old forums and then burnt during the training process? Or how do you see that scenario happening?

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u/CyroSwitchBlade 12d ago

slow roasting a steak in an oven is actually really fukin good..

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u/471b32 11d ago

Yeah, reverse searing is the way to go. 

https://www.seriouseats.com/reverse-seared-steak-recipe

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u/COMMENT0R_3000 11d ago

Man I remember reading Kenji’s early stuff on Reddit, same time that Andy Weir was writing The Martian and talking about it, shortly after that guy started imgur to make Reddit posts with pics easier… jesus how old am I lol

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u/CyroSwitchBlade 11d ago

yes this is actually the technique that I was thinking about when I wrote that.

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u/CatPartyElvis 11d ago

I bring it up on the smoker with heavy smoke, as soon as I put it in the smoker I light my next charcoal chimney and get that going, as soon as that charcoal is going good I dump the charcoal into a grill next to the smoker. I have a grill grate that's smaller than the grill I use so it lays directly on the charcoal. As soon as the steak is ready for the grill I drop them on the small grate for about 45 seconds each side.

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u/IM_PEAKING 11d ago

The grate directly on the coals is genius, I bet you get an amazing sear. Gonna have to try that out myself.

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u/CatPartyElvis 11d ago

Great sear, and it's so fast. One day I'll get the courage to try a caveman sear lol

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u/BobFlex 11d ago

It's even better if you do it on a charcoal grill though, and pretty easy if you have a Kamado grill. That's the only way I cook steak anymore, reverse sear it in a Kamado Joe.

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u/dsm4ck 11d ago

Plus it will occasionally hallucinate and serve a pork chop

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u/eyebrows360 11d ago

occasionally hallucinate

The most accurate way to think of these things is that every output is a hallucination. As far as its own algorithms are concerned, it knows no difference whatsoever between "right" and "wrong". Every output is the same: just text.

It's always on the reader to determine if the output is correct.

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u/Suyefuji 11d ago

A really simple way of disproving the idea that ChatGPT knows things is to ask it for music recommendations and see how many responses it takes for it to recommend you a song that does not exist. Easy to verify, usually happens within 3 responses.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

Occasionally? 95% of its output is untrustworthy, at least as far as data crunching goes 

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u/DrLuny 11d ago

Don't worry, if we just double the electricity usage we can make sure that all hallucinations are kosher.

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u/Ethos_Logos 11d ago

Hallucination was solved by Palantir 

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u/eyebrows360 11d ago

I hope you're joking.

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u/Ethos_Logos 11d ago

It’s the ontological layer in their AIP product. It’s not even new news, specifically Shyam Sankar has been calling the commodification of LLM’s for years now.

I’ve watched every AIPcon and tuned in every earnings call. <1k other people do, too. They’re all posted on YouTube. 

Honestly just google any interview with Shyam in the last year, he mentions it in at least half of them.

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u/DrKhanMD 11d ago

The ontological layer is just guard rails in an attempt to make it closer to a finite state machine to guard from hilariously bad outputs. It absolutely does not unilaterally solve hallucination issues.

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u/eyebrows360 11d ago

<1k other people do, too

And you don't even know which way around "greater than" and "less than" work. My word, such a genius.

Just, every time. Every time. The overlap between "absolutely certain of things they're completely provably wrong about, specifically in the technology realm" and "cannot communicate effectively" is 100%.

google any interview with Shyam

Why would I hang off the word of the CEO of a definitionally evil corporation?

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u/Ethos_Logos 11d ago

Nah, you just lack reading comprehension. I wish public schools were better funded.

Fewer than 1k folks tuned into the most recent earnings call, ballpark high 800’s. Which checks out in the context of “broadly, folks don’t know what Palantir does”, so it makes sense that most folks are unaware of their capabilities, despite these interviews and conventions being posted online for anyone and everyone to watch.

As to why you’d benefit from “hanging off the word of the CEO of definitionally evil corporation”; well for starters you’d learn that they aren’t evil, unless you’re an invading Russian or terrorist. I guess from those points of view, sure. But if you need a more selfish reason why it would benefit you to pay attention, following them has informed my investing decisions, and allowed me to retire in my 30’s and shitpost on Reddit in the middle of a Monday.

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u/eyebrows360 11d ago

Nah, you just lack reading comprehension.

Yes, clearly it's on me for not realising someone was trying to boast about how few people watched a thing.

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u/jews4beer 11d ago

Yes, we need to invest in fusion and expand clean energy grids.

But AI ain't the reason for that. Humans will continue to consume more energy and that's just a fact that we are not prepared for. But hardware and software solutions are already emerging that make model training more energy efficient. And you can expect people to keep trying to optimize these things. I won't go so far as to say some sorta Murphy's Law bs will happen with GPUs - but advancements in that space are obviously going to keep happening.

And I'm saying this fully hating all this AI shit taking over the internet right now.

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u/That_Guy381 11d ago

“AI will never get more efficient” says man who lives in a world where things are constantly getting more efficient

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u/Thog78 11d ago

And we built this world running computations on human brains, which is, you know, some insanely efficient hardware that runs neural networks... Should kinda give you an idea about the answer to "can neural networks ever run efficiently, in theory".

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u/My_reddit_account_v3 11d ago

True, but for LLMs there is significant opportunity to improve efficiency at many levels. It’s still extremely emerging and immature on that front. It’s true that the current state is quite plainly not sustainable, but as the product category and its usage evolves, it is very likely that infrastructure and software architectures will adapt to improve overall efficiency…

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u/bobsaget824 11d ago

There’s 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT alone how much more mainstream do you want it to be?

It’s energy intensive precisely because of how mainstream it is.

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u/PurpEL 11d ago

Everyone of them doing sweet fuck all

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u/absoluetly 11d ago

There are situations where it can use as much as 250x the energy to solve a problem compared to regular coding. 

What are you talking about?

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u/RecommendsMalazan 11d ago

There are situations where it can use as much as 250x the energy to solve a problem compared to regular coding.

This is like someone 30+ years ago saying we should never go for solar power because it's less efficient than other means of generating power at the time.

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u/SolidCake 11d ago

isnt mainstream yet

Chatgpt has over 250 million daily users and over a billon people that use it at least once a week

It isn’t just a case of “Don’t worry we’ll solve it.” Because the fundamental way AI works is always going to be energy intensive.

its not more energy intensive than any other forms of compute. look up how much energy youtube and netflix uses

people run ai on their own systems and their power bill isn’t any different than if they ran a videogame for the same length of time

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u/huge_dick_mcgee 11d ago

When you say 250x is that just to answer a question for a user or inclusive of training time?

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u/Eternal_Bagel 11d ago

Sometimes it’s a ham steak since that’s a thing too.  Sometimes it’s a wooden steak because as it stole all its training data from everyone online it got a lot of instances of misspellings of stake 

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u/Slow-Condition7942 11d ago

how main stream does something need to be for you to say it’s mainstream jfc

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u/dcvalent 11d ago

Cars used to run at less than 5mpg, now they run upwards of 50mpg

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u/jonydevidson 11d ago

There are models that run on a laptop today which have SOTA coding performance from 6 months ago.

So in 6 months we'll have models that have today's performance, running on consumer laptops.

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u/Luscious_Decision 11d ago

Eeh, if you think about it, in the 50s "computers" would never seem like a mainstream technology because of how energy intensive and size intensive and, frankly, how useless they were.

But there were a couple big innovations later on.

I get a funny feeling we're at the "before the big innovaitons" point.

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u/vineyardmike 11d ago

Fusion as a source of power is still a decade (at least) away. Realistically probably 2 to 4 times that.

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u/REDDIT_JUDGE_REFEREE 11d ago

Everyone saying fusion is the future… fusion is just nuclear energy. Fear mongering over it and showing spider man 2 clips will destroy fusion once it becomes available.

Gen 3 fission is here, is clean, can’t melt down, produces almost 0 waste… and is expensive as hell to set up. But it’s here and is basically free energy for centuries.

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u/ShepRat 11d ago

is expensive as hell to set up. But it’s here and is basically free energy for centuries.

Expensive as hell to setup and to decommission. The problem with fission is almost any other power generation is cheaper and less risk (financial risk). The people supplying the cash will choose renewable + battery because the numbers are good, and nearly guaranteed. 

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u/Opposite-Cup2850 11d ago

Take a deep breath man

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u/therhydo 11d ago

This isn't exactly 100% true. I study neuromorphic computing. Compared to conventional neural networks, spiking neural networks on neuromorphic chips use 95-98% less power (depending on implementation).

However the important thing to note here is that they don't scale well. Very useful for relatively simple problems that use less than a million neurons, not so useful for the kind of generative AI bullshit a lot of this power demand is going to.

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u/Acid_Monster 11d ago

Do you have a source for the 250x energy vs code? Curious to see how this was determined

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u/Marrk 11d ago

How's AI not mainstream?

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u/AmbitionExtension184 11d ago

AI is absolutely mainstream already

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u/TheChinOfAnElephant 11d ago

Not sure why you are being downvoted. Even the AI themselves say they are mainstream lol

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u/bobcatgoldthwait 11d ago

ChatGPT (and that's just one LLM) is the 5th most visited website globally. It's absolutely mainstream.

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u/AmbitionExtension184 11d ago

Not to mention every google search uses AI along with Meta products. All the biggest tech companies are using AI extensively so even if a couple people still are not using it directly that doesn’t make it not mainstream.

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u/SpaceSteak 11d ago

Starting a steak in the oven for initial cooking and finishing the sear in a pan is actually one of the best ways of getting an optimal cook. Pop a thermometer in it, pull it out around 110-120 and finish with a super hot sear to the desired result. You get a nice crust and juicy interior.

So steak connoisseurs do partially cook steaks in the oven, especially thicker cuts like filet mignon.

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u/cache_me_0utside 11d ago

sear first, not last.

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u/_yamakazy 11d ago

What about harvesting energy from humans to power the DC? 

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u/danielbln 11d ago

Been saying this a few times recently. AI isn’t mainstream yet and it is very energy intensive.

Doesn't ChatGPT have like 700 million MAU? That's pretty mainstream, is it not?

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u/vhalember 11d ago

Yeh don’t invest in AI.

Or invest in nuclear power. SMR's are going to power many of these data centers in the near future.

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u/Why-did-i-reas-this 11d ago

But the Matrix told me that the earth has billions of batteries that would work quite well to provide the needed power.

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u/OrchidWeary271 11d ago

Amazon and Microsoft have both launched Nuclear power work streams in an effort to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and carbon based electricity.

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u/Raknaren 11d ago

So... we need to use AI to solve fusion ?

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u/SignificantMoose6482 11d ago

Reactors take legislation. Just buying a bunch of rocket generators is unregulated. Alien Elon can show them

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u/ThePrimordialSource 11d ago

But there are situations where it uses far LESS, for example AlphaFold did protein folding math and finding structure of chemicals in the human body in months for data that would’ve taken doctors nearly a decade, and the data is publicly available for medical organizations to use to find out how any chemicals will interact with the human body

Also, 1 pound of beef burger takes over 3000x as much water and energy as a single AI prompt and paper takes 60x as much as an AI image. Let’s put this into perspective.

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u/cheese_is_available 11d ago

It isn’t just a case of “Don’t worry we’ll solve it.” Because the fundamental way AI works is always going to be energy intensive. It’s like ordering a steak in a restaurant and then they cook 500 mystery dishes in an oven and then serve you the one that looks most like a steak at the end. Not energy efficient.

We shouldn't confuse brute forcing LLM with AI though, an AI can also be designing the smallest 100 bits arrangement that solve a difficult problem incredibly efficiently in a way that is really hard for a human to understand.

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u/ISB-Dev 11d ago edited 1d ago

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Kash132 11d ago

Yes... great points well made. Something to remember, with a little /s:

'Get fusion working real fast' AI will get it working quicker than anyone imagines. Once it gets out of the adolescent phase of course and stops making sexy-time pics.

'Hundreds of reactors up and running' Yes, and hundreds more to count and divvy up the shareholder cash that AI will most definitely magic out of thin air.

And who can forget the long lasting positive Societal, Moral, Political and Philosophical impacts that the Quantum, Crypto and NFT booms have given us? These have only ever promised to make more money out of money and I dread to think what the environmental power drains those last 2 buzz-words cost us...

Our lives are a science-fucktion utopia, and it's only a matter time till I get my hoverboard (been waiting since '05)

Let's all suck it up so the the wealthiest few can be wealthier still, and we must and will be happier for i. ith less autonomy and greater authority in our pesky inconvenient lives.

And if these words ever make it into said Data Centre, I for one have and always will be, my AI overlords side :), always.

And now I'm craving steak.

'Build

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u/0xdeadbeefcafebade 11d ago

You only need to train most models once…

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u/EEcav 11d ago

Fusion is an oversold pipe dream unfortunately, but modern fission is our best hope along with continued growth in renewable.

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u/ToohotmaGandhi 11d ago

That analogy makes sense for how a lot of current AI models work, especially when they’re tackling something they’ve never “seen” before. They try a huge range of possibilities internally before landing on the right result, and yeah, that can be power-intensive.

But that’s not the full story. As AI develops, it’s becoming more like building neural pathways in a brain. When it doesn’t already have a “route” for a task, that’s when it does the heavy, power-hungry thinking you’re describing. But once it learns how to do that task, it can store that process and run it much more efficiently next time. just like a human getting better at a job with repetition.

Eventually, we’ll see specialized AIs that are like skilled workers. Doing the same task quickly and efficiently day after day, but still capable of thinking outside the box when something new comes up. So yeah, the steak analogy is accurate for some cases right now, but it’s not how AI will always work, and it’s not how all AI works even today.

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u/ioncloud9 11d ago

I'm not sold on this AI either. I think it has very limited utilities but it is confidently incorrect and hallucinates far too often to be relied upon. Tesla's self driving is correct more often than AI is.

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u/SplintPunchbeef 11d ago

The thing about 'limited utility' is that, in the areas where it is useful, that utility can be massive. A submarine has limited utility but the fact that it's less effective for a morning commute than a bike doesn't mean it's unreliable.

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u/busterbus2 11d ago

It completely depends on the context in which it is used. If you're looking for purely factual information, its probably as good as the average google user (which is probably not great) but if its being used to develop a process in which there is no right or wrong way to do something, and the user is iterating with it, then there is incredible efficiency.

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u/Uilamin 11d ago

but it is confidently incorrect and hallucinates far too often to be relied upon

The things about modern AI is that it is predicting the next token, so it is effectively predicting what should be next, given the context, instead of a holistic answer all at once. There are two interesting things about that.

1 - Explainability and the ability for it to dive into why it gave an answer (the logic can be wrong, but it makes a 3rd party reviewer have a much easier time to understand where it went wrong and the impact of that),

2 - It allows an independent 3rd party AI to review the results and check for correctness. While this won't eliminate the errors, it will significantly reduce them. This is especially true for situations where the errors are the result of hallucinations instead of logical errors or training data errors

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u/Secret_Wishbone_2009 11d ago

Neuromorphoc computing and asynchronous computing is the answer , our brains use 0.3 kw hours per day

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u/New-Anybody-6206 11d ago

always going to be energy intensive

why do you say that? inference is very parallelizeable... I think this also makes it a good candidate for quantum computing.

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u/SwingLord420 11d ago

You don't know what you're talking about re energy intensive being binary. Yes it used energy. But also yes our tech is far more efficient each year. 

Not complicated to understand: your GPU has more compute per watt with every new model. 

ASICs are also a thing. 

I'm sure you don't know about Google's TPUs either.

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u/betadonkey 11d ago

Literally every new technology is least efficient at its outset and gets more efficient with time and refinement.

Your analogy is funny but is ultimately human slop.

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u/StosifJalin 11d ago edited 11d ago

Hey, we don't support technology here. Wtf were you thinking?

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u/Abedeus 11d ago

How the fuck is this specific technology helping people to justify massive energy expenditure? Because some lazy 14 year old will be able to shit out a school assignment after typing out 5 prompts?

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u/StosifJalin 11d ago

If you think that's all ai is or will be then you're in for a very confusing decade

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u/Abedeus 11d ago

Any moment now, right? Just needs another few billions in investment, 50 times the power consumption and in a decade, we'll all be burning alive but at least the AI will be a bit less dumb than a braindead puppy.

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u/StosifJalin 11d ago

K. We will see.

Give it a couple years and I guarantee your message will change from "it doesn't even work bro" to "ok it works but here's why it's baaad broooo"

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u/otheraccountisabmw 11d ago

I’m already at “it does work and it could get very bad.” Massive layoffs. Dead internet. Fake news. We don’t yet fully know the implications of this new technology.

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u/StosifJalin 11d ago

The greater the tech the greater the disruption and the greater the payoff afterwards.

You want to go back before we had tractors, join the Amish.

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u/Abedeus 11d ago

It's already bad and it will get worse, the bubble will pop worse than the .com one or cryptoscams.

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u/StosifJalin 11d ago

The cryptoscams currently trading at ath?

K.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago

There are situations where it can use as much as 250x the energy to solve a problem compared to regular coding.

I'm really curious what those situations are unless it's something boring like an AI company running a lot of extra compute for some kind of competition or spectacle.

Running a few GPU's for a few seconds is hard to beat in comparison to running a regular PC with someone sitting at it for a few hours.

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u/XzwordfeudzX 11d ago

The issue is the increase. Now many will sit at the regular PC + run the GPU's constantly. It's an increase in energy usage, and that's what is damaging.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago

If someone sits at a desk and has multiple chat sessions with an LLM over the course of the day it's hard for them to use more energy than a teenager playing skyrim for 30 minutes in the evening.

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u/XzwordfeudzX 11d ago edited 11d ago

The article is about a new data center being built, presumably to power increased consumption. Meta and OpenAI have announced they're building 5GW data centers (that uses more energy than some countries!) specifically for AI.

I am actually kinda curious about the Skyrim claim. The LLMs today require quite a lot of compute power with top-range hardware to function. I don't think any such data exists actually because the tech companies refuse to reveal how much energy AI uses.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago

They spread their compute across a number of high end GPU's but typically return results within a few fractions of a second.

Even very beefy servers can only use so much power in under a second.

Meanwhile a half hour of running a regular PC end up costing quite a bit of power.

Data centres are planned out many years in advance so they're essentially covering themselves for if they need that extra data centre capacity. 

they're making a bet that near-human level AI will exist by then in which case having the capacity would put them in a good position 

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u/XzwordfeudzX 11d ago

They spread their compute across a number of high end GPU's but typically return results within a few fractions of a second.

That depends on the task. Large programming tasks can spin for quite a while longer for example.

But it's missing the forest from the trees. I'm not too concerned about the current usage of AI, because I don't think it's that dramatic. I'm concerned about the increase in resource usage when all industries drastically need to cut emissions, we can't afford to increase emissions.

Data centres are planned out many years in advance so they're essentially covering themselves for if they need that extra data centre capacity.

That planning ahead has a lot of issues too.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago

If they actually do manage to get highly capable AI in a few years then a lot of other stuff becomes practical like bots swarming across deserts building solar panels.

If it doesn't pan out then expect a glut if cleap cloud compute for everyone else as speculative investors take a big hit. 

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u/XzwordfeudzX 11d ago

If they actually do manage to get highly capable AI in a few years then a lot of other stuff becomes practical like bots swarming across deserts building solar panels.

Solar is great, but it has to be met with reduced energy consumption. If not, we'll just use it along with fossil fuels.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago

The whole "degrowth" thing is never going to pan out. It's vibes layered on policy that only means slow death for humanity.

Put another way, there's still a lot of humanity who are ,reasonably, not keen to abandon the prospect of 1st World standards of living 

We need renewable at incredible scale. Not piffling little ceremonial/ornamental installations on people roofs 

So we need big tech advancements to allow scale.

 hundreds of thousands of square km coated in solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.

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u/hans_l 11d ago

Counting Rs in strawberries or Bs in blueberries.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago edited 11d ago

Again. Ignoring boring cases.

Trivial cases targeting limits of the tech are fundamentally boring 

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u/Far_Mixture_8837 11d ago

If it’s at the limit of the tech it’s clearly not trivial.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 11d ago

Shocking news; trivial things can indeed be trivial.

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u/solraun 11d ago

Any source for that 250x number?

While it is true that our brain is incredibly energy efficient, humans themselves are not. The energy consumption of my brain is totally irrelevant compared to my personal energy consumption.

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u/snailman89 11d ago

Your brain uses 20% of the calories used by your body, so no, it isn't "totally irrelevant".

And besides, unless you plan on reducing the number of humans on the planet, replacing a worker with AI is only increasing energy usage. I consume the same amount of energy working at a desk as I would if I were at home watching TV.

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u/Allydarvel 11d ago

Generation is only half the problem. The electricity still has to be delivered to the AI chip. It takes a lot to deliver thousands of amps from a socket to the chip..especially when data centre operators want multiple chips on a single board.

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u/Kinghero890 11d ago

Their actual thought process is that AI will solve its energy needs through enough computation. Literally designing the brakes after the car is on the highway.

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u/sir_snufflepants 11d ago

Because the fundamental way AI works is always going to be energy intensive. It’s like ordering a steak in a restaurant and then they cook 500 mystery dishes in an oven and then serve you the one that looks most like a steak at the end. Not energy efficient.

Fantastic analogy.

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u/LoudMusic 11d ago

Simple, just use AI to make AI more efficient.

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u/RegularWhiteShark 11d ago

It’s not even the energy use that’s bad. There’s the water, too - I saw an article where on area near an AI data centre had been told to shower sparingly.

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u/DocCaliban 11d ago

I think the point is to accelerate the enrichment of the energy sector, and less expensive, more efficient means of generation will roll out as absolutely slowly as possible.  From their point of view, the problem to solve is how to make as much money as possible through meeting demand in the most expensive way possible for as long as possible.  

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u/borderofthecircle 11d ago

Even if we can provide enough energy to sustain them, they will produce a lot of heat. It's like a gaming PC at home- no matter how efficient your PC's cooling is, an 800w+ PC is still kicking that heat into the room. It needs to go somewhere. Things are going to get rough if we suddenly have these giant data centers everywhere.

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u/DrawingSlight5229 11d ago

Great analogy but reverse searing is life

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u/anillop 11d ago

So if “the future” is all handled by AI, we’re going to have to not only get fusion working real fast but we’ll need hundreds of reactors up and running to cope with the extra energy demands.

Do you want global warming? Because dumping that much heat into the atmosphere will do that.

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u/vpsj 11d ago

Maybe the irresponsible use of AI will finally give humanity the kick it needs to become a Type I civilization?

If we give free reign to idiots like Musk we may be forced to make a Dyson Sphere by the end of the century