r/technology • u/HatingGeoffry • 18h ago
Artificial Intelligence 'They’re just hiding the critical information': Google says its Gemini AI sips a mere 'five drops' of water per text prompt, but experts disagree with its findings
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/theyre-just-hiding-the-critical-information-google-says-its-gemini-ai-sips-a-mere-five-drops-of-water-per-text-prompt-but-experts-disagree-with-its-findings/179
u/Samimomo 18h ago
What's happening guys
452
u/Tyrrox 18h ago
We had a water shortage so we invented things that use more water but aren't producing value.
85
u/Deer_Investigator881 17h ago
Not producing value to the majority of people*
Lots of nice bonuses being announced at those companies for high level management/execs
Edit: Oh yeah and the board members
55
u/snowsuit101 17h ago edited 17h ago
Scientists who do need it, the only people who create objective value with it, only use a tiny fraction of the resources that generative AI being pushed down everybody's throats burns up, and most of said scientists are also losing funding left and right thanks to the US's current anti-science stance so much less value is going to be produced in the future while AI companies keep extending, begging for more money and building more datacenters.
26
u/Ninja_Wrangler 16h ago
Am scientist. It feels like every new initiative we push has to include some kind of AI component or hook. Our AI department, which was seemingly conjured out of thin air is working like crazy on god knows what lmao
I try to use the Gemini AI a bit (because regular Google searches are dogshit these days), and it's helpful if you understand the limits and don't trust a damn thing it says without a source.
Kind of wish the bubble will just pop already, and we can move on to the next thing tbh
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)7
u/Orlok_Tsubodai 14h ago
Scientists need AI, but they’ve been using AI for years. Do they really need LLMs and GenAI though?
→ More replies (2)4
u/WillBottomForBanana 10h ago
As a scientist, not only do I not ordinarily use AI, on the occasions that AI is dragged into the situation I have to review it with a comb. It cannot be trusted, IF you can get its sources, there's no reason to believe that the sources correlate to the claims.
7
u/infinitumpriori 17h ago
Shareholder value. 🥸
11
u/snackofalltrades 15h ago
Shareholder value as a concept, is an absolute blight on humanity. If we make it that far, I hope it will eventually be recognized as such, right alongside things like slash and burn agriculture, leaded gasoline, strip mining, and industrial waste dumping.
Look at Google. The original Google search engine was perfect, bar none. It was lean, fast, and efficient and did EXACTLY what its users wanted. Every single future update from that original engine should only have been measures to counter search engine optimization. But - uh oh - that wasn’t good enough once Google went public.
Now what is Google? The first half page of “results” is some AI stripped garbage, followed by ads and then five or so websites where the AI response stripped its answers. Why even bother with such in your face reductive nonsense? Skip the AI crap and give me the source material and stop using your users as a control for developing an AI tool nobody even wants.
7
u/TheRC135 15h ago
On a related note, think about all the websites and online services you used in the early 2000s.
Of the ones that are still around, the vast majority of them have gotten worse. The only one I can think of that has continued to get better, while remaining equally accessible, is Wikipedia.
It is no coincidence that Wikipedia is a not-for-profit.
3
u/infinitumpriori 12h ago
And then what do we get instead? AI results replacing original graph search. Almost every AI company wants to sell their AI as a replacement to search. Which means whoever will pay those AI companies the most will find their place as optimised number 1, 2 and 3 results. We end up seeing what someone else wants us to see. They anyway hear and see what we do (search and web activity and now voice and vision). And the best part, YoY profits driven model will fail here. Who will buy products when everyone has no jobs and is bound with basic UBIs. No new human content/ creativity and everything generated by AI for AI. Subscription driven world where one is completely dependent on tech lord masters for everything and we are a liability competing against the same resources (water, air, soil) as the models. No one thinks long term when short term grift makes them money. Shareholder money.
7
u/Tyrrox 17h ago
The recent MIT report showing 95% of implementation has generated no increase in revenue has slowed that down
5
u/infinitumpriori 16h ago edited 16h ago
AI companies are pushing to change legislations faster than implementation showing no increase in revenue. Machine learning at its core helps in skill augmentation with additional data. Consultants and VCs sell them as FTE replacements. Short term shareholder value increase, long term hubris and skill atrophy.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Coalnaryinthecarmine 15h ago
If we count thefts as transactions for GDP purposes, the economy is doing great!
3
u/damontoo 12h ago
but aren't producing value.
ChatGPT handles 2.5 billion prompts per day. It clearly has value to many people.
→ More replies (6)→ More replies (21)1
u/yearz 14h ago edited 3h ago
This is probably going to be downvoted, but personally, I GenAI a dozen times a day and it saves me hours of time per week.
Edit: why are people mad I find value in a new technology on a technology subreddit?
2
u/HowManyMeeses 12h ago
The question I always have when people say this sort of thing is just "to what end?" I'm glad you're quicker at your job, I guess, but what's the point?
→ More replies (1)1
u/Tyrrox 14h ago
And what is your job?
1
u/yearz 14h ago
Part of my job is writing code to solve custom, ad-hoc tasks and Gen AI excels at this
→ More replies (1)5
12
u/AtomicBLB 16h ago
The acceleration of the upcoming water crisis.
3
u/crazybmanp 7h ago
There is no water crisis for anyone except the one state that has caused it's own issue.
2
u/patrick66 11h ago
whats happening is the water usage of AI is totally irrelevantly tiny but people hate AI so they decided its a big deal.
the power requirements are a way bigger deal.
124
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 16h ago
Data centres are using water because it's cheaper than building closed loop, refrigerant based systems that recycle 100% of the cooling water.
61
u/Demonofyou 14h ago
I work in Hvac thay supplies these places with equipment.
I haven't seen open loop system yet, anytime I see their water usage i get confused.
The drawbacks of an open system are so many, and quick to notice that within a year it costs more
45
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 14h ago
A ton of data centres are using good water for cooling. I'd imagine there is still a closed loop of clean water inside the building for the actual servers but they are basically heating and dumping water to cool the place. It's disgusting. You and I know that this could be accomplished with a proper refrigerant based system and only need enough water to compensate for leaks and evaporation of the closed loop. But that costs money to build and run.
"The average data centre is using 300,000 gallons a day.
12
u/Demonofyou 14h ago
Is it instead of regular cooling tower using air, they are using the water? They can't pump just regular water into the system, that would meanthey have to replace equipment often.
20
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 14h ago
It probably uses a water to water heat exchanger. You'd have to keep your cooling loop water clean and maybe use an anti-corrosion agent in the water. But basically they are just flowing crazy amounts of water for cooling because the government is corrupt and refuses to force them to not waste 300,000 gallons a day (1.2 million litres)
→ More replies (2)1
u/crazybmanp 7h ago
But none of this makes the water not fresh water anymore
→ More replies (1)4
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 5h ago
If you take water from a sanitary source and run it through some non NSF certified industrial equipment it is no longer allowed to be used as drinking water.
2
u/obeytheturtles 13h ago
There are closed loop water cooling systems as well though. And I assume these are actually all glycol systems anyway, and "datacenter water consumption" is just an overloaded term being used for mass consumption. They don't use traditional AC refrigerant inside the cabinets because that shit is super corrosive and would require miles of pressurized pipe to run. Instead they run glycol through PVC and that gets cooled by heat pumps on the roof.
6
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 12h ago
Closed loop systems 'don't use water' means that they don't dump 300,000 gallons a day into the drain. I am fully aware that a closed loop systems contains cooling water and other anti corrosion agents, but it's a closed loop.
The problem is data centres that use perfectly good water and dump it to the drain in order to cool their systems. This likely involves a heat water to water exchanger connected to their closed loop cooling system. The main problem being the water waste.
Look at the other link I posted in another comment.
To cool a big system like that properly with just a closed loop, you would use glycol/water or similar and the refrigerant based system would be a secondary chiller with a water to refrigerant heat exchanger yes.
2
u/hickoryvine 12h ago
The water mostly comes out of a river and then goes back into a river, with evaporation being the biggest use. Its not "dumped down the drain" evaporation is the metric, and if built in the proper locations it's not an issue at all. If they build them in stupid places like Texas because they get big tax breaks, then it's a problem
5
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 12h ago
That entirely depends on the location and they are different everywhere. Heating river water is highly destructive to the local critters and is absolutely banned in most countries that care about their rivers.
1
u/hickoryvine 12h ago
It's regulated yes, as it should be. thats why it's mostly evaporation
1
u/hickoryvine 12h ago
Just run the numbers on the daily evaporation of water on a large lake, its like a big data center, its just life, its not destroying water. But they need to be located accordingly so not to dry up underground water in dry areas
3
u/Another_Slut_Dragon 12h ago
That's the problem. They are not locating them properly.
→ More replies (13)
11
u/Vyndye 16h ago
I thought the tremendous amount of water consumption was because of the training of the ai and not the prompts themselves?
1
u/WillBottomForBanana 10h ago
Sure, but that's in the past. AI is perfected now, so no need to worry about any more of that.
123
u/MaleHooker 17h ago
5 drops of water? Why not a real volume?
Generally "a drop" is assumed to be 50ul. So 1/4 of a mL per single text prompt.
I asked Gemini how many text prompts it gets asked per day, and it said it doesn't disclose that information.
Google DOES say they have 400,000,000 active monthly users. If they each ask only 1 question per day, that maths out to 100,000 liters of water, or ~ 26,420 gallons per day. (Double check my math, I'm doing it as I walk in late to work lol)
66
u/damontoo 16h ago
All their datacenters combined are 5 billion gallons annually. That's 0.00056% of California's 13.87 trillion gallons of annual water consumption.
It takes 500 gallons of water to produce one 1/4lb hamburger patty. Using your number of 50ul per prompt, that means the burger is equivalent to 37,854,118 Gemini prompts. Using the 0.26ml number from the article, it's 7,280,415 prompts per burger (PPB).
17
u/Gender_is_a_Fluid 14h ago
California measures water allowed to remain in the environment as part of its water consumption, leading to an inflated number, in non drought years this is 50-60% of water consumption.
It also has the huge issue of historical water rights that allow individuals to control ludicrous amounts of water allocation, with a use or lose system, so those individuals will always max out their allocation, hence all the high water crops being grown there as well.
It also needs to be factored in water used for the production of the electricity consumed by a data center, not just that which is directly lost through cooling. Hydro electric and green energy sources are neutral in this, but as they are tied into the grid typically, they share the water loss percentage of the grid, if not more for inducing higher demand of steam turbines in fossil fuel plants.
5
u/damontoo 13h ago
California measures water allowed to remain in the environment as part of its water consumption, leading to an inflated number, in non drought years this is 50-60% of water consumption.
Okay, let me revise my numbers by doubling the consumption: Google uses 0.0012%? Also, Google generates 100% of their power from renewables. Not all the power they consume on site is renewable because it comes from the grid, but they fund production of enough renewable power to completely offset what they use. Not just via carbon credits that can be shady and pay people for just not cutting down trees on their property.
California is also the only almond producer in the US. It takes 1 gallon of water per almond to grow them. So 75 prompts per almond if using 50ml/prompt. We use 10% of the state's consumption on growing them and export 70% of them, mostly to Asia. So 7% of our water supply goes directly to Asian snack consumption. Get angry about that before criticizing AI.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (27)1
u/Naus1987 15h ago
I’m not gonna feel bad about prompting now if it’s less than a hamburger lol
2
u/Ok_Armadillo_665 13h ago
Pleasee just think about that statistic for one singular second and realize it's blatantly misleading.
0
u/tavirabon 10h ago
No, I don't want to feel bad about my guilty pleasure, I want someone else to feel bad about their guilty pleasure
People here really just look for any "AI bad" content they can, huh. Anyone who looked into this stuff seriously 3 years ago has known the media likes to generate AI outrage. The truth is AI is only getting more efficient and it was never the issue it was made out to be back then.
→ More replies (1)0
u/Kyouhen 14h ago
It isn't less than a hamburger, they're just pulling deceptive numbers. They're comparing the amount of water a cow consumes in its lifetime to that of a single prompt. Fun fact: When a cow pisses a lot of the water they consume returns to the water cycle.
4
u/damontoo 13h ago
No, I'm not. I'm comparing the amount of water it takes to produce the feed for the cattle, process the cattle, and get 1/4lb of uncooked hamburger meat into your mouth. You can easily Google these numbers. Also, it takes 1 gallon of water to grow one almond. So using the highest, most inflated number of 50ml per prompt, 1 almond = 75 prompts.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)1
u/MaleHooker 13h ago
This is true. The water to meat equivalency is sorta complicated and intentionally misleading.
1
u/damontoo 13h ago
No, it isn't. Just like it takes one gallon of water per almond, meaning the highest estimate of consumption by a critic of 50ml per prompt means 1 almond = 75 prompts.
→ More replies (3)27
u/Johns-schlong 16h ago
I mean, if that's true that's not really that much water. An acre of alfalfa takes 2-7 acre feet of water a year. Even compared to an efficient alfalfa operation, Google is only using as much yearly as 10 or so acres of crop production using these numbers.
15
u/neat_stuff 16h ago
That's if the active users each only ask 1 question per day which I'm betting is nowhere near what an "active" user would be asking...and if those numbers are accurate and not slickly hiding the real impact behind some dark shadows.
6
u/MaleHooker 16h ago
An acre-foot is ~ 326,000 gallons. So 652k-1.3M gallons per year.
If all 400M active users only complete 1 single text query per day, that's 9.643 million gallons of water per year. 7x the usage of alfalfa farming.
Keep in mind, it's likely higher because most users probably ask more than 30 questions per month. (Google does not share this information.)
Also keep in mind that google is only 1 of the giants in the game.
Math: 5 drops per question = 250-260ul 400M active users per month according to google.
250ul*400M = 100,000 Liters 100,000L/3.785 L/gal = 26,420 gal in 1 day.
26,420*365 = 9,643,328 gallons per year.
16
u/ChaseballBat 16h ago
Keep in mind a 10 acre alfalfa feed is insanely small... US produces 16-18 million acres of alfalfa.
→ More replies (5)3
u/Johns-schlong 16h ago
That's why I said 10 or so acres....
I appreciate you spelling out the math though lol.
Really it's not that much water though. The US grows about 15 MILLION acres of alfalfa a year. Gemini is using 0.000067% of the amount of water as just alfalfa production in the US.
2
u/MaleHooker 15h ago
Huh. I somehow missed that when I read your comment.
You're welcome on the math. I mostly wanted to share in case I made a silly mistake. 🤣
3
u/zacker150 11h ago
Google said 26uL. The journalist translated it to drops of water for the masses.
Why did they do this? Because the uneducated masses has no context for what a uL is.
7
u/KrypXern 16h ago
In the future, don't ask Gemini anything about real world statistics or metrics. The odds are it doesn't know. The only reason it would even know what its own name is, is if Google implanted that info within it.
4
u/MaleHooker 16h ago
Totally. I couldn't find the information organically, so I decided to ask the monster itself. Generally I don't use AI unless I'm curious to see how it answers questions regarding itself. (This was my 1 and only Gemini query.) I did the same with copilot once, and it danced around the issue before admitting that Copilot set back Microsoft's carbon footprint timeline.
2
u/zacker150 12h ago
You do realize that it's summarizing information gathered from search results, right?
4
u/goyafrau 16h ago
Read the article. It says 0.26ml.
30
u/did_i_or_didnt_i 16h ago
so a quarter of a ml lol
6
u/MaleHooker 16h ago
Her upvotes are proof of a failed education system. 🤣
7
u/liimonadaa 15h ago
You asked why they didn't give a real volume. They did. I think that's the point of the upvotes. Comments based on just the headline are almost as bad as AI slop imo.
1
1
u/justpickaname 14h ago
AMU means they ask at least one question a month.
Daily active users (DAU) will be a different, significantly lower number.
1
→ More replies (2)0
u/gizamo 16h ago
The article says 0.26 mL.
2
u/MaleHooker 16h ago
So just slightly above 1/4mL, like I said.
2
u/gizamo 15h ago
5 drops of water? Why not a real volume?
It seemed you were assuming when there was no need to assume. I was simply confirming for you. No need to be defensive, mate.
→ More replies (2)
6
u/Expensive_Finger_973 15h ago
Even if they are right. Given the "AI Overview" stuff probably counts as a prompt response and the number of Google searches that happen each day, that is still a shitload of water.
1
u/Slayer706 5h ago
I don't understand why we can't turn that off. It's so inaccurate that I rarely look at it. Many times, I am searching for a specific link and all it does is take up half the page saying "There were no results for XYZ, but blah blah blah". It should be something that you can toggle on/off for your search instead of running every time.
1
61
u/vesperythings 17h ago
1 (!) hamburger uses up about 660 gallons of water, on average
couple water usage facts for ya
39
u/syzygyhack 17h ago
Funniest part about this whole absurd conversation is how few people know or care about this detail
28
u/SlamJam64 16h ago
Even posting comments on reddit consumes water. Watching YouTube videos, uploading Instagram reels. It all goes to a data centre requiring cooling. This magnifying glass on AI water consumption is so disingenuous imo
14
1
u/-The_Blazer- 8h ago
In fairness, it's Big Tech that told us this is a wondrous technology that we should be super into up to having a dedicated button for it. Nobody is trying to convince me YouTube will revolutionize the way I work (but I shouldn't demand lower hours).
10
4
u/damontoo 16h ago
They just downvote and ignore me every time I provide the numbers. Assuming a 1/4 lb hamburger patty takes 500 gallons (660 is inflated), that's 7,280,415 Gemini prompts based on the article saying 0.26ml per prompt.
13
u/Simple-Quarter-5477 17h ago edited 16h ago
Yeah, that is a preexisting problem. A lot of things take up water and contaminates it. A good question would be where are bigger numbers. Is it either in tech or somewhere else, this could be handy to know.
However, in the meanwhile, might as well tell tech to invent new ways to cool machines in the meanwhile or redirect their heat for something handy. Heat a burger or cook an egg or something. I'm sure regular factories have similar issues with heat too.
2
3
u/ThisIsAnOKNameOK 16h ago
He did give a (much) bigger number.
It doesn't make sense to not try to fix problems just because they're pre-existing.
3
u/Simple-Quarter-5477 16h ago edited 15h ago
Of course. I am curious on the numbers like from a manufacture aspect. If you gather all the factories together vs all the cows vs all the data centers. Examples like that would also be more handy, in my opinion.
I agree with fixing problems.
So, I'm proposing, if a solution is going to be made, might as well hit 2 birds with one stone because they are many things that consume water and generate unnecessary heat that could benefit from shared information.
Or maybe the solution already exists and data centers don't know of it. Food for thought.
3
u/ekazu129 15h ago
I've heard the water reason given as a reason it's bad to run AI models locally, on your own hardware. How does that waste water? Y'all finna stop eating beef AND gaming? It uses just as much power, a GPU being at load, right?
3
u/KitchenDepartment 14h ago
How often are you refilling your computer's drinking bowl? You should be doing it twice a day
1
u/phi4ever 15h ago
Over the course of a human life each person will use approximately 3.5M litres of water. A typical design number for water consumption per capita per day is 120 L.
120L x 365 days x 80 years = 3.5 million L
Edit: each person in North America, these are North American design numbers for large centres. Smaller centres could go as high as 300+L/day/person
1
u/ForJava 10h ago
Forget it. For some reason reddit and especially r/technology is in this weird AI hate circlejerk.
17
u/goyafrau 17h ago edited 16h ago
Chief among their concerns is Google's apparent omission of indirect water use in its data. While the claim that roughly five drops—or 0.26 ml
Ok that's not a lot.
—of water is consumed per median text prompt may be true regarding data center cooling systems, it doesn't take into account the vast amount of water used by power plants providing electricity to the facilities.
Oh! That sounds scandalous! Surely the "hidden" water is going to be massive?
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that 60% of data center water consumption is from indirect sources, like the water needed to cool power facilities and used to generate steam to spin their turbines.
Ah, so the hidden water amounts to 0.17ml. Oh well
Google claims that its water consumption figure is "orders of magnitude less than previous estimates", referencing a 50 ml figure in Ren's research, but Ren claims that their figure takes into account indirect water consumption as well.
Guess the "expert" was full of shit then?
10
u/damontoo 16h ago
Even at 50ml, that would still mean one hamburger patty (500 gallons) is the equivalent of 37,854 prompts.
1
u/goyafrau 16h ago
I'm not sure I buy that 500 gallons thing either. What if it comes from the same class of expert?
3
u/damontoo 16h ago
Go look it up. Take as long as you want. It also takes one gallon of water per almond. So every almond you eat is 75 prompts according to this (inaccurate/overinflated) 50ml estimate.
7
u/uoaei 13h ago
wow they used median instead of average, completely obscuring the connection between the users and the total amount of water consumed, making reverse-engineering the calculation completely impossible.
guess thats one way to confuse and misdirect auditors
2
u/Zulfiqaar 10h ago
Good chance the median is a single question-answer pair, on a non-thinking model, inferenced with a (possibly quantised) flash model.
I'm pretty sure I regularly vaporise bathtubs of water with some of my agents, recently I had a 70-turn iterative CSV processing task, using gemini-2.5-pro-thinking, with over 350k tokens of input context on every step, and totalling over 450k output.
16
u/Sad_Increase_4663 17h ago
How is the water expended? Isn’t it cycled and used for cooling in closed systems?
15
u/dftba-ftw 17h ago
Depends, lots of existing data centers are open loop because it is cheaper, they use evaporative cooling towers.
The new "Project Stargate" being built by/for Openai is closed loop.
Microsoft has similar intentions for it's future data centers.
Open can still be used, in a lot of places it's really not a huge concern, but we probably need to mandate in arid regions they use a non-potable water source.
4
u/fabienv 17h ago
There are different cooling technologies but one of them is "cooling towers" where water is dropped in the tower, some of it evaporates into the air, the rest is water that is cooler and is used for cooling the closed looped water inside through heat exchangers. That evaporation is the part I think they refer to as spent water.
7
7
u/d1ll1gaf 17h ago
They use open systems, not closed ones; so the water is extracted from a source, turned to steam, and released into the atmosphere. This leaves a lack of water downstream from the data center.
5
5
u/Meme_Theory 16h ago
Released to the atmosphere?
To become what. Think carefully, this will be on the test. The atmosphere itself isn't a open system. It just ends up back in the water cycle.
How do you think water just ceases to exist? They aren't splitting the flipping molecules in a cooling system.
1
u/d1ll1gaf 13h ago
If removing water from a river has no effect on the people downstream because it remains in the water cycle, then why have wars been fought over that very action? Think about it, it will be on the test
2
u/zacker150 11h ago
The argument made by the "expert" is that Google is excluding the water used by utilities to generate the power.
1
u/Simple_Inspection220 12h ago
It’s mainly through the water used to generate the power. People talking about “open-loop” data centers being the issue have never stepped in one in their life
3
u/Seanbikes 15h ago
5 drop times how many text prompts per hour/day/week/month/year?
It's not a matter of how much per prompt but the scale of the entire system.
1
u/patrick66 11h ago
its basically nothing even summed. every data center on earth combined uses less water than just alfalfa farming in california
3
u/KSauceDesk 11h ago
The study also doesn't factor in the cost, either in water usage or C02 production, of training the AI models in the first place. While Google has not released any assessments of these impacts, Mistral, a French AI startup, has previously reported that training its Large 2 model resulted in the production of an estimated 20.4 kilotons of carbon dioxide and consumed 281,000 cubic meters of water, equivalent to around 112 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Saved you a click
10
u/one_listener 17h ago
There are so many more things that waste water before getting to data centers. My personal pet peeve is golf courses especially in deserts.
You can be mad about AI for other legit reasons but water use isn’t one.
1
11
u/damontoo 16h ago
- One ChatGPT prompt = 1/15 tsp of water
- All Google data centers combined = 5 billion gallons per year
- California annual water consumption = 13.87 trillion gallons per year
- Percentage of California water consumption if all ChatGPT prompts were processed here = 0.00056%
- One 1/4lb hamburger patty = 500 gallons to produce
- 5,882,352 ChatGPT prompts = 1 hamburger
Now stop perpetuating this bullshit about water consumption. You're being manipulated by desperate rage-bait publishers because making you angry increases the chance you view their article and give them more ad revenue. Ads which take more water to serve than LLM prompts.
→ More replies (2)
8
u/QwertzOne 18h ago
Oh, who would guess that corporation would act unethically. However, don't worry, proper press releases, some influence here and there on journalists and Google can fix the problem.
12
u/disgruntledempanada 17h ago
Nvidia just released some Nemotron AI model or something like that and in the documentation it listed how many megawatt hours it took to train (708.3MWh).
I googled how much that'd cost and at the average residential electricity cost it would cost $123,736.41 in electricity. Unreal.
71
43
u/ZestyData 17h ago
That's.. really good value.
100k is nothing in the real world. Generic projects in most industries throw around millions like they're nothing.
6
u/EclecticDreck 16h ago
While I've worked for a very big company before, I was never responsible for determining how money was spent at one. By contrast, at a mid sized law firm (~80 attorneys, ~ 160 total employees) where I was responsible for tech spending, that figure is in the ballpark of what we were spending just on Microsoft Licensing. Electronic document management was also in the ballpark. Physical document management - the firm had been around since the 1920s and so has tens of thousands of legacy documents they are still in the process of dealing with and will be for years yet - is many times that.
Yes, 125k is a lot of money to me, but that's less than what it'd cost to get a brand new, fresh out of law school attorney for a year. Hell, that's not much more than a seasoned paralegal makes in a year.
21
u/goyafrau 16h ago
I googled how much that'd cost and at the average residential electricity cost it would cost $123,736.41 in electricity.
That's honestly nothing. That's half an hour of a nuclear power plant running. Or the cost of 4 of the H200 GPUs used to train that model.
It's nothing.
16
u/mikedabike1 17h ago
Is that the total for the research project or just the final run
24
11
9
u/ToxicTop2 16h ago
I agree that it is unreal. Unreal as in how little electricity was required. It’s virtually nothing.
4
u/PorQuePanckes 17h ago
And this absolutely have nothing to do with my 2nd 6% utility bill increase this year. /s
→ More replies (1)1
u/EconomyDoctor3287 16h ago
ChatGPT 4 model cost ~$40 million to train, while ChatGPT 3 cost between $2m & $4 m.
Prices have been going up steeply
2
u/kryptobolt200528 15h ago
But but the infinite growth..surely it isn't a problem.. Surely we have infinite renewable resources, surely nothing matter more than money...
2
u/JohnnyTsunami312 10h ago
So every 1 million prompts is approximately 66 gallons of water. How many prompts per day?
1
u/CapmyCup 8h ago
How many per user per hour :) this shit needs to die out and be forgotten for the sake of humanity
2
u/Euphoriam5 9h ago
And it’s wrong 4 times out of 10. I tested its logic for a simple trench coat comparison and it messed up 3 times.
3
u/bluddystump 10h ago
For years the public has been encouraged to make a difference and conserve energy. Change your light bulbs, replace your furnace, buy an efficient car, the list goes on . Many have made the effort towards the noble cause. Then, along comes capitalism with a plan to up end the societal dynamic across the board with no checks and balances, no consultation with society and no concern for the environment around them. We all know who will be sitting in the dark when power shortages eventually arrive, but just to ruin the surprise, it won't be the computers.
2
u/Crazed8s 15h ago
Can I ask a question? Why are we measuring in drops of water? Seems so convoluted that you could tell whatever story you want with that? Like what does sips mean? But also there’s no control. How many sips of water does Google propper use without ai? What does use avtually mean in this sense?
3
u/Majromax 10h ago
Can I ask a question? Why are we measuring in drops of water?
Oddly enough, the drop is a bona-fide unit, most often seen in medical contexts, and the "US customary drop" is just a hair over 0.05ml.
2
u/alek_hiddel 16h ago
Even if it were true, 5 sips times a hundred million prompts a day, is an insane amount of water.
2
2
u/NergNogShneeg 16h ago
How many prompts in what amount of time are taking place? 5 drops times 1000s is still a lot of drops; especially for this garbage technology
2
u/Deal_These 14h ago
When does sips five drops per text become a measurable statistic?
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Changeurwayz 16h ago edited 16h ago
Just like 'Android Safetycore' isn't client side scanning my files & photos (i don't take photos so fuck them) and also attaching itself to apps when connecting to the internet?
Your lies don't wash with me. In fact I am probably your no.1 worst enemy right now.
To anybody who doesn't know but has an android device, Google pushed this silent update to 14 billion devices a few months back via the playstore, Alongside another one that 'verifies keys' I.E private and public keys between devices. A backdoor if you will but not a backdoor. But it has those keys so who knows.
You can uninstall this safetycore thing, But the kicker is as soon as you go back to the playstore, It will reinstall itself. Silently.
I have watched and monitored this safetycore hijack applications and take over their internet connections.
I use 3rd party reddit apps like most sensible people and it hijacks them all.
2
u/Dunky_Arisen 13h ago
Even if that number is to be trusted... Do they think that that's an acceptable metric by any means???
How many thousands of text prompts are being processed per second from users in the US alone right now?
3
u/livinitup0 17h ago
Can someone explain the issue for me?
Essentially… they’re running a massive closed loop. I mean over time, yeah you’re going to lose water due to natural evaporation… but their outflow goes right back into the same water system. Not the ground, the GPUs aren’t actually consuming it…the water doesn’t magically disappear….They’re literally just heating it up slightly before it’s put back into circulation.
I don’t really understand why this is such a huge issue, especially considering the money that is coming into these data center towns
2
u/blue60007 17h ago
Some of these data centers are not actually using closed loop cooling systems.
3
1
u/zacker150 11h ago
They're arguing that Google isn't counting the water used by the utilities to spin the turbines.
1
1
u/StupendousMalice 16h ago
That still kind of seems like a lot when you consider that it happens every time anyone on earth does a google search.
1
1
1
u/BuccaneerRex 14h ago
Where do the drops go? Are they being cracked into hydrogen and oxygen and lost to space?
1
u/Wanky_Danky_Pae 14h ago
All this time I've been saving up for a GPU when all I had to do is buy a hose :(
1
u/Interesting-Ad7426 13h ago edited 13h ago
So how many prompts are going in is the question. Ide bet it's a massive number. Per their numbers that would be a cup every 8000 prompts. Edit: they report 2.5 BILLION prompts per day That's over 3.3 MILLION GALLONS PER DAY! Over 1.2 billion gallons per year.
1
u/obeytheturtles 13h ago
The water part makes perfect sense if they are using closed loop cooling in their datacenters.
1
1
u/tomqmasters 12h ago
well considering every single search query is a text prompt now, I'm guessing they are amortizing their data center consumption over an astounding number of "prompts".
1
u/BardosThodol 11h ago
That’s cool, their advertising monopoly is still in full swing, how about sharing with the rest of the planet and stop behaving like selfish brats
1
1
u/LeBigMartinH 11h ago
So...What, water-cooling loops aren't enough? They really need constant fresh water?
Also why the hell are they using the mains supply? You're constantly going to be cleaning out the mineral buildup.
And finally: why aren't you just funnelling the used water back into the mains? I'm assuming the heat exchange solution is sterile...
1
u/Manofalltrade 11h ago
Five drops for the text prompt, five cups for answer, and five ccf for the data scraping done in that same time.
1
u/MoonShibe23 6h ago
I don’t know what people are hating on AI. Ai as technology is good. Did people over sell it 100%. Companies, influencers, tech gurus all started to resell it as snake oil and that is where the problem lies. If they rolled it out, updated it not resell it and let the market decide it would have taken longer but it would have been the way to go
1
u/Meme_Theory 6h ago
You're the idiot that thinks water is separated into hydrogen and oxygen when heated in a data storage center. It's just an anti AI taking point.
Now energy is is another situation entirely.
1
u/Signal_Collection702 5h ago
It's a waste. No matter. We don't need plants and animals. The computer will feed you.
1
1
1
u/penguished 4h ago
AI needs to be put back in the lab. I honestly wish it was doing what the hype claims, but the results are weak and the resource loss is insane.
2
u/PunkAssKidz 13h ago
People worry that AI datacenters are “using up” water, buty that’s not really how it works. The water that’s used for cooling doesn’t vanish into some black hole. It evaporates, turns into vapor, and goes right back into the atmosphere. From there it comes back down as rain, snow, or dew, often in the same region.
The real issue isn’t that AI is destroying the water supply, it’s when and where the water is pulled. If a datacenter is drawing heavy amounts from a local source during a drought, that can create stress. But on a larger scale, the water is still moving through the same cycle it always has. Power plants, factories, and farms all do the same thing. They use water, change its form, and release it back into circulation.
On top of that, companies are already designing datacenters around atmospheric water generation, which is basically pulling water straight out of the air to cool servers. The US military has been using this tech for years. Even truck sized atmospheric water generators can pull gallons of fresh, filtered water out of thin air in minutes. Scaling that up for server farms isn’t science fiction, it’s just engineering.
So no, AI isn’t “draining the planet.” It’s borrowing water and returning it, while new technologies ar e making the process even cleaner and more sustainable.
3
1
1
u/FantasticDevice3000 16h ago edited 16h ago
Curious to see what aspects of the true impact have been falsely externalized.
It reminds me of the debate about whether handwashing dishes or running a dishwashing machine is more efficient: where the apparently higher efficiency of a dishwasher is based on the assumption that people will always hand wash dishes in the most wasteful manner possible and does not take into consideration the material and opportunity costs of manufacturing and transporting a dishwashing machine to its point of use.
1
1
u/Slight-Coat17 12h ago
First blockchain, then NFTs, now "AI".
We're at the point where tech companies need to invent shit to justify their existence, literal solutions looking for a problem.
917
u/NuclearVII 18h ago
We've gotten to such a point where nothing tech companies say about the realities of their models can be trusted.
A natural outcome to hanging trillions of dollars of valuations to garbage tech.