Also don't forget how people like wasting resources by asking questions like "what's the weather today".

And water usage which will also increase as fires increase and people have trouble getting access to clean water

AI water footprint suggests that large language models are thirsty

Analysis warns that enormous AI water footprint could pose a major roadblock to sustainable evolution of large language models such as GPT-4.

TechHQ (techhq.com)

Technologies come and go, but often when a worldwide popular one vanishes, it's because it got replaced with something else.

So lets say we need LLM's to go away. What should that be? Impossible to answer, I know, but that's what it would take.

We cant even get rid of Facebook and Twitter.

BUT that being said. LLMs will be 100x more efficient at some point - like any other new technology. We are just not there yet.

A standard dryer is more like 2-5kWh for a load.. Far more than 40Wh.

@themurphy @rigatti There is one difference ... LLM's can't be more efficient there is an inherent limitation to the technology.

https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/internet-archive-storage.html

In 2021 they used 200PB and they for sure didn't make a copy of the complete internet. Now aks yourself if all this information without loosing informations can fit into a 1TB Model ?? ( Sidenote deepseek r1 is 404GB so not even 1TB ) ... local llm's usually < 16GB ...

This technology has been and will be never able to 100% replicate the original informations.

It has a certain use ( Machine Learning has been used much longer already ) but not what people want it to be (imho).

Tech hasn't improved that much in the last in the last decade. All that's happened is that more cores have been added. The single-thread speed of a CPU is stagnant.

My home PC consumes more power than my Pentium 3 consumed 25 years ago. All efficiency gains are lost to scaling for more processing power. All improvements in processing power are lost to shitty, bloated code.

We don't have the tech for AI. We're just scaling up to the electrical senand demand of a small country and pretending we have the tech for AI.

Maybe you're mixing Wh with kWh. 40Wh is not that much, but it's still a lot for a single request.

Yeah I think I have

It would only take one regulation to fix that:

Datacenters that use liquid cooling must use closed loop systems.

The reason they dont, and why they setup in the desert, is because water is incredibly cheap and energy to cool a closed loop system is expensive. So they use evaporative open loop systems.

Doesn't matter, their audience isn't intetested in accuracy they only want more things to feel outraged about

Unfortunately I wonder if it’s more expensive to set up a closed loop system that’s really expensive or to buy lawmakers that will vote against bills saying you should do so and it’s a tale old as time

Politicians are cheap

Yeah sorry forgot my /s there

that's a lot. remember to add "-noai" to your google searches.

Dot-com bubble - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

There were certainly companies that survived, because yes, the idea of websites being interactive rather than informational was huge, but everyone jumped on that bandwagon to build useless shit.

As an example, this is today’s ProductHunt

And yesterday’s was AI, and the day before that it was AI, but most of them are demonstrating little value with high valuations.

LLMs will survive, likely improve into coordinator models that request data from SLMs and connect through MCP, but the investment bubble can’t sustain

I'm just going to ignore the AI recommendations, let them burn money.

That increases your energy use though, because evaporative cooling is very energy efficient.

My guess would be that using a desktop computer to make the queries and read the results consumes more power than the LLM, at least in the case of quickly answering models.

The expensive part is training a model but usage is most likely not sold at a loss, so it can't use an unreasonable amount of energy.

Instead of this ridiculous energy argument, we should focus on the fact that AI (and other products that money is thrown at) aren't actually that useful but companies control the narrative. AI is particularly successful here with every CEO wanting in on it and people afraid it is so good it will end the world.

i don't judge you for that. honestly it matters fuck all at this point

Roughly the capacity of a laptop battery, a huge amount of energy per request.