The massive computer clusters powering artificial intelligence consume vast quantities to answer the world’s queries, but how is Big Tech redressing the balance?

Writing a 100-word email using ChatGPT (GPT-4, latest model) consumes 1 x 500ml bottle of water It uses 140Wh of energy, enough for 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max

  • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    224·
    vor 8 Stunden

    140Wh seems off.

    It’s possible to run an LLM on a moderately-powered gaming PC (even a Steam Deck).

    Those consume power in the range of a few hundred watts and they can generate replies in a seconds, or maybe a minute or so. Power use throttles down when not actually working.

    That means a home pc could generate dozens of email-sized texts an hour using a few hundred watt-hours.

    I think that the article is missing some factor, such as how many parallel users the racks they’re discussing can support.

    • Naz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      vor 13 Minuten

      Datacenter LLM tranches are 7-8 H100s per user at full load which is around 4 kW per second.

      Multiply that by generation time and you get your energy used. Say it takes 62 seconds to write an essay (a highly conservative figure).

      That’s 68.8 Wh, so you’re right.

      Source: I’m an AI enthusiast

      • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        vor 7 Minuten

        Well that’s of the same order of magnitude as the quoted figure. I was suggesting that it sounded vastly larger than it should be.

        • Naz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          vor 3 Minuten

          They’re probably factoring in cooling costs and a bunch of other overhead, I dunno

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      vor 4 Stunden

      You are conveniently ignoring model size here…

      Which is a primary impact on power consumption.

      And any other processing and augmentation being performed. System prompts and other things that are bloating the token size …etc never mind the fact that you’re getting a response almost immediately for something that an at home GPU cluster (not casual PC) would struggle with for many minutes, this isn’t always a linear scale for power consumption.

      You are also ignoring the realities of a data center. Where the device power usage isn’t the only power consumption of the location, cooling must be taken into consideration as well. Redundant power switching also comes with a percentage loss in transmission efficiency which adds to power consumption and heat dispersion requirements.

      • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        vor 12 Minuten

        It’s true, I don’t know how large the models are that are being accessed in data centers. Although if the article’s estimate is correct, it’s sad that such excessively-demanding models are always being used for use-cases that could often be handled with much lower power usage.

    • teh7077@lemmy.todayEnglish
      171·
      vor 2 Stunden

      That’s what I always thought when reading this and other articles about the estimated power consumption of GPT-4. Run a decent 7B LLM on consumer hardware like the steam deck and you got your e-mail in a minute with the fans barely spinning up.

      Then I read that GPT-4 is supposedly a 1760B model. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4#Background) I don’t know how energy usage would scale with model size exactly, but I’d consider it plausible that we are talking orders of magnitude above the typical local LLM.

      considering that the email by the local LLM will be good enough 99% of the time, GPT may just be horribly inefficient, in order to score higher in some synthetic benchmarks?

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        vor 5 Stunden

        Computational demands scale aggressively with model size.

        And if you want a response back in a reasonable amount of time you’re burning a ton of power to do so. These models are not fast at all.

        • teh7077@lemmy.todayEnglish
          4·
          vor 4 Stunden

          Thanks for confirming my suspicion.

          So, the whole debate about “environmental impact of AI” is not about generative AI as such at all. Really comes down to people using disproportionally large models for simple tasks that could be done just as well by smaller ones, run locally. Or worse yet, asking a behemoth model like GPT-4 about something that could and should have been a simple search engine query, which I (subjectively) feel has become a trend in everyday tech usage…

  • vinnymac@lemmy.worldEnglish
    234·
    vor 9 Stunden

    Why does the article make it sound like cooling a data center results in constant water loss? Is this not a closed loop system?

    I’m imagining a giant reservoir heat sink that runs throughout a complex to pull heat out of the surrounding environment where some liquid evaporates and needs to be replenished. But first of all we have more efficient liquid coolants, and second that would be a very lazy solution.

    I wonder if they’ve considered geothermal for new data centers. You can run a geothermal loop in reverse and use the earth as a giant heat sink. It’s not water in the loop, it’s refrigerant, and it only needs to be replaced when you find the efficiency dropping, which can take decades.

    • Munkisquisher@lemmy.nzEnglish
      6·
      vor 5 Stunden

      Evaporative coolers save a ton of energy compared to refrigerator cycle closed loop systems. Like a swamp cooler, the hot liquid that comes from cooling the server is exposed to the atmosphere and enough evaporates off to cool the liquid by a decent percentage, then it’s refrigerated before going back into the servers.

      Data centre near me is using it and the fire service is used to be being called by people concerned the huge clouds of water vapor are smoke

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      vor 5 Stunden

      You can run a geothermal loop in reverse and use the earth as a giant heat sink.

      You need something to move the heat away, like water or air. Having something solid that just absorbs will reach its heat capacity pretty quick.

    • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      7·
      vor 8 Stunden

      It highly depends on every data center, but it is very likely that they do use municipal water for cooling. Mainting a Reservoir is extremely expensive for the amount of thermal mass it requires, these things kick off HEAT.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        vor 2 Stunden

        I don’t know why they aren’t using reclaimed water from treatment plants. I don’t see why potable water is necessary as long as the substitute isn’t corrosive, but I might be missing something here.

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          vor 50 Minuten

          You’d have to get the gray water in, and it’s more efficient to just continue treating it and using the municipal water system.

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      vor 9 Stunden

      Yes, the vast majority are closed loop systems and the water isn’t really used up, like a lot of these headlines imply.

      That’s not to say the energy being used can’t be put to better uses, though.

        • Hubi@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          vor 4 Stunden

          It could be used for other things like district heating at least.

        • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
          91·
          vor 8 Stunden

          The math on this doesn’t really check out. The USA uses 322 billion gallons of fresh water per day. A hyperscale datacenter uses only 5 million gallons per day.

          There are about 1,000 hyperscale datacenters in the USA, so that comes out to 5 billion gallons of water every day.

          That’s 1.5% of our annual freshwater usage, half of which is in closed loop systems and not going anywhere, and the other half being returned to the atmosphere where it will rain back down as fresh water again.

          And of course, the water cycle doesn’t really care about national borders or annual evaporation rates so much, and there is about 1 quintillion gallons of liquid fresh water available worldwide, so its not like sequestering 5 million gallons really offsets the available freshwater needed for hydration and agriculture.

  • frunch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    345·
    vor 10 Stunden

    I’m sure I’m missing out, but i have no interest in using chatbots and other LLMs etc. It floors me to see how much attention they get though, how much resources are being dumped into their development and use. Nuclear plants being reopened for the sake of AI?!!

    I also assume there’s a lot of things they’re capable of that could be huge for science, and there’s likely lots of big things happening behind closed doors that we’re yet to see in the coming years. I know it’s not all just chatbots.

    The way this article strikes me though, is that it’s pretty much just wasting resources for parlor-game level output. I don’t know if i like the idea of people giving up their ability to write a basic letter or essay, not that my opinion on the matter is gonna change anything obviously 😅

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
      175·
      vor 10 Stunden

      Think of it like this: rich people accumulate more wealth by paying fewer people to accomplish more work faster, so it’s worth burning through the worlds resources at breakneck speed to help the richies out, right?

  • a4ng3l@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    vor 11 Stunden

    The real surprise for me is how little the battery of my iphone holds. Especially compared to my ev6 or what my heat pump guzzles daily. Crazy.