This anguished rant appeared the other day.
AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy
The computing power for AI models requires immense – and increasing – amounts of natural resources. Legislation is required to prevent environmental crisis
Sun 3 Mar 2024 02.55 AEDT Last modified on Sun 3 Mar 2024 08.34 AEDT
One of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the “paperless” office and “frictionless” transactions? And of course, while our personal electronic devices do use some electricity, compared with the washing machine or the dishwasher, it’s trivial.
Belief in this comforting story, however, might not survive an encounter with Kate Crawford’s seminal book, Atlas of AI, or the striking Anatomy of an AI System graphic she composed with Vladan Joler. And it certainly wouldn’t survive a visit to a datacentre – one of those enormous metallic sheds housing tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers humming away, consuming massive amounts of electricity and needing lots of water for their cooling systems.
On the energy front, consider Ireland, a small country with an awful lot of datacentres. Its Central Statistics Office reports that in 2022 those sheds consumed more electricity (18%) than all the rural dwellings in the country, and as much as all Ireland’s urban dwellings. And as far as water consumption is concerned, a study by Imperial College London in 2021 estimated that one medium-sized datacentre used as much water as three average-sized hospitals. Which is a useful reminder that while these industrial sheds are the material embodiment of the metaphor of “cloud computing”, there is nothing misty or fleecy about them. And if you were ever tempted to see for yourself, forget it: it’d be easier to get into Fort Knox.
OpenAI’s boss warned the next wave of AI will consume vastly more power than expected. Energy systems will struggle to cope
There are now between 9,000 and 11,000 of these datacentres in the world. Many of them are beginning to look a bit dated, because they’re old style server-farms with thousands or millions of cheap PCs storing all the data – photographs, documents, videos, audio recordings, etc – that a smartphone-enabled world generates in such casual abundance.
But that’s about to change, because the industrial feeding frenzy around AI (AKA machine learning) means that the materiality of the computing “cloud” is going to become harder to ignore. How come? Well, machine learning requires a different kind of computer processor – graphics processing units (GPUs) – which are considerably more complex (and expensive) than conventional processors. More importantly, they also run hotter, and need significantly more energy.
On the cooling front, Kate Crawford notes in an article published in Nature last week that a giant datacentre cluster serving OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4, is based in the state of Iowa. “A lawsuit by local residents,” writes Crawford, “revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use – increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies’ environmental reports.”
Within the tech industry, it has been widely known that AI faces an energy crisis, but it was only at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that one of its leaders finally came clean about it. OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.
What kind of “breakthrough”? Why, nuclear fusion, of course. In which, coincidentally, Mr Altman has a stake, having invested in Helion Energy way back in 2021. Smart lad, that Altman; never misses a trick.
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I am not sure I am as pessimistic as the writer above but it is true to say he has a very strong point that will need to be addressed.
I need to say that the “how” is well above my pay-grade but I can say that similar concerns that have appeared over the years – think ‘global starvation’ etc. – seem to have somehow ebbed away and I have faith this one will too!
I suspect unlimited data-centre growth will turn out to be a self-limiting phenomenon! Time will tell.
What do you think?
David.
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