AI’s voracious need for computing power is threatening to overwhelm energy sources, requiring the industry to change its approach to the technology, according to Arm Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.
The ENIAC drew 174 kilowatts and weighed 30 tons. ENIAC drew this 174 kilowatts to achieve a few hundred-few thousand operations per second, while an iPhone 4 can handle 2 billion operations a second and draws maybe 1.5w under heavy load.
Like, yeah, obviously, the tech is inefficient right now, it’s just getting off the ground.
The ENIAC drew 174 kilowatts and weighed 30 tons.
it’s just getting off the ground
That’s what we’re afraid of, yes.
Yeah, uh huh, efficiency isn’t really a measure of absolute power use, it’s a measure of how much you get done with the power. Nobody calls you efficient if you do nothing and use no power to do that nothing. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all together could not get anything done as companies if they all had to split an ENIAC (vastly less powerful than an older model iPhone) between them. This is a completely meaningless comparison.
Absolute power consumption does matter, but global power consumption is approximately 160,000 TWh, so the doubling means all the largest cloud providers all together are now using less than 0.05% of all the energy used across the world. And a chunk of that extra 36 TWh is going to their daily operations, not just their AI stuff.
The more context I add in to the picture, the less I’m worried about AI in particular. The overall growth model of our society is the problem, which is going to need to have political/economic solutions. Fixating on a new technology as the culprit is literally just Luddism all over again, and will have exactly as much impact in the long run.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all together could not get anything done as companies
Google’s biggest revenue stream is advertisement
Amazon’s biggest revenue stream is data hosting for national militaries and police forces.
Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream is subscriptions to software that was functionally complete 20 years ago
Meta’s biggest revenue stream is ads again
So 72-TWh of energy spent on Ads, Surveillance, Subscriptions, and Ads.
Absolute power consumption does matter, but global power consumption is approximately 160,000 TWh
If these firms were operating steel foundries or airlines at 72-TWh, I would applaud them for their efficiency. Shame they’re not producing anything of material value.
The more context I add in to the picture, the less I’m worried about AI in particular.
Its not for you to worry about. The decision to rapidly consume cheap energy and potable water is entirely beyond your control. Might as well find a silver lining in the next hurricane.
I don’t like these companies for their cooperation/friendly attitude towards nation-states either, but your comments are insipid. AWS has like 2 million businesses as customers. They have 30% marketshare in the cloud space, of course they provide cloud services to cops and militaries. They’re cheap, and one of the biggest providers, period. I can’t find any numbers showing their state contracts outweigh their business contracts.
And, sure, plenty of those business contracts are for businesses that don’t do anything useful, but what you don’t seem to understand is that telecoms is vital to industry and literally always has been. It’s not like there’s a bunch of virtuous factories over here producing tons of steel and airplanes, and a bunch of computers stealing money over there. Those factories and airlines you laud are owned by businesses, who use computers and services like AWS to organize and streamline their operations. Computers are a key part of why any industry is as productive as it is today.
AI, and I don’t so much mean LLM’s and stable diffusion here, even if they are fun and eye-catching algorithms, will also contribute to streamlining operations of those virtuous steel foundries and airlines you approve so heartily of. They’re not counterposed to each other. Researchers are already making use of ML in the sciences to speed up research. That research will be applied in real-world industry. It’s all connected.
Its not for you to worry about. The decision to rapidly consume cheap energy and potable water is entirely beyond your control. Might as well find a silver lining in the next hurricane.
By the same token, you shouldn’t worry about it either? So insipid.
AWS has like 2 million businesses as customers.
None of them hold a candle to the Wild and Stormy Cloud Computing contact issued by the NSA.
I don’t like defending Amazon, but your arguments are shockingly ignorant. Stop making things up on the spot and do a shred of research. The cost of the Wild and Stormy contract is ~half a billion, while AWS’s annual revenues are projected to top $100 billion this year.
So, less than half a percent of AWS’s annual revenues. Stop just making shit up off the cuff.
The cost of the Wild and Stormy contract is ~half a billion
It’s ten billion.
