alt Hacker NewsMy first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"
And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.
Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.
You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
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I'm not sure I understand where the issue is here - something can use a small amount of energy per use but a large amount in aggregate because of lots of use.
What about it is whitewashing? This seems like it would be a great resource if you wanted to contextualize the argument you're gesturing at.
War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery,
Facts are Whitewashing.
Much like when people discuss whether these companies are profitable: training costs don't count.
LLMs don't use a lot of electricity per user. Why should the fact that the energy usage happens in data centers instead of each user's house be an important moral factor?
You have set up a false conflict. The data centers are "huge" and they also consume about the same power as 1 airplane. These things are both true.
It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.
> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?
A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.
If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:
- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution
- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
Hannah Ritchie is a quite well reputed writer and data scientist squarely in the climate field. She's written two books on climate and I found the one I read (Not The End of the World) was quite good and data-driven.
https://hannahritchie.com/
You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is biased towards LLM than that.