alt Hacker NewsAI uses less water than the public thinks
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This sounds like being concerned about the adverse health effects of a steak due to sugar.
I really love how he ends his bio:
“His 68-year-old hardware with 50,000-year-old architecture is enjoying and struggling with the promise, threats, and turbulence of the AI revolution.”
This article conflates agricultural use, which is not treated and is drawn directly from groundwater, rainfall, and rivers, with urban use, which is treated and much more expensive. I find it baffling that the person who put their name on this article would fail to make this critical distinction, given their credentials.
> Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geography at the University of California – Davis. He is also a Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
And the main evidence he presents is a summary of a prompt he gave to LLM's? Be serious, please. This is challenging my suspension of disbelief a bit.
As a more complete title...
AI uses less water than the public thinks and more water than Anthropic or OpenAI report.
Both sides have dishonest reporting
what an incredible slop political cartoon around the first paragraph
Fantastic news!
Very insightful bullet points, ordered lists and grok tables! Articles like this are certainly a net benefit to society
This whole meme never made sense. Data centres are cooled with AC. Where the fuck is water supposed to be going?
So tired of these articles. Yes, it’s possible for them to use very little water. But naive comparisons to non-potable agricultural or other irrigation use or comparisons that don’t take into account growth rates of specific uses or local bottlenecks are useless.
Cool. Except. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas.
Agriculture feeds people, including people outside of California (California being a huge agricultural exporter to all the other states: find me a grocery store that doesn’t have California agricultural products on the shelves and I’ll Venmo you $5).
Cities are…people. Literally the most important use of water.
So far, AI seems to just put people out of work and enrich a small group of oligarchs who own the technology.
If tech companies want people to change their view away from my above statements above maybe they should spend less time moving to the far right and being hostile to regular people.
We already see that the public perceptions of AI is collapsing: https://www.highereddive.com/news/gen-z-ai-gallup-poll-negat...
Peter Thiel is out there building a military AI surveillance state and basically all the tech billionaires are turning MAGA and anti-democracy.
I don’t really care how much water AI uses, I’m not going to sit back and make excuses for billionaire assholes and their revenue toys. I don’t benefit from AI being embraced by society outside of stuff like cancer research (which was happening before LLMs took over the mainstream).
In reality, the most likely outcome is that I’ll be harmed by AI. I will be replaced by software and the billionaires who replaced me won’t exactly create a utopia, will they?
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Does it use more than zero? Then I hate it. Maybe we should try to calculate how much water online advertisements take.
The author uses a measurement I'm not familiar with so I used AI to translate it.
>Using the broader initial AI water use estimate of 32,000 acre-ft/year to 290,000 acre-ft/year
Note : 1 acre-foot is approximately equal to 325,851 gallons.
AI : That estimate converts to approximately 10.4 billion to 94.5 billion gallons per year.
Ya 10 billion gallons of water (low estimate) is totally nothing. Thx for this informative blog post.
28.6 million gallons per day.
one environmental concern down, hundreds to go! keep up guys!
Whether it is or isn't happens to be beside the point. It's water being removed from the system en masse for a non-essential function, i.e. other than sustaining life, while driving up the cost of other utilities.
If we're trying to deny the usage "tier," I'd argue we're being intentionally obtuse at worst and foolish at best.
My conspiracy theory is the whole AI datacenter water consumption outrage is a psyop by state actors to worsen public sentiment around AI, so China and others can catch up. Obviously we should lessen the environmental impact of our technology, while considering it's relative impact vs benefit, especially compared to other technology, in this case in particular to other datacenter usage.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
Greater than $0 in cost of living increases for people living near these things is too much.
I've always found it quite sad and cringeworthy when people talk about AI's water usage. The first thought that comes to my head is whether its even worth trying to talk the person out of their delusion, or just accept that they are lost and can't be helped.