alt Hacker NewsYeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Something that I've started looking into and I think could become an interesting metric is resource usage comparison of # of average-request prompts against minutes of audio/video streaming. Then we can start to say things like "you know, watching a 10-minute YouTube video uses roughly the same amount of resources as 60 prompts" and hopefully have a more down-to-earth conversation surrounding our ecological impact and how we assign value.