alt Hacker NewsVery fun idea. I do think this puts the water argument into a bit more perspective. Your average person should drink ~3L of water per day, or about 22mL per 11 minute average-length chat that Quili quotes on their site. It's hard to pin down exactly how much water AI uses, but something on the order of 5mL per interaction seems reasonable [1]. So the people doing this are using about 4x more water than an AI model would. Of course, it does matter what happens to that water, whether it turns into water vapor or urine and how much of that water re-enters the water cycle, but it's an interesting comparison.
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Give them Stillsuits from Dune and we have solved everything.
My urologist told me off for drinking 3L of water per day, said I should be aiming for 3 pints, maybe 4 at the most.
My understanding is that water used in data centers is recirculated, much like all water is. What's the alternative? Does the data center somehow destroy water through a chemical reaction such that is ceases to be water? Or pollutes and releases the water and makes it unusable and incapable of evaporating and being recirculated? Am I missing something?
From the source:
> The water’s going back into the water cycle anyway, so is water usage a big deal? Yes. The phrase to research here is “freshwater scarcity” — cleaning water takes time and energy, the water cycle doesn’t reliably distribute water evenly, water usage can pull water out faster than the cycle can return it, and so on.
If this is true, then it's an engineering problem. Cleaning water takes time and energy, we should improve that and the energy required is already priced. There's more demand for infrastructure and it should be built out.