Why mix units? Match 1.3billion for water. Why not say match 1.95 billion for power, instead of 3x650 million.
Maybe they did the text with an AI.
Don’t forget to shower less and only use paper straws
A note: “AI” doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s not using evaporative cooling out of necessity. It’s just the absolute cheapest, fastest way to cool en masse. Just like slamming a gas generator down on a site, or housing servers in tents:
They could take an extra second to build something efficient, and they did not.
Or, they could just not use waste so many GPUs on “intelligence scaling” that does not scale. Like most non-US firms do, just fine. But FOMO.
In other words, non technical decision makers, who don’t understand how transformers models even work, dictated this would happen. It’s not even a sane business planning decision, and they’re too rich to face any consequences now.
Why don’t they make this the first problem AI should solve?
Once again: stop letting them use potable fucking drinking water it makes no sense
Fuck this.
I remember in the 00s imagining what AI might be like.
I did not imagine soulless chat bot that was going to steal all the water.
Because it’s not real ai. It’s just marketing.
It makes sense with the context in the article, but “triples that of 650 million” is a very strange way to say “almost 2 billion”.
Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well
What if we as a society decided to just not?
Makes no sense. (I know that there are countries without proper regulation, but) around here they would simply not be allowed to use that much water.
They would need to build them in a way to not use that much water for cooling, and this would be controlled by officials during planning,build and operation.
Many states with proper regulation would never allow this for literally any other industry without extensive permitting, and rightfully forcing the company to build its own treatment plants to support the increased load on existing systems
But somehow, nope. Fuck all that I guess.
Yeah the billionaires just bribe the state government. Easy.
Therefore there are (or: need to be) laws and courts who can check even the actions of governments.
The courts and the law makers are owned by the same billionaires.
… in countries which I call “unregulated”
Tech bros in general always seem to do it anyway and deal with complaints afterwards, preferably after lobbying or sueing to remove regulations.
do it anyway
Not possible here, cowboy.
It’s stupid how much they are pouring into hardware that might be vastly obsolete. By the time AI becomes truly intelligent, there may be specialized chips that are efficient at running models that blow GPUs out of the water.
Look at how it happened to bitcoin mining. Nobody serious is using a GPU to mine when ASIC is available.
However, I don’t see all this hardware hitting the second hand market once a better solution is found. I’m sure they will keep trying to make compute hard to get for the average person so they can rent out their servers for a crazy price.
Its worse. The expected life span of the compute server hardware is 2 years. The processors cannot be re-purposed and the memory needs to be re-packaged in a non-novel way. They will most likely send it too ewaste processing to get the precious and rare earth metals back.
Drinking needs or net water usage?