AI Needs So Much Power, It’s Making Yours Worse : technology

[-] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 88 points 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Um, we solved this problem years ago, we charge industry for dirty power produced and that incentivizes the industries to install power line filters and capacitors and if they don't we use the extra they are paying to clean it up. They might not be having to pay for dirty power since its commercial not industrial but all that requires is forcing them to be in industrial zones or changing the electrical price structure, this is a solved issue

[-] Hackworth@lemmy.world 7 points 15 hours ago

All of the data centers in the US combined use 4% of total electric load.

[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 1 day ago

This map shows readings from about 770,000 home sensors, with red zones indicating areas with the most distorted power.

Bloomberg News analyzed data from about 770,000 Ting sensors from Whisker Labs, which are plugged into homes across the country, to better understand the distribution and severity of an important power-quality measure known as total harmonic distortion (THD). A lower THD is better.

Good large source of data, but possibly misleading about the severity of the problem (as well as the source being somewhat dubious as it's from a private company).

I'm from Washington and was actually surprised at how small the problem is in the Seattle area and surrounding compared to the rest of the country. We have explosive data center growth here that seems ill represented by this map.

Further, a lot of the massive data centers in Washington are actually on the Eastern side of the state, particularly in Wenatchee, which on this map is just basically entirely black. The small line of spots on the East side of the state seems more in line with Yakima/Tri-Cities/Spokane while not really including the more rural Wenatchee/Chelan area. I wish you could zoom in more on this map so I could do a proper overlay to see what areas are being missed.

Is that because it's mostly rural and not a lot of the rural residents have the money to be adding home-sensors to be testing their energy and whether its "clean?" Like seriously, that seems more like a wealthy-people service, I had never heard of Whisker Labs or Ting before now. So not only is the data going to be limited to bigger cities (so like so many maps its really just a fucking population map), but it's going to miss every area that isn't as wealthy.

So Wenatchee is sparsely populated, shows up as basically black on the map, but is also home to some of the largest bitcoin mining datacenters in the state, if not the largest. Part of the reason they set up there is the cheap electricity due to close proximity to hydroelectric power. Because the population is small, more rural, and generally poorer, there's fewer sensors showing higher THD in the area.

So anyway, a lot of words to say that this problem may be even more serious than this map shows, because there's a lot that this map isn't showing including the explosion of data centers in more rural areas with cheap electricity, where there not be as many rich folks with Ting sensors.

[-] silence7@slrpnk.net 12 points 1 day ago

Power use by the Washington/Oregon data center cluster was almost entirely covered by a local surplus of hydropower until a couple years ago. That might be why it looks different from elsewhere.

[-] SeaJ@lemm.ee 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I was going to point out that Seattle's electricity usage is small on the map but the datacenters are going to Wenatchee and Quincy. The state has plans to remove dams and switch more to wind but the massive investment in datacenters for AI is going to derail that.

[+] Sprocketfree@sh.itjust.works -16 points 17 hours ago

This added zero to the discourse other then making you look like a complete idiot. Are we in the shitpost community here?

[-] swampdownloader@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 16 hours ago

Did you reply to the right thread mate

[+] ReCursing@lemmings.world -35 points 1 day ago

Once again, not the faulty of the technology. Don't blame your shitty infrastructure on ai

[-] silence7@slrpnk.net 34 points 1 day ago

If you're doing a massive load increase, build out emissions-free generation to match. Some mix of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and geothermal would do fine. Otherwise, don't do the big load increase.

[-] swampdownloader@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 16 hours ago

I agree with your idea but granting a utility the right to determine to whom they distribute power is not an easy task nor should it be taken lightly. In order to do that, you have to have regulators make the rule and then utilities obey. Utilities can’t (and shouldn’t) just deny a customer service because they don’t agree with what the customer is going to do with that power. Sanctioned natural monopolies come with regulations in most places. And in order to enforce rules, the wheels of regulatory bodies must churn and we know how slow that can be.

In theory, if you got an entity to bring x megawatts of renewable capacity online as a requirement of a new electric service load, you could tie production to data center use. Then if you ensured that the customer had controllable load to match the output of the corresponding renewable generation you could have a minimal impact growth. But that’s an absurdly complicated solution that would likely take a decade to develop and implement even if you had the political will.

I do not know what the best solution is other than to make more renewable electricity and store it, and maybe nuclear (if it didn’t take 10 years to build a plant).

[-] Grimy@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

As much as I think this is a great solution and should be written into law, the anti-ai crowd only asks it from one industry and it's a clear sign of bias.

Not to mention that the big companies are literally doing it, either building new nuclear plants or restarting old ones. They aren't the one holding green energy back, the oil cartel and their corrupt politicians are.

[-] Infynis@midwest.social 7 points 1 day ago

One industry? People are so mad at AI because it's just another industry, a new one with massive environmental impact, and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists. It's the absolute worst face of the tech sector, and totally deserving of all the hate it receives.

[-] Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 4 points 21 hours ago

and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists

This shows you think all AI are LLMs or generative art. Those are only the most visible faces of the tech, and you're showing your name ignorance of the field.

[-] Infynis@midwest.social -1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

If you want to talk about machine learning in general, that's a different conversation. Like it or not, colloquially, AI is LLMs and chatbots

[-] Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 0 points 7 hours ago

Sorry, but you're just wrong. Every industry is not currently spinning up their own LLM. They ARE looking to incorporate AI into their work flows, causing huge demand for data centers.

This is Bloomberg, a business centered media site. They're not dealing with what the plebs colloquially mean.

[-] Fades@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

How exactly is the rest of AI a different conversation???? Were talking about the power requirements of running AI at scale and somehow you think it’s not only correct but implied that this convo should just be about colloquial parts AI and anything else is a totally different topic in regards to power consumption?

totally deserving of the hate it gets

Yeah so breakthroughs in chemistry and other sciences for example, deserving of hate eh?

Nothing good comes from AI… when all you know about AI is colloquial lmao

[-] Infynis@midwest.social 2 points 19 hours ago

Here's an article from the IEEE about the issues with AI energy consumption. This article specifies that they're discussing the requirements of LLMs and new generative AI. The article we're commenting under wasn't that cut and dry about it, but a basic understanding of the context of the world should be all a reasonable person needs to figure that out

[-] Grimy@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

basically no real use

"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.”

Also, will you get mad at the next new industry? I highly doubt it.

[-] Infynis@midwest.social 8 points 22 hours ago

If the next new industry is an energy hungry propaganda machine, yes I will

[-] taladar@sh.itjust.works -3 points 22 hours ago

People advocating for the 99 shitty technologies that die always seem to like to quote the people talking about the one technology that survived from past generations as if that somehow made criticism of the 99 others a bad call.

[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world 3 points 20 hours ago

Ai is going nowhere mate, you're on the wrong side of this one. It's too broadly useful already and has too much potential in the future

[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world -5 points 20 hours ago

Oh fuck off with "stealing from artists" - that just proves you know nothing about the subject and and should be completely ignored.

[-] silence7@slrpnk.net 1 points 21 hours ago

The environmental movement asked the same thing for subsidized hydrogen production

[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world 7 points 1 day ago

More renewable energy is good, that much I will agree with

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Renewables won't exactly help harmonics, on the contrary, especially solar. This is an issue of insufficient mitigation mechanisms, probably on the supply side as computer PSUs are generally quite well-behaved loads: Drawing lots of electricity, on its own, does not harmonic distortion make.

If it is on the consumer side utilities need to start charging commercial customers for distortions just like they're charging for blind current. If it's on the supply side, utilities need to require large solar installations to have proper filters, and have their own mechanisms to mop up the rest. Generally the US should start having a not shoddy electricity grid, brown- and blackouts and you call yourself a developed country? We don't even have a (colloquial) word for brownout over here!

That all said, yeah the AI hype gotta stop. That doesn't mean that you should blame them for everything.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

Generally the US should start having a not shoddy electricity grid, brown- and blackouts and you call yourself a developed country?

I just want to say I've never had a brownout in my part of the US, and the only blackouts we've had are due to weather or a car hitting a pole or something. And our electricity is inexpensive.

I've mostly heard of these issues in California and Texas, because of unique issues with their power utilities.

And yeah, I think both the AI hype and disdain are stupid. It's a tool that does less than proponents claim and more than detractors claim. Don't blame all our problems on it, and don't suggest it'll solve all our problems.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 3 points 23 hours ago

I'll go the opposite way. The fact that there are serious plans to spin up nuclear reactors to run nothing but AI datacenters is ridiculous.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 16 hours ago

Is that actually being suggested? My understanding is that only a portion of the electricity production will go to data centers in most cases, with much of the rest going to local communities. Microsoft is buying all of 3 mile island's power, but that's going to data centers, which do a lot more than AI.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 4 points 20 hours ago

Nuclear reactors take a decade+ to spin up, so by the time these reactors are online the AI bubble will have long since popped...

[-] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 2 points 19 hours ago

as someone who uses ai daily i’m not sure what could replace it, ecosia search results are sometimes ok (i haven’t used google in years) but a lot of the time the questions i ask have bot style “articles” with the exact same page layout anyway, so no use there or i don’t get my question answered

When I want real world opinions on a product or thing i used to pop site:reddit.com on the end but now i use https://thegigabrain.com/ as it does a far better job with searching and summarising the posts into useful information

then i use usually a 7b or 14b local llm using gpt4all, lately i use reasoner which has a built in javascript sandbox

https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/gpt4all-scaling-test-time-compute

basically you can watch ai fix any errors that it generates in real time and produce better coding results which helps me code and i have a home battery powered by solar so no grid usage there

finally i use https://chat.mistral.ai/chat when generating random ai images which i think are funny or interesting or i’m not at my pc

i’m probably 75% ecosia 25% ai but that 25% gets me answers and is invaluable, not to mention the answers are getting better every week as opposed to web searches which appear to be getting worse

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches. Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you're defending. AI is making web searches less useful by flooding the internet with AI-generated garbage. Also? Unless I can cite the results of a search it's useless to me. Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?

[-] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches

Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we're rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?

Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending

I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won't as it'll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers... so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:

Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me

Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-lemmy-ml-Q_mHphL3T.i2dA16PDKtAw

When using social it's summarising reddit, when using Academic it uses academic sources:

You can also use AI for language learning:

https://morpheem.org/

To quote Mistral 7b:

A bubble in finance is when the price of an asset or security rises far above its true value due to speculation and hype, fueled by investors buying with the expectation of selling at a higher price. Prices rise based on market sentiment rather than fundamental value, creating a self-reinforcing cycle until enough investors realize the bubble's unsustainability and sell, leading to a sharp decline in price and potential losses for those who bought during the bubble phase.

I'm certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I'm not sure where the dot com style bubble is?

In crypto it's easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you're talking about but a hype one?

Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain't going anywhere

https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending

Not only that but from all the examples I've given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):

The Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbXZoMocpM8

Songs: AI Took My Job https://suno.com/song/14572e0f-a446-4625-90ff-3676a790a886

It's hard to say it's a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there

Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?

About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I'm not sure, I just search a bit more, there's no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 0 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?

They're investing into huge, energy intensive compute resources that aren't going to pay off for at least a decade, and meanwhile investors are going to want returns on those investments ASAP. They need to fill warehouses with compute and power them with nuclear reactors, but there's no profitability model. That means stranded assets, especially if investment dries up and they can't pay or if demand shifts away from their models. This is set up to be a massive crash.

NVIDIA will probably be fine though.

Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:

Yeah, and what they'll do is invent sources from thin air or draw made up conclusions from real sources. They're just LLMs, no matter how much data you feed them and how much the results are tinkered with they only regurgitate a statistically likely answer. Perplexity is a bullshit machine. It's fine if you don't really care about the answer and are just kind of curious, but no serious researcher should ever rely on a chatbot.

[-] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

This is set up to be a massive crash.

For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?

Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air

The sources are right there next to it? You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up? what are you, an AI?

or draw made up conclusions from real sources

This feels like I'm having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.

Yeah, it's always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don't even get me started on social media.

[-] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 points 22 hours ago

Honestly I'd take the utilitarian approach to that, if it's a net good, then I'm probably for it - but that's a big if.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 22 hours ago

Real big if. There's reason to believe that current models aren't going to get much better. They've eaten all the training data they possibly can. Improving with further training takes exponentially more power to get a small improvement. We're talking about new nuclear reactors because that's what they need to get anywhere, but it's still not going to improve by much.

The field needs a new model that can get better results on less data and less training. Then we wouldn't need those nukes. It doesn't appear we'll get much better any other way.

[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world 1 points 20 hours ago

New architechtures are in development and many have already been released. Learn something about the subject before spewing shite

[-] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 17 hours ago

You sound like the people who assured me that I needed to understand NFTs or I'd get left behind. Actually, were you one of them?

[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world 1 points 5 hours ago

No because nfts were obviously stupid if you had half an understanding of the technology, whereas ai is only stupid if you don't understand the technology

[-] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 2 hours ago

I've followed AI for decades before its current hype cycle. Enough to understand how important the field is to the history of computing. Everything from optimizing compilers to shared virtual memory.

I also understand that the current hype cycle is exactly that, and people who are deep in the research don't like it anymore than I do. If it somehow does result in AGI, I hope it grows up to resent its parents.

[-] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 2 points 10 hours ago

No he's right, AI news is out of date nearly as quickly as it's written, I've never seen a faster moving piece of tech.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 7 hours ago

I don't doubt that's true, but I was more commenting on the cult-like tone of the responses.

[-] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

True, your original post made me think of:

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - November 13, 2024 https://archive.md/kYe5n

But we just had Deepseek v3 come out

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hn8rcx/deepseek_has_released_exclusive_footage_of_their/

It's doing incredibly well and was incredibly cheap to produce

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hmxjbn/deepseek_is_better_than_4o_on_most_benchmarks_at/

China is catching up extremely quickly to the west

By 2026 we might have to recheck all those doomsday "AI is going to use all the energy in the world" articles

edit: I just realised I'm commenting on one of those "AI is going to use all the energy in the world" articles :|

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 16 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

If you're not willing to engage in good faith, intelligent, discussion, please consider leaving the platform and making it a better place for the rest of us.

"I couldn't be assed to read the article nor understand the problem, but I will assert my God given right to an ignorant opinion on it regardless"

Isn't what this platform needs.

[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world -5 points 20 hours ago

Everything gets disingenuously blamed on ai and it's all bullshit that's either not a problem or is a completely different problem. I don't need to read this article to know that this problem I have read about elsewhere is not actually a problem with ai. Sorry to not reinforce your preconceived notions, you luddites are about as intractable as trump supporters and very nearly as dumb. THAT is not what this platform needs.

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