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akash's avatar

I wish more people were truth-seeking while opining on this topic. Anyway, I appreciate this post!

Austin Morrissey's avatar

Epistemic humility is in 😎

Oscar Delaney's avatar

According to Altman, your energy use and water use numbers were too high by a factor of about 10x and 50x for a ChatGPT query. https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

Although maybe Altman has some creative accounting to make the numbers come out extra low, and maybe you were deliberately being conservative to be on the safe side, so that might explain much of the difference.

Andy Masley's avatar

Yup I was deliberately being conservative!

Mikael Lind's avatar

Wired just released an article today called AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand—and It’s Only Getting Worse, and they write: "AI’s energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. That demand from AI, the research states, could double by the end of this year, comprising nearly half of all total data-center electricity consumption worldwide, excluding the electricity used for bitcoin mining." I'm wondering how much this is due to language models. I'm guessing illustration and especially video creations consume much more.

Matt Ball's avatar

Andy, Andy, Andy. This is NOT how the internet works. You have to DOUBLE DOWN on anything and everything you say!

What's next - reconsidering if the Earth really ISN'T flat?

</s> ;-)

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Comment deleted
May 17, 2025
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Andy Masley's avatar

Good point on the conversation building up energy use! Will look into that and add it.

I don’t think I’m making any kind of “What’s the point of anything” argument in the posts. I say over and over this is motivated by a worry the climate movement’s getting distracted. I’m not at all a nihilist on the environment, I want us to win. If you can point to anything I’m saying that implies otherwise I’d appreciate it.

The “The Courage to be Disliked” was just an off-handed joke about some very negative reactions to the piece. I don’t agree that it reflected a negative reaction to serious disagreement.