Saw this going around again with some really stupid strawmanning so thought I'd dig up this string instead since it already has a bunch of good sources. Let's take a look at even more while we're at it!
AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc on Global Power Systems - June 21, 2024
By one official estimate, Sweden could see power demand from data centers roughly double over the course of this decade — and then double again by 2040. In the UK, AI is expected to suck up 500% more energy over the next decade. And in the US, data centers are projected to use 8% of total power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, according to Goldman Sachs, which described it as “the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation.”
How the surging demand for energy and rise of AI is straining the power grid in the U.S. - July 19, 2024
But it's already taxing the U.S.' aging power grid, and the demands of AI are just beginning to grow. A ChatGPT query, for example, uses nearly 10 times the electricity of a typical internet search.
How much more water and power does AI computing demand? Tech firms don’t want you to know - August 26, 2024
Three years ago, Google vowed to reach net-zero — where its emissions of greenhouse gases would be equal to what it removed — by 2030.
The company isn’t making progress toward that goal. In 2023, its total carbon emissions increased by 13%, the company disclosed in a July report. Since 2019, its emissions are up 48%.
Using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 3 bottles of water — AI data centers also raise power and water bills for nearby residents - September 19, 2024
Data centers are shown to be heavy consumers of water and electricity, which also drives up the power and water bills of residents in the towns where these data centers are being built. For example, Meta needed to use 22 million liters of water to train its LLaMA-3 model — about how much water is needed to grow 4,439 pounds of rice, or, as researchers noted, "about what 164 Americans consume in a year."
Study: AI and data centers could drive cost of energy up by 70% over 10 years - November 21, 2024
According to reports, America is facing an energy crisis, with demand for energy soaring due to the proliferation of AI and hyperscale data centers – which can use as much energy as almost 40,000 homes – the boom in advanced manufacturing, and the movement toward electrification.
So just to reiterate: There is no "clear implication" in the OP that Google didn't already suck before forcing their genAI on all searches. Tumblr users criticizing genAI aren't doing so "based on vibes" and aren't just now discovering the existence of water cooling or data centers.
The previous iteration of search simpy did not use as much water and power as genAI content generators do. That's not to say that it was great before, but let's stop pretending that anyone criticizing genAI is a complete luddite.
Because again: there could be good uses for all that power and water, but having Advanced Autocomplete guesstimate your search results (with varying accuracy) just isn't worth it.
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