I call bullshit. Stable Diffusion XL has energy footprint of about 0.29 watt hours per image while generating. That is roughly equivalent to running a 0.5 Watt energy LED light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes. Even for training the costs are not that extreme. Stable Diffusion needed 150,000 GPU hours. At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
My guy. That is over 15 years of daily driving and the occasional long haul trip, 1.5x the average lifespan of an EV. Consumed in under 2 years. For ONE iteration of ONE AI model. Nevermind how many thousands of people are running that “light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes” every second, with the vast majority of what it spits out not even being used for anything of value except to tell the prompt writer what they need to tweak in order to get their perfect anime waifu out of it.
Still not much on an industrial scale. For example, you can compare it to the aviation industry. There are roughly 550 transatlantic flights per day and each one consumes about 5000kg of fuel per hour for 6 to 10 hours straight. A kg of jet A1 has roughly 11 kWh. So a single transatlantic flight consumes roughly 385,000 kWh of energy. So training one model still consumes a lot less energy than a single one of the 550 transatlantic flights daily.
Not sure why people rip on commercial air travel so much.
Some “back of the napkin math here”.
A380 can hold 84,545 gallons of fuel, and has a range of 9200 miles, giving it a fuel economy of roughly 0.1MPG…
Except it can carry 853 people at a time. At 1/3rd capacity, it exceeds the average fuel economy per person per mile than a car with a single person in it in the US. (26mpg). At full capacity it’s around 85 mpg/person.
Oh good job, you found another thing we need to reduce!
You are kinda missing the point.
It’s not about how energy efficient or inefficient a single ChatGPT prompt is.
It’s that A/C is arguably more important to an individual than your ability to use AI. But while the government asking people to reduce AC usage is not new, AI is.
So we’re introducing new and unnecessary ways to draw power while asking people to tolerate higher temperatures within their homes.
My personal take is that we should be investing in nuclear power so we continue evolving as a society. But I guess we can hold back progress in the name of puttering along with other technology as the world slowly burns and people cook inside their homes
I don’t like that first article, it gives contradicting information about the energy usage per image, saying 0.29kWh/image then saying 0.29kWh/1000 images.
The article is way, waaaaaaay off. My PC generates images at a rate of about one per second (SDXL Turbo) with an Nvidia 4060 Ti which uses 160W (~12W when idle). Let’s assume I have it generate images constantly for one hour:
- 3,600 images per 0.16kWh
- About 22,500 images per hour.
In other words, generating a single image is a trivial amount of power.
How are you able to generate images so quickly? When I tried to run Stable Diffusion on my nominally comparable GPU (RX6800M, similar to 6700XT, 12GB VRAM), it took over a minute to get halfway to generating a medium sized image before my entire computer crashed.
Good point. I just tried it on my M1 macbook with 16 gb ram to get better data (but used SD 1.5 though). It took roughly 2 minutes to create an image at roughly full power load (which I would conservatively assume to be roughly identical to the 96 Watt max load of my power adapater.). So i’s 3.2 watt hours per image (with my inefficient setup)
Okay, but corpos aren’t training one model and being done with it. They’re training thousands of models, tweaking hyperparameters to find the correct fine tuning needed.
Also, putting the scale at 180,000 miles of driving makes it sound more insane to me. The earth is like 25,000 miles. If you could drive on the ocean, you could circumnavigate the globe seven times over!
Yeah but only with a fairly efficient EV in the TESLA model 3 class. With a typical gasoline car you’d be closer to only one and half circumnaviagtions with 45.000 kWh. The average american car can apparently drive 25 Miles per Gallon. A gallon of gas has roughly 33 kWh of energy in it. That’s only 34090 miles on the energy used train stable diffusion.
1 AI search uses the equivalent of 10 google searches…
Just imagine how much power you’re using up browsing the web lol.
AI is not making or breaking power grids, water sources, or any other bullshit alarmist prop you’re peddling like AI isn’t being used all over from image generation, checking your shitty grammar, or saving us all time from writing bullshit proper emails every day.
LLMs are 5 tits of awesome that I’ll be suckling on every chance I get.
You sound very angry and defensive. And you will continue to do so after evidence shows that AI has had a negative impact on the environment. On the bright side, the end of humanity will mean that people being angry and defensive won’t exist either, which will be nice.
Angry and defensive? Sounds like they are saying AI is ten times less efficient than what we’ve already built but they are fine with that because of the convenience the new tool offers them. They seem like they are attempting humor more than expressing anger to me.
They seem like they are attempting humor
Ha, yes, “bullshit alarmist prop” truly is a very funny phrase!
That does not sound angry in the slightest.
How about instead of strawmanning their emotional state, why don’t you be a better person?
The environmental impact is interesting, if an AI search being as environmentally impactful as 10 Google searches is true.
I don’t know about you, but it often takes a number of Google searches for me to find the right information, whereas with AI and Google combined I usually get the info I need in 1/2 Google searches.
That means that, based on my personal experience, AI is probably more environmentally efficient at getting me the correct info than google search alone.
Edit: gotta love downvoters that give no discussion. I’m happy to re-evaluate the above but if nobody is rebuking it then all I can assume is that downvoters are ‘AI BAD’ folks who don’t have any intelligent input.
The ai results from Google I have been getting are less helpful than two specific searches. It could be because of how we search for things and it is definitely getting messed with because of seo weighting and ai targeting those tools, so I think a better option would be to teach people how to actually use the search engines properly instead of just sitting back and letting ais pick up slack.
Try using the duckduckgo search engine. I switched recently and the search results are way better than Google now. I get what I’m looking for first try more often than not.
AI has a negative impact on the environment today (because of energy use) but it could also result in breakthroughs in battery and power generation technology that enable us to overcome our energy problems. It’s already having a huge impact with things like medicine and was a key component in recent advancements in fusion reactor design (which would be the thing that saves us from our energy problems).
It’s not all LLM and image generation.
Yep, I’m familiar with it. More from previous comments since these disingenuous memes get pedaled here regularly. People love to spout stats about AI in data centers that aren’t just used for AI without having any sense of how much CO2 is produced from really really common stuff lol. Let alone it being contingent on being run in non-renewable powered areas yet 40% of the USA’s grid is clean.
1 AI search = 10 google searches. More sauce.
How about watching TikTok? 30 minutes of video daily = 28kg of carbon a year. Calculators here: 1, 2, 3.
How about the recent ‘Oh no 1/5 a city’s water!’ The city use 770,000 gallons a day… So it uses 154,000 gallons of water for an entire piece of critical infrastructure that keeps the internet running. For the entire data center lol. And that’s for the city Carrol, Iowa with a whopping population of 10,000 people in 5 square miles lol.
A real common citation is how much carbon it takes to initially train these too. 500 tons of carbon dioxide… That’s only 33/334,000,000 Americans worth of CO2 for the year lol.
Can we stop with the AI misinformation? AI is not slurping up consumer power. All major tech companies use privately generated, non-consumer power.
Bitcoin is still causing these power grid issues. It has been since 2019.
Edit: to the brainturds downvoting without even looking into it, read it from the source
That power and HVAC in those data centers is still being used though, regardless of if it’s from the same supply consumers would use
They buy power plants and run it themselves. It improves reliability. For example, Google owns its own solar and wind farms.
People are downvoting because they want to hate AI. And hating AI is valid. There are many reasons not to like AI. Environmental and power reasons are not one of them.
But they are probably still using the power grid in cases where there is no wind or sun for their wind and solar farms, right?
Gee almost as if capitalism is the actual underlying issue.
Free market economics are going to slurp any extra watt as long as it’s capable of making a modicum of profit, unless it is just told “no”. The private sector is going to have to pay far more for their power, or else we’ll never reach NET zero emissions.
“bUt ThInK aBoUt ThE eCoNoMy!!”
- Everytime, anyone every mentions any of the many unfair advantages that businesses are getting.
There’s no free market. Free market would mean no copyright, no patents, no brand protection. With real free market (provided you have endless energy from Satan knows where to support that state of things) we’d have noname small to medium businesses coming and going, bigger corporations existing for very complex supply chains and\or some advantageous trade secrets.
That would potentially cause stagnation in some long perspective, but fix the current situation.
Are you suggesting we harvest portals to hell for unlimited free energy? Genius!
The really juicy bit is the hypocrisy of asking common people to refrain from consuming.
“Fuck you plebe” would at least have the positive of being honest.
That’s history. The ones with the means hoard anything of value while blaming the commons for their problems. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Irish Potato Famine or telling us global warming is our fault because we didn’t buy enough greenwashed shit to fix it.
The Irish famine was more of a result of imperial policy. It’s about genocidal states, not capitalism. I mean, yes, most of Ireland was owned by landlords residing elsewhere, and “protection” of their rights was one of the reasons, but there were also things quite obviously showing the intent, like widespread destruction of church records and local history.
Same with water usage. Everybody has to reduce water, not wash cars while industry and agriculture who use like ¾ of the water don’t do anything
The US massively overproduces food. We absolutely can afford to not water some of those crops.
The US massively overuses cars. You can absolutely afford to not wash your car.
lol fresh food is like all public health and wellbeing is non existent unless its been heavily industrialised to make as much money out of it as possible.
Juts search for “AI water consumption” or “data center water consumption”. I’ll agree that “we could be using this to wash our cars” is a silly argument, but water shortages affect between 2 and 3 billion people every year (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imminent-risk-global-water-crisis-warns-un-world-water-development-report-2023). We could be doing more with this water than cloud computing and AI.
Wait a sec, how do they consume water for cooling, i thought it’s in a closed loop as its purpose is only transferring heat
Sure but growing water intensive crops in the desert is also not logical.
