The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. | How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?
The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. | How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?
How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?
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de Vries, who now works for the Netherlands’ central bank, estimated that if Google were to integrate generative A.I. into every search, its electricity use would rise to something like twenty-nine billion kilowatt-hours per year. This is more than is consumed by many countries, including Kenya, Guatemala, and Croatia.
Why on earth would they do that? Just cache the common questions.
It’s been estimated that ChatGPT is responding to something like two hundred million requests per day, and, in so doing, is consuming more than half a million kilowatt-hours of electricity. (For comparison’s sake, the average U.S. household consumes twenty-nine kilowatt-hours a day.)
Ok, so the actual real world estimate is somewhere on the order of a million kilowatt-hours, for the entire globe. Even if we assume that's just US, there are 125M households, so that's 4 watt-hours per household per day. A LED lightbulb consumes 8 watts. Turn one of those off for a half-hour and you've balanced out one household's worth of ChatGPT energy use.
This feels very much in the "turn off your lights to do you part for climate change" distraction from industry and air travel. They've mixed and matched units in their comparisons to make it seem like this is a massive amount of electricity, but it's basically irrelevant. Even the big AI-every-search number only works out to 0.6 kwh/day (again, if all search was only done by Americans), which isn't great, but is still on the order of don't spend hours watching a big screen TV or playing on a gaming computer, and compares to the 29 kwh already spent.
Math, because this result is so irrelevant it feels like I've done something wrong:
- 500,000 kwh/day / 125,000,000 US households = 0.004 kwh/household/day
- 29,000,000,000 kwh/yr / 365 days/yr / 125,000,000 households = 0.6 kwh/household/day, compared to 29 kwh base
Just cache the common questions.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
You mean: two hard things - cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors
Reminds me of the two hard things in distributed systems:
- 2: Exactly-once delivery
- 1: Guaranteed order
- 2: Exactly-once delivery
It's a good thing that Google has a massive pre-existing business about caching and updating search responses then. The naming things side of their business could probably use some more work though.
I'm glad someone was on the same track as me. I posted numbers as well if you want to take a peak at mine below.
Just cache the common questions.
AI models work in a feedback loop. The fact that you're asking the question becomes part of the response next time. They could cache it, but the model is worse off for it.
Also, they are Google/Microsoft/OpenAI. They will do it because they can and nobody is stopping them.
This is AI for search, not AI as a chatbot. And in the search context many requests are functionally similar and can have the same response. You can extract a theme to create contextual breadcrumbs that will be effectively the same as other people doing similar things. People looking for Thai food in Los Angeles will generally follow similar patterns and need similar responses, even if it comes in the form of several successive searches framed as sentences with different word ordering and choices.
And none of this is updating the model (at least not in a real-time sense that would require re-running a cached search), it's all short-term context fed in as additional inputs.