I mean even disregarding the environmental cost, it’s rapidly accelerating our decline from the “Information Age” where knowledge about anything can be found in an instant to the “Disinformation Age” in which it’s impossible to tell what is fact from fiction because information is overflowing everywhere but most of it is bullshit.
Ended up ruining my soup the other week because I got the recipe from someone using AI. Can't even follow 2023+ video recipes anymore because the creator might have used AI to plan a video with an inedible recipe.
Did you know you can get a real dirt cheap handheld console like the R36S (for $40) that can run most PS1 games, as well as many PS2 and N64 games, and anything below that... Even a few GameCube games.
For twice the price you can get more advanced chinese made android based portable handheld emulator consoles that can run all PS2 games and most PS3 games... For even more money you can get similar devices that are SteamOS compatible.... Meaning you can get a low end SteamDeck for half the price of the real thing.
So one of those options can probably get you your preferred Final Fantasy game in a pocket sized portable console.
You may think this knowledge is a blessing, but it's a curse. Spoiled for choice and it ultimately comes down to money and whether you actually want more screen time.
I'm honestly terrified of the person I'd be if I had a console with me at all times. No one needs that, least of all me. But I genuinely am very curious about these handhelds and I'm currently reading through handhelds.wiki to see how things have developed over the years. It feels quite a bit like rediscovering video games. It's gonna be a minute until I can start to hold a cohesive opinion on 'em
I fucked up a concrete mix last month because I was in a hurry and trusted the Google ai summary instead of my own intuition. Lesson learned, hopefully
Most of those numbers shouldn't be hard to validate, but a reliable source for the 16oz number (how much a single AI prompt uses) would be appreciated. A search turns up a lot of sites I've never heard of (or are unreliable), so I don't know how reliable they are.
a) 16oz is 0.5 liters. To evaporate 0.5 litres from 20c to 101c you need 361 Wh of energy. An nvidia B300, top out at 1400W. In order for a single prompt to use 361Wh on a B300, the prompt needs to take 15 minutes to run. Thats clearly not happening.
b) Even when water is used to cool GPUs, it isn't destroyed. Its heated, and then cooled down again. The water just moves heat around the system, it doesnt get destroyed
If we are playing the guessing game, almost all of them. Its not that expensive to build and run a closed loop water system. You cant just run plain tap water through cooling loops, it needs to be distilled or treated, or youll grow mold inside the loops and get clogs.
Provide your source for these data centres using open loop systems.
They use evaporative cooling on the AC that actually cools the inside of the data center. Evaporating water cools things down significantly more than simply splashing cold water at them.
This significantly reduces their costs on electricity because AC runs much more efficiently when the condenser side is cool.
They do not (usually) use evaporative cooling on the GPUs themselves. Evaporative cooling is used more directly too, but the indirect variant is better because it doesn't raise the humidity inside the data center. This is why so many data centers are being built in deserts now (well this and the cheap land).
When they do use it without the heat pump/AC in tandem, then it means pushing hot air through a water soaked membrane, not using all that water in the coolant pipes for the servers. The closed loop is still closed, the evaporation happens outside of the loop.
Almost none of them run closed loop systems. They’re extremely expensive, and even if they did they actually still use just as much water, it’s just that the water is now being spent at a gas or coal power plant instead of on site due to the increased energy usage.
The systems that most data centers use are called adiabatic cooling systems. They evaporate water after a closed loop because the problem isn’t moving the heat away from the servers, it’s getting rid of them fast enough.
Conveniently most data center providers provide absolutely no statistics about these things because they look very bad to the public, but researchers have calculated usage.
Okay, while I do suspect the 16oz number is pulled from someone's ass (or just very old, many efficiency improvements ago), there are a couple of things to consider:
a) A single B300 won't even run frontier models. It only has 288 GB of HBM. The DGX B300 server has 2.1 TB, which I suspect is not enough either (running Qwen 3.8 Max lossless (BF16) requires 4.9 TB just to load the model). But these are run in clusters anyway and any single user's prompt only uses a tiny percentage of the compute from tons of servers. OpenAI and Anthropic are going for size with their models so the most expensive ones probably need even more than Qwen.
b) While the GPUs themselves are directly cooled by closed loops, the water inside those closed loops is often cooled by evaporative coolers, or even AC and evaporative cooling in tandem (that allows the evaporation to happen outside the datacenter itself). That's because evaporative cooling is the most energy efficient form of cooling.
There are companies offering very complex heat systems that take advantage of multiple forms of cooling because they're making 100+ kW racks these days and talking of 500-1000 kW racks in the future. Ridiculous numbers, honestly.
This is from some company's website that offers cooling solutions: Notice the outside "cooling tower" - those can be dry or wet. In a hot and dry climate, you'd want wet. It'll cool really well. In a colder and more humid climate, dry might work better. They also optionally let you heat the aquifer apparently, which is bound to cause issues for everyone living nearby over time.
The b300 figure is to give a sense of scale, its clearly more on the order of milliliters per query than half a liter.
Evaporating water into the atmostsphere is really just recirculating it, it hasn't spoiled the water or destroyed it.
The problem with the 16oz number is that its so clearly wrong that is discredits any other valid arguments. If complaints about ai resource usage want to be taken seriously, forget the water "usage" and worry about the gas/coal/diesel generators pumping carbon directly into the atmosphere. Because that is far more concerning that water getting cycled through the water cycle.
I believe the paper was looking at total footprint including building and running data centers with open evaporative cooling, and the water "used" by civilian power stations.
I don't really see more water in the air as the most pressing environmental issue around data centers. That's better than the water being destroyed or contaminated.
The main environmental hazard of data centers is the rapid expansion of them. The running of them for months on end in the training of models... And above all else, the fact billionaires have chosen to power them in the least environmentally friendly ways (gas and disel):
I'm much more concerned about the electricity going in as well. If they want to build these huge power sinks, they should be required to build their own green power for them as well, not just buy from the already constrained grid. And burning gas or any other fossil fuel for them is just madness.
Yep, we're paying for answers we know are wrong, using the currency of environmental health. It's probably the dumbest thing I've seen humanity do.
People who use the technology need to use things like AnythingLLM for running answer machines locally (yes, AnythingLLM can go online, search websites, and do GPT style answering)... and something like Kolbold.cpp (also run locally) for creative writing tasks.
AnythingLLM is very simple to set up, Kolbold.cpp has tutorials on YouTube and is far less restrictive than ChatGPT. Both avoid interacting with AI data centers (now the available models have already been trained).
Self hosted definitely is the way to go. I have a second hand Intel nuc + nvidia p100 setup, and its more than enough for what I need it to be. And it only uses 250w when im using it, I turn it off when I'm done. Plus my power is all my own solar, so effectively free.
I think you're right about the number being nonsense, but water not being destroyed doesn't mean you haven't converted potable water to non-potable water, and it is still important at the actual scale of water that data centers are using for cooling to the localities they operate in.
Several places report 6.4 Billon Gallons per year by Google alone in 2023. Even if we assume this has icreased across all companies, the 163 Billion Gallons per year seems overblown by quite a bit.
I hate it when people lie to make a point that would have stood well on it's own without lying. Even an estimated 13 Billion Gallons per company and year (so assuming it doubled since 2023) is fuckton of water.
The extremely dumb thing here is that the water use is totally fine. California alone uses ~11 TRILLION gallons of water per year for farming. And so what, that water cycle returns via precipitation (assuming we don't go so hard to fuck up the aquifers, but you know what I mean). The water is fine. Plus that farm water runoff is even kinda hazardous, with pesticides etc. It's still fine
This is a totally recyclable resource. You can probably use it to water plants after it's been through the data center, or it may have just evaporated away as part of the cooling process
Meanwhile, the obvious dart to throw is the fact that the power need is absolutely ridiculous and only growing, leading to every major tech company investing extensively in energy tech. Eventually they will become a new generation of utilities that supply power (and compute) to everyone. So the opportunity is to force them to reinvent energy in a clean way rather than, say, burning an utter shitton of oil to do it
Honestly this is just like the whole carbon footprint thing. It’s a massive attempt to put the blame on the average person who is barely contributing at all, and just ignoring the corporations who are doing the vast majority of the pollution.
Don’t get me wrong it’s bad for the environment, but the average person stopping is a drop in the ocean when it comes to actual AI use.
That paper never passed peer review, and I believe it was trying to find the total footprint. Training probably does take a lot (considering it involves building and running a data center for 3 or 4 months), but once a model is trained you can run it locally on a regular mid level PC.
It's unlikely running models locally on your own PC uses a glass of water per question. But there is a large environmental cost to building and running so many data centers or asking the latest LLMs running that way.
A lot of that environmental cost comes from the fact Governments have asked data centers to not interrupt the power grid, and billionaires have subsequently responded by choosing the dirtiest ways to power them so they're off grid.
You CAN run it locally on a regular mid level PC, but the big models require terabytes of high bandwidth memory and tons of compute. Most people do not run local models.
I don't understand the point the post is trying to make.
Accelerating climate change due to increased water vapour in the atmosphere I guess? The post seems to imply that the water disappears but it's not like fracking where the water is no longer retrievable or contaminated afterwards. The pollution to the water from data centres would be heat pollution (also bad, but again, that doesn't seem to be what the post is talking about).
Let's just take a second and ignore the massive lapses of information in your post and I will ask you this: do you think the water cycle is instant?
As in, when they are mass pumping out the underground aquifers and draining the man-made reservoirs, do you think that the "magically clean water" discharge from the data centers instantly goes back into said aquifers and reservoirs?
33 Comments
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works · 65 pts · 10h
I mean even disregarding the environmental cost, it’s rapidly accelerating our decline from the “Information Age” where knowledge about anything can be found in an instant to the “Disinformation Age” in which it’s impossible to tell what is fact from fiction because information is overflowing everywhere but most of it is bullshit.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 18 pts · 10h
Ended up ruining my soup the other week because I got the recipe from someone using AI. Can't even follow 2023+ video recipes anymore because the creator might have used AI to plan a video with an inedible recipe.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 10h
It can't be trusted with foods, medicine dosages, or basically anything with a hazard rating.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 10h
Oh shit, dark cloud! Is your name based on the RPG?
DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 10h
No I'm just grumpy all the time.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 10h
DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 9h
Did you know you can get a real dirt cheap handheld console like the R36S (for $40) that can run most PS1 games, as well as many PS2 and N64 games, and anything below that... Even a few GameCube games.
For twice the price you can get more advanced chinese made android based portable handheld emulator consoles that can run all PS2 games and most PS3 games... For even more money you can get similar devices that are SteamOS compatible.... Meaning you can get a low end SteamDeck for half the price of the real thing.
So one of those options can probably get you your preferred Final Fantasy game in a pocket sized portable console.
You may think this knowledge is a blessing, but it's a curse. Spoiled for choice and it ultimately comes down to money and whether you actually want more screen time.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 8h
I'm honestly terrified of the person I'd be if I had a console with me at all times. No one needs that, least of all me. But I genuinely am very curious about these handhelds and I'm currently reading through handhelds.wiki to see how things have developed over the years. It feels quite a bit like rediscovering video games. It's gonna be a minute until I can start to hold a cohesive opinion on 'em
Bustedknuckles@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 9h
I fucked up a concrete mix last month because I was in a hurry and trusted the Google ai summary instead of my own intuition. Lesson learned, hopefully
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 5h
WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today · 29 pts · 11h
Most of those numbers shouldn't be hard to validate, but a reliable source for the 16oz number (how much a single AI prompt uses) would be appreciated. A search turns up a lot of sites I've never heard of (or are unreliable), so I don't know how reliable they are.
CameronDev@programming.dev · 37 pts · 10h
Its nonsense.
a) 16oz is 0.5 liters. To evaporate 0.5 litres from 20c to 101c you need 361 Wh of energy. An nvidia B300, top out at 1400W. In order for a single prompt to use 361Wh on a B300, the prompt needs to take 15 minutes to run. Thats clearly not happening.
b) Even when water is used to cool GPUs, it isn't destroyed. Its heated, and then cooled down again. The water just moves heat around the system, it doesnt get destroyed
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/water-heating
Zensate@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 10h
You're talking about closed water cooling systems, which are ethical and more expensive.
Now can you guess how many data centers use those?
CameronDev@programming.dev · 6 pts · 10h
If we are playing the guessing game, almost all of them. Its not that expensive to build and run a closed loop water system. You cant just run plain tap water through cooling loops, it needs to be distilled or treated, or youll grow mold inside the loops and get clogs.
Provide your source for these data centres using open loop systems.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 11 pts · 9h
They use evaporative cooling on the AC that actually cools the inside of the data center. Evaporating water cools things down significantly more than simply splashing cold water at them.
This significantly reduces their costs on electricity because AC runs much more efficiently when the condenser side is cool.
They do not (usually) use evaporative cooling on the GPUs themselves. Evaporative cooling is used more directly too, but the indirect variant is better because it doesn't raise the humidity inside the data center. This is why so many data centers are being built in deserts now (well this and the cheap land).
When they do use it without the heat pump/AC in tandem, then it means pushing hot air through a water soaked membrane, not using all that water in the coolant pipes for the servers. The closed loop is still closed, the evaporation happens outside of the loop.
tyler@programming.dev · 9 pts · 7h
Almost none of them run closed loop systems. They’re extremely expensive, and even if they did they actually still use just as much water, it’s just that the water is now being spent at a gas or coal power plant instead of on site due to the increased energy usage.
The systems that most data centers use are called adiabatic cooling systems. They evaporate water after a closed loop because the problem isn’t moving the heat away from the servers, it’s getting rid of them fast enough.
Conveniently most data center providers provide absolutely no statistics about these things because they look very bad to the public, but researchers have calculated usage.
https://datacenters.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Azure_Modern-Datacenter-Cooling_Infographic.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
Zensate@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 7h
An interesting guess in a capitalist dystopia.
The answer is: almost none of them.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 10 pts · 9h
Okay, while I do suspect the 16oz number is pulled from someone's ass (or just very old, many efficiency improvements ago), there are a couple of things to consider:
a) A single B300 won't even run frontier models. It only has 288 GB of HBM. The DGX B300 server has 2.1 TB, which I suspect is not enough either (running Qwen 3.8 Max lossless (BF16) requires 4.9 TB just to load the model). But these are run in clusters anyway and any single user's prompt only uses a tiny percentage of the compute from tons of servers. OpenAI and Anthropic are going for size with their models so the most expensive ones probably need even more than Qwen.
b) While the GPUs themselves are directly cooled by closed loops, the water inside those closed loops is often cooled by evaporative coolers, or even AC and evaporative cooling in tandem (that allows the evaporation to happen outside the datacenter itself). That's because evaporative cooling is the most energy efficient form of cooling.
There are companies offering very complex heat systems that take advantage of multiple forms of cooling because they're making 100+ kW racks these days and talking of 500-1000 kW racks in the future. Ridiculous numbers, honestly.
This is from some company's website that offers cooling solutions: Notice the outside "cooling tower" - those can be dry or wet. In a hot and dry climate, you'd want wet. It'll cool really well. In a colder and more humid climate, dry might work better. They also optionally let you heat the aquifer apparently, which is bound to cause issues for everyone living nearby over time.
CameronDev@programming.dev · 1 pts · 5h
The b300 figure is to give a sense of scale, its clearly more on the order of milliliters per query than half a liter.
Evaporating water into the atmostsphere is really just recirculating it, it hasn't spoiled the water or destroyed it.
The problem with the 16oz number is that its so clearly wrong that is discredits any other valid arguments. If complaints about ai resource usage want to be taken seriously, forget the water "usage" and worry about the gas/coal/diesel generators pumping carbon directly into the atmosphere. Because that is far more concerning that water getting cycled through the water cycle.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 10h
I believe the paper was looking at total footprint including building and running data centers with open evaporative cooling, and the water "used" by civilian power stations.
I don't really see more water in the air as the most pressing environmental issue around data centers. That's better than the water being destroyed or contaminated.
The main environmental hazard of data centers is the rapid expansion of them. The running of them for months on end in the training of models... And above all else, the fact billionaires have chosen to power them in the least environmentally friendly ways (gas and disel):
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dirty+power+ai+data+centers+powered+by
CameronDev@programming.dev · 4 pts · 10h
I'm much more concerned about the electricity going in as well. If they want to build these huge power sinks, they should be required to build their own green power for them as well, not just buy from the already constrained grid. And burning gas or any other fossil fuel for them is just madness.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 9h
Yep, we're paying for answers we know are wrong, using the currency of environmental health. It's probably the dumbest thing I've seen humanity do.
People who use the technology need to use things like AnythingLLM for running answer machines locally (yes, AnythingLLM can go online, search websites, and do GPT style answering)... and something like Kolbold.cpp (also run locally) for creative writing tasks.
AnythingLLM is very simple to set up, Kolbold.cpp has tutorials on YouTube and is far less restrictive than ChatGPT. Both avoid interacting with AI data centers (now the available models have already been trained).
CameronDev@programming.dev · 3 pts · 9h
Self hosted definitely is the way to go. I have a second hand Intel nuc + nvidia p100 setup, and its more than enough for what I need it to be. And it only uses 250w when im using it, I turn it off when I'm done. Plus my power is all my own solar, so effectively free.
Malica@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 10h
There's also data centers using closed loop systems, they don't lose water
Feyd@programming.dev · 1 pts · 10h
I think you're right about the number being nonsense, but water not being destroyed doesn't mean you haven't converted potable water to non-potable water, and it is still important at the actual scale of water that data centers are using for cooling to the localities they operate in.
GloomyDorje@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 10h
https://www.aitooldiscovery.com/ai-infra/how-much-water-does-ai-use
Several places report 6.4 Billon Gallons per year by Google alone in 2023. Even if we assume this has icreased across all companies, the 163 Billion Gallons per year seems overblown by quite a bit.
I hate it when people lie to make a point that would have stood well on it's own without lying. Even an estimated 13 Billion Gallons per company and year (so assuming it doubled since 2023) is fuckton of water.
lung@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 7h
The extremely dumb thing here is that the water use is totally fine. California alone uses ~11 TRILLION gallons of water per year for farming. And so what, that water cycle returns via precipitation (assuming we don't go so hard to fuck up the aquifers, but you know what I mean). The water is fine. Plus that farm water runoff is even kinda hazardous, with pesticides etc. It's still fine
This is a totally recyclable resource. You can probably use it to water plants after it's been through the data center, or it may have just evaporated away as part of the cooling process
Meanwhile, the obvious dart to throw is the fact that the power need is absolutely ridiculous and only growing, leading to every major tech company investing extensively in energy tech. Eventually they will become a new generation of utilities that supply power (and compute) to everyone. So the opportunity is to force them to reinvent energy in a clean way rather than, say, burning an utter shitton of oil to do it
cloudpersona@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 10h
Honestly this is just like the whole carbon footprint thing. It’s a massive attempt to put the blame on the average person who is barely contributing at all, and just ignoring the corporations who are doing the vast majority of the pollution.
Don’t get me wrong it’s bad for the environment, but the average person stopping is a drop in the ocean when it comes to actual AI use.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 10h
That paper never passed peer review, and I believe it was trying to find the total footprint. Training probably does take a lot (considering it involves building and running a data center for 3 or 4 months), but once a model is trained you can run it locally on a regular mid level PC.
It's unlikely running models locally on your own PC uses a glass of water per question. But there is a large environmental cost to building and running so many data centers or asking the latest LLMs running that way.
A lot of that environmental cost comes from the fact Governments have asked data centers to not interrupt the power grid, and billionaires have subsequently responded by choosing the dirtiest ways to power them so they're off grid.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dirty+power+ai+data+centers+powered+by
This was a choice made by governments, billionaires, and their investors.
But yeah, if a model was trained in an environmentally powered data center then run locally it wouldn't be such a problem.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 9h
You CAN run it locally on a regular mid level PC, but the big models require terabytes of high bandwidth memory and tons of compute. Most people do not run local models.
usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 6h
I don't understand the point the post is trying to make.
Accelerating climate change due to increased water vapour in the atmosphere I guess? The post seems to imply that the water disappears but it's not like fracking where the water is no longer retrievable or contaminated afterwards. The pollution to the water from data centres would be heat pollution (also bad, but again, that doesn't seem to be what the post is talking about).
Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 6h
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Its just much less controllable than methane or carbon dioxide.
Also poisoning the un-evaporated water is literally killing us, which is what people usually mean.
MrEff@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 6h
Let's just take a second and ignore the massive lapses of information in your post and I will ask you this: do you think the water cycle is instant?
As in, when they are mass pumping out the underground aquifers and draining the man-made reservoirs, do you think that the "magically clean water" discharge from the data centers instantly goes back into said aquifers and reservoirs?
curiousaur@reddthat.com · 3 pts · 4h
I mean, I know how long my showers are