AI's thirst for power keeps coal fires burning bright More evidence has emerged that AI-driven demand for energy to power datacenters is prolonging the life of coal-fired plants in the US. With AI still the hot new trend, demand for compute to operate it is pushing the growth of bit barn capacity along with the need for ever more energy to power it all. This growth is having some …
Because it's not like Google could only crawl new sites to index while the sun is up, or only recompress YouTube videos at other resolutions when the wind is blowing.
Cat videos are a strategic national resource and must be available at locally all at times. You expect people to wait an extra 50ms to be served an ad from 2 states away?
@Yet Another Anonymous coward
"Because it's not like Google could only crawl new sites to index while the sun is up, or only recompress YouTube videos at other resolutions when the wind is blowing."
Why should they? And if it takes weeks for the wind to blow it might become a bit of an issue.
"Cat videos are a strategic national resource and must be available at locally all at times."
You dont need your light to come on when you hit the light switch but lets see how long you go without before changing your mind. Hell some people get overwhelmed at their surroundings if their phone dies for christ sake.
But we are talking about the developed world. You would think we would be able to generate energy with our long history of doing so instead of falling back into the old problems of praying to whatever deity to provide the right weather.
Suggesting we might have a bit of a rethink about datacenters.
We are still in the banking/Telco mindset of 9-9a uptime with multiple redundancy to avoid any performance degradation at any cost.
But more of the load isn't as tie critical. If I train an AI for only 50% of the time when power is 10% of the price, or I buy 50% cheaper hw that needs a daily reboot I might come out ahead.
Maybe it will be cheaper to serve YouTube from different data centers?
yes, oh yes. I too have downloaded on Win11 using jDownloader every single video I want. Not at first b/c I wanted to save energy primarily, but more than sick-inducing level of ads on YouAd. I always exit the mid-roll ads which are sometimes 60secs and if you are in the bath them seem to transform into a near endless promo video of the worst music and video that even Hell itself would stand back in admiration and awe. So you have to spend a lot of the bath time guessing how long the unbearable ad that bears no sonic resemblance to that what i was listening to from the bathtub. Imagine chilled SucideBoys being interrupted by the most banal and unwanted screaming ad! The only ad I have ever given credit is the Wizz ones which are silent with nice Illustrator-like vector graphics.
TV ads are a breeze nowadays compared to the net. PiHole doesn't block pre-roll ads well Ive heard. Will test on WIn11 again.
Better still, to return from the retard rant, download them onto a HD along with the best 4K movies and lots and lots of audio ripped from the utube video into mp3 and plufg into TV. Kill internet on the TV full stop (dont even run HDMI inputs as you cant be sure if that either.
Of course many hear have done this already and indeed back in 2004 I was knee-deep in NAS. Now a slim line USB3 fast one drive will easily hold a few months of entertainment without needing to use the net. So, for me the drain on my iPhone battery from hotspot washuge and she sat on the MagSafe most of the time at home.
Social is a complete waste of bandwidth and even seeing it makes me feel dirty and like a poor unwashed ill-intentioned person for some reason. Real dirty.
"But more of the load isn't as tie critical. If I train an AI for only 50% of the time when power is 10% of the price, or I buy 50% cheaper hw that needs a daily reboot I might come out ahead."
You don't think that the people splashing a billion or two on a state of the art DC filled with however many processing units might already have gone through all the possible permutations to achieve their intended outcome?
@Yet Another Anonymous coward
"Suggesting we might have a bit of a rethink about datacenters."
Thats all good in the hypothetical armchair but yet reality seems to disagree. If we believe in greedy capitalists then the idea of only running these things during times of cheap energy would surely be exploited, if it could.
It's great that we can engage in this Manhattan project to provide 100,000,000x the power and end up with AI that is dumber than a cat. Says a lot to Helene, Milton, and Kirk, about our priorities!
When the mAIster says jump, we ask ...
One of the issues with keeping coal plants going is the cost of heavy maintenance. There might have been a bunch of patches put on before a plant was planned to be shut down, but if they now want to keep running, there may have to be a shut down and proper refurbishment done or efficiency drops and catastrophic problems can crop up that are uneconomical to repair. There will have to be a big backpedaling by politicians that passed laws killing off coal plants as part of their Green programs. I'm sure their opposition at the next election will be keen to point this out to voters.
He's living in China these days, where there's currently about 1.15 terawatts of coal fired power generating plant, with a target to add 80 GW of new coal capacity in 2024.
Admittedly the 80 GW is down on previous year's build, but when you've got over terawatt of coal plant it's hardly surprising you'd not see the need to keep building quite so fast.
"Our society needs to decide what is more important, our environment or access to AI."
That would be like asking which is more important, sleep or access to AI. No real relation and not really a valid question.
"We have managed without AI for millennia, maybe AI should be abandoned until a way of using AI with significantly lower power demands can be found."
We managed without medicine for millennia. Wanna try it? And how little energy is it acceptable for AI to use?
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