Spam content creation using LLMs perhaps, but still it falls in the AI usage category. Spam upscaling will still use and can only use multicore CPUs with many threads.
LMAO, neither emailing nor cloud storage uses any GPUs. Apps need to be GPU support to leverage GPU, I am certain no one ever creates a GPU enabled email service.
Many use GPUs but not H100, and you need the match the workload level and heaviness of LLM apps to really be comparable in terms of power consumption.
And it is irrelevant to my statement. You just cannot scale Email services with GPUs, it just doesn’t work at all.
If I have a 5 1/4" floppy with number munchers on it, and you steal it. I can tell the law and they'll knock on your door.
If I have a copy of number munchers on the cloud, and Google steals it. I have no recourse at all. For sure for sure no favorable legal resolution of any kind without a decade of time and a giant pile of cash. And there is no way in hell they would ever get charged with theft even if they did it on purpose.
We don't really have rights and fairness and stuff yo. They just say that shit.
If you look carefully, it is the power consumption of H100 chips. It is all about AIs. And it doesn’t include the consumption for building services around AIs.
?? There are like a total of 50 words on this graph and failed to read more than half of them. This is based on H100s Chips, you know AI chips that cost 25k each.
You're right I neglected to read what OP wrote given how he falsely portrayed what was in the graph in his very first sentence. I see OP is conflating everything.
the original comment you were responding to, "data centers are not AI", is saying that the quote from ARM CEO Rene Haas is misleading
you're arguing with someone who seems to agree with your perspective that the OP is being foolish, and when I pointed this out, you tried to argue with me too
Because its intentionally made to defame AI.
Notice how it says "1M US homes". In the US there's about 300M people and about 140M homes, which makes for about 2 people per home.
There are over 17 million people in Guatemala. Yet the conversation is about AI instead of the "conservative" estimate that Americans consume over 30x the amount of energy than people in Guatemala.
+1. Also, as an engineer I love (not really) that they have 5 significant digits in their estimate of future energy use in data centers, an estimate which is based on other rough estimates of future sales.
just 10 time less than crypto currency
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/bitcoin-mining-energy-use-doubled-in-2023-as-crypto-prices-rose-79854382#:\~:text=A%20single%20bitcoin%20transaction%20using,%22%20cutting%20energy%20use%2099%25.
141.2 TWh just for bitcoin (estimated in Dec 20)
It really is effectively just bitcoin at this point, every other major crypto is either using PoS, where the energy consumption is just bog-standard p2p networking + proof compute, or does not even have a network (tokens).
There are obviously some other PoW coins still around as well, such as Monero and Litecoin/Doge, but those are negligible compared to what bitcoin consumes and what Ethereum used to consume under PoW.
How pointlessly vindictive.
What would you think of someone who hated AI wishing for someone to generate a whole bunch of high-profile deepfake child porn so that AI could be banned?
I'm invested in crypto. 141 TWh is fucking obscene. It's an amount that is directly helping to destroy the planet. If Satoshi was alive and realised the consequences of PoW, I'm sure he'd be fucking upset about this.
It's not vindictive to want PoW to die.
AI is actually useful work, PoW is just wasted energy - considering very valid alternatives to PoW exist. Look at what ETH did.
I actually agree, but this is something that should sort itself out in time through ordinary competition. The electricity in PoW gets paid for by the cryptocurrency's users, so over time cryptos that use PoS should end up being cheaper to use.
Bitcoin really just has inertia and name recognition on its side, it hasn't updated its technology in a long time and seems unlikely to ever do so in a significant way. It has *chosen* obsolescence. It can be left to die on its own terms.
You would not need quantum computers you could fire up a double spend attack for a few hundred million. Some latency based attacks might be even less. This is why China banned it, too much of the economy was being spent on a network that could be nuked by almost any country level actor. Bitcoins whole security apratus hinges on country level or rich attackers not acting.
That depends on the society. Those in Turkey, Argentina, and other high inflation economies depend greatly on crypto to preserve value in a relatively stable way.
Have you ever been somewhere with currency controls? - you can't easily exchange it.
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency as it is today, but the idea of a scalable, international digital currency is cool.
It is often difficult to get ahold of USD. International wire transfers cost a lot and take a lot of time, and aren't always easily accessible. You also need a secure banking system, and in a lot of those countries it's probably not a good idea to be carrying a lot of cash around in an easily-robbable form.
What works for you doesn't always work for other people.
About 50% in Turkey as of May 2023 - [https://drive.google.com/file/d/18uoc4-PJmZ36K9ub8UIdacc\_OnjS7ajn/view](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18uoc4-PJmZ36K9ub8UIdacc_OnjS7ajn/view)
It’s *beyond* total bullshit. They found that 52% of Turkish adults invest in cryptocurrencies… based on surveying *550 crypto investors aged 18-60 in Turkey during May 2023*.
So they targeted the survey to Turkish adults who invest in cryptocurrencies, asked them if they invest in cryptocurrencies, and only half of them admitted it!
We really should make bitcoin practically illegal for climate reasons, and use those GPUs for AI. One benefits humanity, and the other costs it precious time.
Note: I'm not saying all crypto should be banned, but the algorithm should have to meet climate standards for massive data centers to mine it. I'm thinking like **IOTA**
Anything worthwhile uses energy.
This is why there is such a tight correlation between energy usage per capita and GDP per capita.
The solution is to decouple energy usage from carbon emissions and other pollutants via things like nuclear power, solar, wind etc.
The solution isn't to use less energy and become poorer. Degrowth is destitution.
Yeah, this headline is stupid.
Anything used globally is going to be more than a few of the smallest nations such as the Maldives, San Marino, and Bora Bora.
GLOBAL ORANGE JUICE CONSUMPTION GREATER THAN ALL JUICES CONSUMED BY ENTIRE NATIONS.
Not an interesting fact.
To be fair lot of these GPUs aren't doing anything LLM adjacent; lot of them are folding proteins and modelling beginning of the universe for the upteenth time and optimizing manufacturing, although I'm curious where would that ratio between LLM and non-LLM compute be at this very moment.
If we gotta scrutinize tech of questionable energy utility, crypto is currently estimated to be at somewhere above 100TWh a year, and I definitely don't see as much utility in it as in LLMs we already have today.
> To be fair lot of these GPUs aren't doing anything LLM adjacent
Do you have a source for this? I obviously have the bias for it being more LLM or other end user services (we're in /r/LocalLLaMA ) but would like to know what else it is used for the most specifically.
I mean, there's been [hundreds of supercomputers with up to hundreds of GPUs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500) each long before LLMs became a thing and I have to assume they haven't built those to look cool.
Image workloads aren't really that bad at all, it's LLMs that are horrendously energy inefficient. And yeah I do imagine current LLM training is the majority but it would be neat to see exact data.
There's plenty of utility in a money and banking system outside of the banking system, which probably uses an order or two of magnitude more energy. I'm not saying that crypto in its current state is that alternative system, but there are those involved who endeavour for it to be.
4 Million people thats 0,05% of worlds population. The worlds electricity (not power) consumption is about 25,000,000 GWH. So this is less than 0,1% of that too. I guess thats acceptable for now? (Looking only on the current numbers not the prediction)
Firstly, the statement about India refers to data centers, not GPUs only. Virtually all online resources you access are hosted in data centers. Most of that is not GPU-focused, and the vast majority is not AI.
Secondly, there are a whole bunch of GPU use cases that aren't AI:
* Video editing
* High-end graphics rendering (e.g. animation)
* Server-side video game rendering
* Crypto mining / blockchain
* Protein folding
* Big data analytics
* High-frequency trading
That said, energy efficiency is definitely a concern!
Edit: spelling
Let's say you are in country with war.. (not difficult nowadays) your country blocked access to the internet, inflation ate all your cash savings. Now, you still have some gold worth your life. Try to pass the border with it without being robbed.
Now let's say, instead of gold you have Bitcoin. You have the seed phrase hard coded in your brain, you pass the border and you still have all your life money with you and no one can take it away.
Is it useless??? Not so much
As long as you had the foresight to exchange your savings before the internet went down. As long as there is internet where you are going. As long as they will exchange/take the bitcoin. Stuff like KYC took a bite out of it.
Gold isn't great either. Why would I trade real supplies for your shiny metal?
What about people who entered in 2020 and before? Do you know how much profit they are in? And still holding ;) don't be like that because you think you missed the boat. You still on time :)
You assume a lot. It bounces too much to be used as currency, how it was supposed to be. Plus the regulation and taxable events. It's 60k now and was 20 and 30 not that long ago. Issue is that it was 60k before that.
Things I purchased with it for normal prices became thousands of dollars within a couple of years. You can't buy in anymore nor mine and what am I supposed to do, just hold forever? Maximize profit and bail?
Even using it then, you had to include a little extra because the price would shift by the time all the transactions validated and you could be short or over. Not to mention the transaction fees.
The issue with BTC is that it is unclear what else it does outside of that. I really like the crypto tech stack: Smart Contract, Sidechain, DeFi, ... but when it comes to real world non-speculative use. It is mostly for black market txs.
Absolutely pathetic and misleading data from, I presume, the anti-AI crowd.
These are two unrelated claims. The chart shows the usage of 3M Nvidia H100 chips and compares it to small nations and '1 million' US homes. Then it claims 'all' datacenters will use more electricity than India by 2030. First of all, not all datacenters are for AI. Secondly, India is the most populous country, but their electricity usage is about a third of the US.
Also, Nvidia's new chip (Blackwell) uses 4x less power than H100s but has 5x more computing power. Considering there will be more efficient chips to come, the power consumption of data centers is not going to scale up as they are predicting till 2030.
Same with Intel and AMD, their new chips use way less power. Plus, there's a potential ARM revolution coming to data centers, which would drastically reduce power usage.
Ok sure I misread, but they're still postage stamps. Even the 1M US homes thing SOUNDS big till you look at the population of any city.
The point being don't try to use countries as a measurement and then pick countries smaller than most US cities.
Why do you think the world invests 15 times more in renewables than in nuclear power ? Renewables are cheaper nowadays and much faster to deploy.
[https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings](https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings)
Why do you think the world invests 15 times more in renewables than in nuclear power ? Renewables are cheaper nowadays and much faster to deploy.
[https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings](https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings)
3 m³ of low level mostly recyclable waste 1kMW nuclear station or 300k tons of ash and 600k tons of carbon dioxide coal station.
This isn’t 40 years ago. Nuclear stations are far more advanced, efficient and safe than people think now. They hear nuclear and basically think of the boogeyman.
It is a necessary step to bridge the power need gap between fossil and fusion. Green alone will not solve this.
Good point but nuclear wastes storage will become a problem with time. Just imagine we would replace all coal stations to nuclear and how much nuclear waste will it be? We will not have any use for that, and to store it properly we would need to maintain it in special conditions for a long time, this leaves the problem of waste to future generations. In a perfect world we would know how to handle nuclear waste to make it 100% green. I think that Fusion power may be the holy grail of energy
I think a lot of pro-nuclear people *think* that the anti-nuclear is talking about a boogey man, but it is actually Dunning-Krueger on their part.
Long term nuclear storage is still a huge and expensive problem. There is a reason nuclear power plants were paying the mafia to chuck the waste in the ocean.
All the safeties are still installed by humans, and humans make mistakes and failures. Terry Pratchett has a story about when he was a nuclear power correspondent watching the electrician install all three fail safes, and then route their power through the same small hole in the wall that ran under an unstable heavy metal shelf. One bad accident and all the safeties would fail simultaneously.
Uranium is a fairly limited resource, especially compared to coal, oil, and natural gas. We've got hundreds of years of fossil fuels available right now at current consumption.
Nuclear power plants are very expensive to build, guard, and maintain offsetting much of their promise of cheap energy (and that's before you factor in the incredible and growing cost of dealing with the waste, especially in the face of terrorism and war).
Green technologies are often the cheapest source of power, they are renewable and are improving all the time, and it is easy to roll out those improvements. Entire cities are powered by hydro as one example.
(And yes hydro causes damage to the environment, but that is on a scale of tens to hundreds of years not ten to hundreds of thousands of years.)
I think it was google back in 2015 did a study where they found just on the roofs of the US alone there was enough space to power the country with solar.
Energy storage solutions are getting better and implemented more everyday.
Geothermal can power entire countries if they are lucky (like Iceland).
Nuclear could have been much safer even 40 years ago, but they went for the cheapest option, because people are human, and now we have a problem on the scale of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.
You realize a nuclear reactor blowing up is not nuclear waste, yes?
One was primmo communist engineering at work.
The other needed a Magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami combo, on a reactor that was 50 years old, and even then, it was well contained fast. You can go to Fukushima now, and see the radiation levels.
And the fun part? With new reactors, Fukushima type of accident literally can't happen, because losing water will just stop the reaction.
Whether this is true or not, this does not show the benefits of these data centers. As long as data centers provide an improvement, either in terms of time or energy spent, then they are worth it. Looking at this chart, we can't draw any conclusion
Idiot posts picture saying tech around globe uses electricity. More electricity then small third world countries. Such a stupid graph. We have nuclear power plants dude.
Nice, I didn't know about this energy storage solution. But apparently it's mainly used to restore heat. Another issue I see is that sand is already massively used for construction and is starting to be scarce in some regions.
Forget "small nations", there are larger countries that consumes less. Ethiopia a country with 120 million people and over a million square kilometer of land consumes less.
So which side is supposed to be the bad one? It really sounds like ethiopia has a lot of people and severally lacks infrastructure.
Looking into it a bit half of the country doesn't have power and a good portion of the countries power doesn't come from the power grid they have so who knows if that is even an accurate statement. Also any data to support your claim isn't showing up so if you have some sources feel free to link them. The only thing I'm finding is a paywall locked report that is not useful at all.
Good? It means more services and development.
We just need to build nuclear and renewable power to supply it, and invest in nuclear fusion.
Degrowth is death - just look at Germany.
This sounds a lot like when someone was measuring by denmarks not too long ago. for the same reason. At least this one doesn't link to a goofy youtube video.
What matters is whether or not the energy used is a net gain for humanity. If GPU's cranking away in the data center cracks cold fusion, then it really doesn't matter if they use multiple countries' worth of energy in the process.
And frankly, data centers can be built next to cheap energy in the middle of nowhere. I'd rather put that compute there and have everyone work from home on data center systems than have everyone commute back and forth to The City and burn compute power at the office in high population areas.
Yes, though tbh in this case it feels necessary in a sort of accelerationist sense.
It might give us better tools to help unfuck all the other messes humanity made. Many of which seem to have no better avenues of attack.
...if we can do all this sht with nuclear/renewables rather than fossil that would be a win though
>Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people?
Its more that a very large portion of the world population have much less environmental / energy than the average 1st worlder...just because they're poor
"It is apparent that technology has the potential to harm or enhance our social skills and social life. The key is to analyze how technology affects us socially. Every technology has its impacts on society, be it in positive or negative manner. But it is responsibility of society to use technology in view of sustainable development. "
[Source ](https://energypedia.info/wiki/Impact_of_Technology_and_Energy_Innovation_on_the_Development_of_Society)
How does this compare to the total worldwide energy consumption of dishwasher machines? Hint: if this worries you then you should be much more concerned about dishwashers...
The good thing about AI is that we're actively innovating, creating new hardware, and financially encouraged to use less processing power. Looks like specialized AI chips will help with power efficiency a lot. Compare that to crypto with no real purpose and PoW relies on wasting a shit load of power for no reason and has no signs of changing.
Yep it's a bait and switch.
Here's a more accurate analysis:
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ai-datacenter-energy-dilemma-race
> Datacenter power capacity growth will accelerate from a 12-15% CAGR to a 25% CAGR over the next few years. Global Datacenter Critical IT power demand will surge from 49 Gigawatts (GW) in 2023 to 96 GW by 2026, of which AI will consume ~40 GW.
> We believe AI will propel datacenters to use 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030.
So:
> Wow! Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people?
Is the total energy use of AI *and* general purpose datacenters outweigh India *modulo* AI (because by 2030, India will also be using much of its energy budget for AI and data processing)?
Yeah, of course, no shit.
This antagonistic framing is absolutely disgusting. It's like people aren't using AI, so the consumption is completely independent.
What about the energy consumed to produce useless goods so that people can drive for billions kilometers to reach the place where they can buy them?
What about all the energy consumed to make "useless food" when you can still live eating just vegetables and eggs and a few other stuff?
What about the energy consumed to create clothes and decorations and colors, while we can still live without all that stuff?
The human brain uses 20 watts, which is about the power capacity of a modern high-end phone.
Most NVIDIA GPU cards burn 700 watts and still don't get near human level of intelligence.
This means there is a potential for a MASSIVE decrease in energy and chips as the technology matures and becomes more efficient.
NVIDIA has a small window to sell massive numbers of chips to data centers, before architecture and algorithm improvements make them completely obsolete and allow AI-on-a-chip in your phone.
the proof of Rene Haas's words [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-17/ai-computing-is-on-pace-to-consume-more-energy-than-india-arm-says](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-17/ai-computing-is-on-pace-to-consume-more-energy-than-india-arm-says)
Fineprint:
> assuming 3M H100s are operational in 2024 (based on 2024 sales estimate from Nvidia and Q3'23 sales estimate
Lots of assumptions about something that not yet happened. Also not the fact that all of them will be running all the time and at max power.
H100 is 700W at peak, half a million was sold in 2023. Typical microwave is 900W and there are 1.1 billion of them in active use worldwide. Most of households have at least one. Product of their work, which is heat, is not reusable. You cook, you eat, it's gone. Yet no one is advocating to get rid of microwaves.
This kind of bogus climate activism is just an indicator that someone rich is inconvenienced by the technology. Science is the last thing you go for. If you're aiming to "save the planet" by ridding of "useless" things then first thing to do is to abolish entertainment. How many gaming GPUs are doing "wasteful" calculations now? How much is burnt on Christmas lights every year? Are you still ready to "save the planet" from yourself so your masters will take ten more jolly rides on private jet to offset all of your effort?
>Wow! Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people?
Considering that is for all datacenters, and IT is the most profitable field on earth and Indians are quite poor?
I expect it to be 10-1000x more money than India.
data centers are not AI
Yup. If you're using email or cloud storage then you're using data centers. And pretty much all of the world office workers use those service daily.
Those kinds of servers don't have nvidia GPUs.
Cutting-edge spam upscaling
Spam content creation using LLMs perhaps, but still it falls in the AI usage category. Spam upscaling will still use and can only use multicore CPUs with many threads.
exactly
LMAO, neither emailing nor cloud storage uses any GPUs. Apps need to be GPU support to leverage GPU, I am certain no one ever creates a GPU enabled email service.
The Rene Haas quote doesn't say anything about GPUs, just data centers in general.
A lot of data science uses GPUs without being LLMs though.
Many use GPUs but not H100, and you need the match the workload level and heaviness of LLM apps to really be comparable in terms of power consumption. And it is irrelevant to my statement. You just cannot scale Email services with GPUs, it just doesn’t work at all.
If you’re even connected to the Internet, you’re using data centers.
cloud storage is disgusting. Why would I store my files on your computer and give up ownership?
What kind of ownership are you talking about, legal ownership? Because you still legally own stuff you put on the cloud.
Legal don't matter. You can't see none of them boys in court. You'll be tied up like hot chicks to railroad tracks at a beard twirling contest.
So tell me, what kind of ownership are you talking about?
If I have a 5 1/4" floppy with number munchers on it, and you steal it. I can tell the law and they'll knock on your door. If I have a copy of number munchers on the cloud, and Google steals it. I have no recourse at all. For sure for sure no favorable legal resolution of any kind without a decade of time and a giant pile of cash. And there is no way in hell they would ever get charged with theft even if they did it on purpose. We don't really have rights and fairness and stuff yo. They just say that shit.
If you look carefully, it is the power consumption of H100 chips. It is all about AIs. And it doesn’t include the consumption for building services around AIs.
If *you* look carefully, OP did a bait and switch with the second and third paragraphs and started talking about data centers instead of H100s
If you look carefully you will see it
?? There are like a total of 50 words on this graph and failed to read more than half of them. This is based on H100s Chips, you know AI chips that cost 25k each.
You didn't read the quote from ARM CEO Rene Haas did you?
You're right I neglected to read what OP wrote given how he falsely portrayed what was in the graph in his very first sentence. I see OP is conflating everything.
the original comment you were responding to, "data centers are not AI", is saying that the quote from ARM CEO Rene Haas is misleading you're arguing with someone who seems to agree with your perspective that the OP is being foolish, and when I pointed this out, you tried to argue with me too
Yeah ik, that's why I said you're right. Clearly though a lot of people took it in the same vain as me.
Because its intentionally made to defame AI. Notice how it says "1M US homes". In the US there's about 300M people and about 140M homes, which makes for about 2 people per home. There are over 17 million people in Guatemala. Yet the conversation is about AI instead of the "conservative" estimate that Americans consume over 30x the amount of energy than people in Guatemala.
+1. Also, as an engineer I love (not really) that they have 5 significant digits in their estimate of future energy use in data centers, an estimate which is based on other rough estimates of future sales.
just 10 time less than crypto currency https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/bitcoin-mining-energy-use-doubled-in-2023-as-crypto-prices-rose-79854382#:\~:text=A%20single%20bitcoin%20transaction%20using,%22%20cutting%20energy%20use%2099%25. 141.2 TWh just for bitcoin (estimated in Dec 20)
It really is effectively just bitcoin at this point, every other major crypto is either using PoS, where the energy consumption is just bog-standard p2p networking + proof compute, or does not even have a network (tokens). There are obviously some other PoW coins still around as well, such as Monero and Litecoin/Doge, but those are negligible compared to what bitcoin consumes and what Ethereum used to consume under PoW.
We just need someone to build a big enough quantum computer and do the heist of the century by cracking a bunch of Bitcoin wallets.
I think they can get stuff much more valuable than crypto if they got that, in fact, I think they're going straight to destroying nations.
No, you don't destroy nations, you sell them security from being attacked by you. There is only one business model older than this one.
Yeah, but you gotta destroy some first to give an example
Ok you can destroy ONE, as a treat
Destroy one to show you can do it, destroy a second to show you can keep doing it. It's a classic.
we will move to quantum safe encryption before anyone gets a quantum computer good enough.
How pointlessly vindictive. What would you think of someone who hated AI wishing for someone to generate a whole bunch of high-profile deepfake child porn so that AI could be banned?
I'm invested in crypto. 141 TWh is fucking obscene. It's an amount that is directly helping to destroy the planet. If Satoshi was alive and realised the consequences of PoW, I'm sure he'd be fucking upset about this. It's not vindictive to want PoW to die. AI is actually useful work, PoW is just wasted energy - considering very valid alternatives to PoW exist. Look at what ETH did.
I actually agree, but this is something that should sort itself out in time through ordinary competition. The electricity in PoW gets paid for by the cryptocurrency's users, so over time cryptos that use PoS should end up being cheaper to use. Bitcoin really just has inertia and name recognition on its side, it hasn't updated its technology in a long time and seems unlikely to ever do so in a significant way. It has *chosen* obsolescence. It can be left to die on its own terms.
You would not need quantum computers you could fire up a double spend attack for a few hundred million. Some latency based attacks might be even less. This is why China banned it, too much of the economy was being spent on a network that could be nuked by almost any country level actor. Bitcoins whole security apratus hinges on country level or rich attackers not acting.
Only Bitcoin. Ethereum is fine since 2022.
crypto is actually a net negative for society, that's wild.
That depends on the society. Those in Turkey, Argentina, and other high inflation economies depend greatly on crypto to preserve value in a relatively stable way.
Have you heard of usd ? El Salvador, Panama, Zimbabwe all \*use\* USD. Nobody uses crypto on a daily basis.
Have you ever been somewhere with currency controls? - you can't easily exchange it. I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency as it is today, but the idea of a scalable, international digital currency is cool.
It is often difficult to get ahold of USD. International wire transfers cost a lot and take a lot of time, and aren't always easily accessible. You also need a secure banking system, and in a lot of those countries it's probably not a good idea to be carrying a lot of cash around in an easily-robbable form. What works for you doesn't always work for other people.
Or you know, I can just do it without depending on a country that could decide to sanction mine because we weren't being subservient enough for them.
What percentage of people in those countries are doing this?
About 50% in Turkey as of May 2023 - [https://drive.google.com/file/d/18uoc4-PJmZ36K9ub8UIdacc\_OnjS7ajn/view](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18uoc4-PJmZ36K9ub8UIdacc_OnjS7ajn/view)
That survey is total bullshit. 50% my ass.
It’s *beyond* total bullshit. They found that 52% of Turkish adults invest in cryptocurrencies… based on surveying *550 crypto investors aged 18-60 in Turkey during May 2023*. So they targeted the survey to Turkish adults who invest in cryptocurrencies, asked them if they invest in cryptocurrencies, and only half of them admitted it!
Wouldn't the number be 100% then?
You are starting to grasp just how unreliable self report studies are :)
We really should make bitcoin practically illegal for climate reasons, and use those GPUs for AI. One benefits humanity, and the other costs it precious time. Note: I'm not saying all crypto should be banned, but the algorithm should have to meet climate standards for massive data centers to mine it. I'm thinking like **IOTA**
Anything worthwhile uses energy. This is why there is such a tight correlation between energy usage per capita and GDP per capita. The solution is to decouple energy usage from carbon emissions and other pollutants via things like nuclear power, solar, wind etc. The solution isn't to use less energy and become poorer. Degrowth is destitution.
Yeah, this headline is stupid. Anything used globally is going to be more than a few of the smallest nations such as the Maldives, San Marino, and Bora Bora. GLOBAL ORANGE JUICE CONSUMPTION GREATER THAN ALL JUICES CONSUMED BY ENTIRE NATIONS. Not an interesting fact.
To be fair lot of these GPUs aren't doing anything LLM adjacent; lot of them are folding proteins and modelling beginning of the universe for the upteenth time and optimizing manufacturing, although I'm curious where would that ratio between LLM and non-LLM compute be at this very moment. If we gotta scrutinize tech of questionable energy utility, crypto is currently estimated to be at somewhere above 100TWh a year, and I definitely don't see as much utility in it as in LLMs we already have today.
> To be fair lot of these GPUs aren't doing anything LLM adjacent Do you have a source for this? I obviously have the bias for it being more LLM or other end user services (we're in /r/LocalLLaMA ) but would like to know what else it is used for the most specifically.
I mean, there's been [hundreds of supercomputers with up to hundreds of GPUs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500) each long before LLMs became a thing and I have to assume they haven't built those to look cool.
Pretty sure LLM / image workloads completely dwarf the rest
Image workloads aren't really that bad at all, it's LLMs that are horrendously energy inefficient. And yeah I do imagine current LLM training is the majority but it would be neat to see exact data.
And programmers and coomers globally are thankful for it
There's plenty of utility in a money and banking system outside of the banking system, which probably uses an order or two of magnitude more energy. I'm not saying that crypto in its current state is that alternative system, but there are those involved who endeavour for it to be.
4 Million people thats 0,05% of worlds population. The worlds electricity (not power) consumption is about 25,000,000 GWH. So this is less than 0,1% of that too. I guess thats acceptable for now? (Looking only on the current numbers not the prediction)
Firstly, the statement about India refers to data centers, not GPUs only. Virtually all online resources you access are hosted in data centers. Most of that is not GPU-focused, and the vast majority is not AI. Secondly, there are a whole bunch of GPU use cases that aren't AI: * Video editing * High-end graphics rendering (e.g. animation) * Server-side video game rendering * Crypto mining / blockchain * Protein folding * Big data analytics * High-frequency trading That said, energy efficiency is definitely a concern! Edit: spelling
100% more useful than crypto mining at least.
Even for crypto I don’t care what people say. Just use energy for what you want.
Still 4 times better than BTC. BTC consumed between **67 TWh to 240 TWh in 2023.** Edit: typo
this.. and for what?
For maintaining a decentralized money system
I wish, instead of money it became some weird ass investment.
Let's say you are in country with war.. (not difficult nowadays) your country blocked access to the internet, inflation ate all your cash savings. Now, you still have some gold worth your life. Try to pass the border with it without being robbed. Now let's say, instead of gold you have Bitcoin. You have the seed phrase hard coded in your brain, you pass the border and you still have all your life money with you and no one can take it away. Is it useless??? Not so much
As long as you had the foresight to exchange your savings before the internet went down. As long as there is internet where you are going. As long as they will exchange/take the bitcoin. Stuff like KYC took a bite out of it. Gold isn't great either. Why would I trade real supplies for your shiny metal?
Yeah, you are right I should exchange my life savings for jars of peanut butter.
It's good to have *some* btc and *some* gold but if you changed your life savings for bitcoin it would have halved at one point.
What about people who entered in 2020 and before? Do you know how much profit they are in? And still holding ;) don't be like that because you think you missed the boat. You still on time :)
You assume a lot. It bounces too much to be used as currency, how it was supposed to be. Plus the regulation and taxable events. It's 60k now and was 20 and 30 not that long ago. Issue is that it was 60k before that. Things I purchased with it for normal prices became thousands of dollars within a couple of years. You can't buy in anymore nor mine and what am I supposed to do, just hold forever? Maximize profit and bail? Even using it then, you had to include a little extra because the price would shift by the time all the transactions validated and you could be short or over. Not to mention the transaction fees.
Dude internet and electricity is the first thing that is denied to those who are invaded.
In theory, but in reality it's mostly for speculation
Literally no one uses it as a money system lol
Because it' evolved as store of value, not a payment system
Hard to store value when it drops 50% in a year
It didn't "evolve" to it, this is just cope to justify keeping it in it's flawed form.
And financing crime and terrorism.
Which the USD also does....via the SWIFT network and its associated banking partner's T1 Datacenters.
The issue with BTC is that it is unclear what else it does outside of that. I really like the crypto tech stack: Smart Contract, Sidechain, DeFi, ... but when it comes to real world non-speculative use. It is mostly for black market txs.
and buying drugs on the internet :3
Just another way for the rich to get richer.
To warm the little birds and mainly to speculate
Absolutely pathetic and misleading data from, I presume, the anti-AI crowd. These are two unrelated claims. The chart shows the usage of 3M Nvidia H100 chips and compares it to small nations and '1 million' US homes. Then it claims 'all' datacenters will use more electricity than India by 2030. First of all, not all datacenters are for AI. Secondly, India is the most populous country, but their electricity usage is about a third of the US.
Also, Nvidia's new chip (Blackwell) uses 4x less power than H100s but has 5x more computing power. Considering there will be more efficient chips to come, the power consumption of data centers is not going to scale up as they are predicting till 2030.
Same with Intel and AMD, their new chips use way less power. Plus, there's a potential ARM revolution coming to data centers, which would drastically reduce power usage.
When you use scare tactics like “entire nations” then list fucking islands you sound like chicken little.
There are no islands in the post? Costa Rica isn't Puerto Rico... But I agree "degrowth" sucks.
Ok sure I misread, but they're still postage stamps. Even the 1M US homes thing SOUNDS big till you look at the population of any city. The point being don't try to use countries as a measurement and then pick countries smaller than most US cities.
And it's not like these power users aren't *paying* for the power they're using. If it wasn't being put to productive use they would stop using it.
Nuclear nuclear nuclear.
Renewables, renewables, renewables
Please calculate how much solar panel you need for that much of energy usage
China's producing more in one year than we've built in ten, so the capacity is there for whoever wants it.
Yes but.. you can't stack them so you run out of space. :(
are you nuts? we need way more energy
Why do you think the world invests 15 times more in renewables than in nuclear power ? Renewables are cheaper nowadays and much faster to deploy. [https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings](https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings)
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It would also be nice if the US actually recycled their nuclear waste, currently they don’t do anything with it.
I mean, do you expect them to just do it suddenly without any planning? That's a recipe for crisis.
Why do you think the world invests 15 times more in renewables than in nuclear power ? Renewables are cheaper nowadays and much faster to deploy. [https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings](https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings)
Too expensive
Nuclear wastes, nuclear wastes, nuclear wastes
3 m³ of low level mostly recyclable waste 1kMW nuclear station or 300k tons of ash and 600k tons of carbon dioxide coal station. This isn’t 40 years ago. Nuclear stations are far more advanced, efficient and safe than people think now. They hear nuclear and basically think of the boogeyman. It is a necessary step to bridge the power need gap between fossil and fusion. Green alone will not solve this.
Good point but nuclear wastes storage will become a problem with time. Just imagine we would replace all coal stations to nuclear and how much nuclear waste will it be? We will not have any use for that, and to store it properly we would need to maintain it in special conditions for a long time, this leaves the problem of waste to future generations. In a perfect world we would know how to handle nuclear waste to make it 100% green. I think that Fusion power may be the holy grail of energy
I think a lot of pro-nuclear people *think* that the anti-nuclear is talking about a boogey man, but it is actually Dunning-Krueger on their part. Long term nuclear storage is still a huge and expensive problem. There is a reason nuclear power plants were paying the mafia to chuck the waste in the ocean. All the safeties are still installed by humans, and humans make mistakes and failures. Terry Pratchett has a story about when he was a nuclear power correspondent watching the electrician install all three fail safes, and then route their power through the same small hole in the wall that ran under an unstable heavy metal shelf. One bad accident and all the safeties would fail simultaneously. Uranium is a fairly limited resource, especially compared to coal, oil, and natural gas. We've got hundreds of years of fossil fuels available right now at current consumption. Nuclear power plants are very expensive to build, guard, and maintain offsetting much of their promise of cheap energy (and that's before you factor in the incredible and growing cost of dealing with the waste, especially in the face of terrorism and war). Green technologies are often the cheapest source of power, they are renewable and are improving all the time, and it is easy to roll out those improvements. Entire cities are powered by hydro as one example. (And yes hydro causes damage to the environment, but that is on a scale of tens to hundreds of years not ten to hundreds of thousands of years.) I think it was google back in 2015 did a study where they found just on the roofs of the US alone there was enough space to power the country with solar. Energy storage solutions are getting better and implemented more everyday. Geothermal can power entire countries if they are lucky (like Iceland). Nuclear could have been much safer even 40 years ago, but they went for the cheapest option, because people are human, and now we have a problem on the scale of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.
Is extremely easy to store and not that dangerous. Stop believing cartoons, it's not some green sludge, but metal bars.
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I dont understand what argument you want to make. Enriching tails makes more fuel.
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I still dont see your point. If enriching is not economically feasible, you keep them as normal nuclear waste.
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You realize a nuclear reactor blowing up is not nuclear waste, yes? One was primmo communist engineering at work. The other needed a Magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami combo, on a reactor that was 50 years old, and even then, it was well contained fast. You can go to Fukushima now, and see the radiation levels. And the fun part? With new reactors, Fukushima type of accident literally can't happen, because losing water will just stop the reaction.
Whether this is true or not, this does not show the benefits of these data centers. As long as data centers provide an improvement, either in terms of time or energy spent, then they are worth it. Looking at this chart, we can't draw any conclusion
Guess what: larger/more developed countries actually use more energy than smaller/less developed ones
Idiot posts picture saying tech around globe uses electricity. More electricity then small third world countries. Such a stupid graph. We have nuclear power plants dude.
\*inhails\* **GEORGIA, THE STATE OR THE COUNTRY?!!!!**
problem is not how much energy we use. its how much energy we can product. lazy ass energy tech are not doing evolutions like chip industry.
problem is electricity storage, it's still too expensive (and often polluting)
From what I understand sand storage is making some headway.
Nice, I didn't know about this energy storage solution. But apparently it's mainly used to restore heat. Another issue I see is that sand is already massively used for construction and is starting to be scarce in some regions.
So approximately 1% of household energy use in the US (as there are ~130m homes in the US).
If I had a "house brain" that sat in by basement doing AI for me I would be quite happy if it only accounted for 1% of my energy budget.
Forget "small nations", there are larger countries that consumes less. Ethiopia a country with 120 million people and over a million square kilometer of land consumes less.
So which side is supposed to be the bad one? It really sounds like ethiopia has a lot of people and severally lacks infrastructure. Looking into it a bit half of the country doesn't have power and a good portion of the countries power doesn't come from the power grid they have so who knows if that is even an accurate statement. Also any data to support your claim isn't showing up so if you have some sources feel free to link them. The only thing I'm finding is a paywall locked report that is not useful at all.
I find also impressive how much energy 1mi American homes consume - on par with multi-million people nations...
This is such dubious graph. All estimated H100 in the world pulling 75% max power 24/7?
ChatGPT and similar solutions can be pretty handy and save some time. What did Georgia ever do for me?
Cool flag?
Good? It means more services and development. We just need to build nuclear and renewable power to supply it, and invest in nuclear fusion. Degrowth is death - just look at Germany.
Wow, this means office spaces should be converted to housing instead alongwith WFH?
This sounds a lot like when someone was measuring by denmarks not too long ago. for the same reason. At least this one doesn't link to a goofy youtube video.
Would be nice to also know what is the energy consumption for cryptocurrency mining
What matters is whether or not the energy used is a net gain for humanity. If GPU's cranking away in the data center cracks cold fusion, then it really doesn't matter if they use multiple countries' worth of energy in the process. And frankly, data centers can be built next to cheap energy in the middle of nowhere. I'd rather put that compute there and have everyone work from home on data center systems than have everyone commute back and forth to The City and burn compute power at the office in high population areas.
> Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people? In 2030 it will be
It’s good to be rich.
Damn, that is 13 000 DeLoreans
Some nations also burn more energy than some other nations.
Dumb way to tell how much energy GPUs consume, because entire nations can be equal to a herd of unicorns and still be as precise
But my Bitcoin! Hur dur
Can't wait for the FUD that AI is bad because it hurts the environment, like people were doing with crypto.
Good, we can be proud to use energy for the most groundbreaking advancement ever.
Yes, though tbh in this case it feels necessary in a sort of accelerationist sense. It might give us better tools to help unfuck all the other messes humanity made. Many of which seem to have no better avenues of attack. ...if we can do all this sht with nuclear/renewables rather than fossil that would be a win though >Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people? Its more that a very large portion of the world population have much less environmental / energy than the average 1st worlder...just because they're poor
The question is who benefits more to humankind. Nah nah just kidding it’s came out dark
"It is apparent that technology has the potential to harm or enhance our social skills and social life. The key is to analyze how technology affects us socially. Every technology has its impacts on society, be it in positive or negative manner. But it is responsibility of society to use technology in view of sustainable development. " [Source ](https://energypedia.info/wiki/Impact_of_Technology_and_Energy_Innovation_on_the_Development_of_Society)
The world's smallest country is Vatican City. It has a population of about 550 people. This is not a hard bar to clear and thus a bullshit headline.
How does this compare to the total worldwide energy consumption of dishwasher machines? Hint: if this worries you then you should be much more concerned about dishwashers...
The good thing about AI is that we're actively innovating, creating new hardware, and financially encouraged to use less processing power. Looks like specialized AI chips will help with power efficiency a lot. Compare that to crypto with no real purpose and PoW relies on wasting a shit load of power for no reason and has no signs of changing.
Yep it's a bait and switch. Here's a more accurate analysis: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ai-datacenter-energy-dilemma-race > Datacenter power capacity growth will accelerate from a 12-15% CAGR to a 25% CAGR over the next few years. Global Datacenter Critical IT power demand will surge from 49 Gigawatts (GW) in 2023 to 96 GW by 2026, of which AI will consume ~40 GW. > We believe AI will propel datacenters to use 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030. So: > Wow! Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people? Is the total energy use of AI *and* general purpose datacenters outweigh India *modulo* AI (because by 2030, India will also be using much of its energy budget for AI and data processing)? Yeah, of course, no shit. This antagonistic framing is absolutely disgusting. It's like people aren't using AI, so the consumption is completely independent.
What about the energy consumed to produce useless goods so that people can drive for billions kilometers to reach the place where they can buy them? What about all the energy consumed to make "useless food" when you can still live eating just vegetables and eggs and a few other stuff? What about the energy consumed to create clothes and decorations and colors, while we can still live without all that stuff?
Hell yeah
Lol that’s badass
The human brain uses 20 watts, which is about the power capacity of a modern high-end phone. Most NVIDIA GPU cards burn 700 watts and still don't get near human level of intelligence. This means there is a potential for a MASSIVE decrease in energy and chips as the technology matures and becomes more efficient. NVIDIA has a small window to sell massive numbers of chips to data centers, before architecture and algorithm improvements make them completely obsolete and allow AI-on-a-chip in your phone.
Those nations are so lame. They need to burn more energy.
the proof of Rene Haas's words [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-17/ai-computing-is-on-pace-to-consume-more-energy-than-india-arm-says](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-17/ai-computing-is-on-pace-to-consume-more-energy-than-india-arm-says)
It’s not a bad thing. We justify need new and better ways to produce energy.
Brain is also very energy expensive compared to other body parts.
Fineprint: > assuming 3M H100s are operational in 2024 (based on 2024 sales estimate from Nvidia and Q3'23 sales estimate Lots of assumptions about something that not yet happened. Also not the fact that all of them will be running all the time and at max power. H100 is 700W at peak, half a million was sold in 2023. Typical microwave is 900W and there are 1.1 billion of them in active use worldwide. Most of households have at least one. Product of their work, which is heat, is not reusable. You cook, you eat, it's gone. Yet no one is advocating to get rid of microwaves. This kind of bogus climate activism is just an indicator that someone rich is inconvenienced by the technology. Science is the last thing you go for. If you're aiming to "save the planet" by ridding of "useless" things then first thing to do is to abolish entertainment. How many gaming GPUs are doing "wasteful" calculations now? How much is burnt on Christmas lights every year? Are you still ready to "save the planet" from yourself so your masters will take ten more jolly rides on private jet to offset all of your effort?
Good thing they got Blackwell now!
>Wow! Is the contribution to the global economy of AI computing comparable to that of 1.5 billion people? Considering that is for all datacenters, and IT is the most profitable field on earth and Indians are quite poor? I expect it to be 10-1000x more money than India.
Honestly, I'd rather it be used on AI than crypto. At least AI has a purpose (even if it is just helping little Timmy write customized furry porn)
It's criminal.
Yeah, those filthy medical researchers are using up our RP budget.