Scientists have estimated that the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, partly driven by the demands of generative AI. Globally, the electricity consumption of data centers rose to 460 terawatt-hours in 2022. This would have made data centers the 11th largest electricity consumer in the world, between the nations of Saudi Arabia (371 terawatt-hours) and France (463 terawatt-hours), according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatt-hours (which would bump data centers up to fifth place on the global list, between Japan and Russia).
If your phone could do the ai trash, it would still be morally bankrupt and devoid of any humanity. But it’s done on 5 gpus that eat as much energy as your entire household.
The real usefulness of ai technology is probably limited to 1% of what it is now. Signal processing, protein folding, translation and transcription are all fine and well. But it is 99% spam and so I’ll judge the technology on that.
Because I like to live on a habitable planet more than I like your ability to prompt a defective and stylisticly pathetic essay for your college class.
If your phone could do the ai trash, it would still be morally bankrupt and devoid of any humanity. But it’s done on 5 gpus that eat as much energy as your entire household.
The real usefulness of ai technology is probably limited to 1% of what it is now. Signal processing, protein folding, translation and transcription are all fine and well. But it is 99% spam and so I’ll judge the technology on that.