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We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
(www.technologyreview.com)
as it gets better
Bold assumption.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
301 points (96.6% liked)
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Historically AI always got much better. Usually after the field collapsed in an AI winter and several years went by in search for a new technique to then repeat the hype cycle. Tech bros want it to get better without that winter stage though.
AI usually got better when people realized it wasn't going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.
Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.
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That's part of why they installed Donald Trump as the dictator of the United States. The other is the network states.
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Yeah, I think there was some efforts, until we found out that adding billions of parameters to a model would allow both to write the useless part in emails that nobody reads and to strip out the useless part in emails that nobody reads.
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The energy issue almost feels like a red herring for distracting all idiots from actual AI problems and lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It's so tiring.
Partly, yep. Seems like every time I try to pin down an AI on a detail of a question worth asking - a math question, or a date in history, it'll confidently reply with the first answer it finds ... right or wrong.
I don't think accuracy is an issue either. I've been on the web since inception and we always had a terribly inaccurate information landscape. It's really about individual ability to put together found information to an accurate world model and LLMs is a tool just like any other.
The real issues imo are effects on society be it information manipulation, breaking our education and workforce systems. But all of that is overshadowed by meme issues like energy use or inaccuracy as these are easy to understand for any person while sociology, politics and macro economics are really hard.
That's because it IS an issue, together with many other issues like disinformation, over reliance, wrong tools for wrong (most) jobs, etc.
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How does crypto mining play into all of the electrical need? I know they used to use a butt load.
I found this article from last year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.
The wide range should not be too surprising, it's a mess to keep track of, especially with the current administration. Since then, with Trump immediately pledging to support the "industry", I can only imagine it consuming even more now.
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