this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 month ago (6 children)

how much it does use anyway? 5GWe was from delusional openai talk for investors, so maybe lower

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

That's the fucking problem, it's impossible to tell since MSFT won't tell you directly, and only the people who run the datacenters could.

The only relatively reliable numbers I was able to find were in this research paper by Luccioni and Strubell from ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024. Now, that's an obscure conference (not even ranked by CORE), by Dr. Luccioni appears to be right on the money about dangers of AI (https://www.sashaluccioni.com/).

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

i started to look up satellite photos and openinframap in order to figure out maximum capacity of their substations, but powerlines for them are probably massively oversized, and substations are probably oversized too in order to make it redundant and high-availability so there might be some way to guess it but then some of these will be underground and if they're doing load-following to match their renewables (which might be cheaper for them) then it's also oversized a bit on top of that

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well the main problem is that a datacenter is running much more than just AI. You'd need to somehow subtract "normal" cloud usage from just the promptfondling.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

ez. remember that announcement when ms said their energy use got up 36%? that's ai, and includes both training and use

this still can be fudged with more efficient office heating, shutdowns of least efficient dcs and so on, but only to a limited degree

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