Google Is Really, Really Thirsty
Google said it consumed 5.6 billion gallons of water in 2022—its push into AI is likely to make that amount skyrocket.
Highlighting that in the article researchers found that the average chat with ChatGPT is the equivalent of dumping one bottle of water on the floor.
It's important to remember that not every litre of water is the same as every other liter of water.
It's really important to watch water use if you're using groundwater in Texas or California, but water is a renewable resource in many places and it isn't a problem to use water as long as it's properly managed. For example if you remove water from a river, purify it, use it for something benign like cooling making sure not to add anything to it, process it so you're not impacting the ecosystem, then return it to the same river, then you've used water, but you didn't really consume anything.
On the other hand, if you polute that water, or you damage local ecosystems, or if you're pulling water out of non-renewable sources, that's a problem. Environmentalism must be local, there are few universal answers.
The article doesn't address it, maybe someone here can.. what does "consumed" mean? Where does the water go after it's used to cool? Surely it's reusable, right?
To add to what the other person said, I went looking and couldn’t find any solid answers. Part of it might be that Google considers their water use details as proprietary information they’re not keen on sharing, and there’s so many sites in so many different jurisdictions that I’d be surprised if there was an overarching solution.
I thought this article went into it decently: https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/
The researchers also found that an average conversation with ChatGPT amounts to dumping out a bottle of water on the floor.
This is what I was wondering when the tech media was saying "ChatGPT, the Google killer! Google is threatened by ChatGPT replacing Google search!!" a couple of months ago. One, it doesn't seem like they're comparable products for most uses. But also, what about energy usage? It's a hell of a lot more intensive to spin up an AI instance to generate paragraphs on the fly than query a database and print out a bunch of links to existing web pages. Also, horribly inefficient to generate new text every single time for whatever someone writes.
One, it doesn’t seem like they’re comparable products for most uses.
ChatGPT, the user-facing website, is not comparable to google, but the technology itself is directly comparable. I am using Google's own brand of chatbot-in-search (not bard, but probably is bard in the background) and it really does a good job taking the information from the top couple search results and compiling it together in one place for me to get the answer to my question. It seems (seems) less likely to hallucinate since it seems to be pulling information specifically from the search results; I obviously don't accept what it outputs without clicking through to the source websites, but I could see that becoming unnecessary in the future, since so far I haven't seen anything misrepresented or made up.
It's like Google's thing where they pull short answers to questions from popular websites (like wikipedia) but dialed to 11.
Also, horribly inefficient to generate new text every single time for whatever someone writes.
Cached answers incoming...
Someone with a degree weigh in here. All these big tech companies are buying 100% sustainable energy, reducing their carbon footprint YOY, but it doesn’t seem to be making a difference on global GHG.
What accounts for the increase? Purely population increase plus consumption?
Not a degree holder for this topic but my significant other works in renewable energy. A lot of these companies actually just buy and sell "renewable" credits which is legal in the US so they can make the claim. They themselves do not have to be using renewable energy. IE if I am LemmyCorp and I have genuine renewable energy, I can get it certified and sell my credits to BananaPhoneCorp.
It is not always the case, but it is quite popular. Rivian's CEO made a remark on it today: https://www.theverge.com/23803541/rivian-solar-kentucky-ppa-ceo-scaringe-interview
Due to constant growth being a requirement of our economic system, implementation of renewables results in the prior non renewable energy being consumed by another entity.