Image credit: technologyhill.com
The definition of a ‘small’ country could change to ‘not so small’ quite quickly. When so-called net zero climate policies are threatening to make electricity supplies more restricted and unreliable, the added effect of AI demand could become significant. This is on top of the issue with data centres – the BBC recently reported that Data centres use almost a fifth of Irish electricity.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) comes with promises of helping coders code faster, drivers drive safer, and making daily tasks less time-consuming, says TechXplore.
But in a commentary published October 10 in the journal Joule, the founder of Digiconomist demonstrates that the tool, when adopted widely, could have a large energy footprint, which in the future may exceed the power demands of some countries.
“Looking at the growing demand for AI service, it’s very likely that energy consumption related to AI will significantly increase in the coming years,” says author Alex de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Since 2022, generative AI, which can produce text, images, or other data, has undergone rapid growth, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Training these AI tools requires feeding the models a large amount of data, a process that is energy intensive.
Hugging Face, an AI-developing company based in New York, reported that its multilingual text-generating AI tool consumed about 433 megawatt-hours (MWH) during training, enough to power 40 average American homes for a year.
AI’s energy footprint does not end with training. De Vries’s analysis shows that when the tool is put to work—generating data based on prompts—every time the tool generates a text or image, it also uses a significant amount of computing power and thus energy. For example, ChatGPT could cost 564 MWh of electricity a day to run.
While companies around the world are working on improving the efficiencies of AI hardware and software to make the tool less energy intensive, de Vries says that an increase in machines’ efficiency often increases demand. In the end, technological advancements will lead to a net increase in resource use, a phenomenon known as Jevons’ Paradox.
“The result of making these tools more efficient and accessible can be that we just allow more applications of it and more people to use it,” de Vries says.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Humm, there’s LOTS one could say and about rubbish in, you know the rest. And who is to be held accountable for resulting effects of that nonsense. Just like artificial Meat. … NO it never can be meat – so lets not continue calling it that. A big thing is made of plagiarising work .. where do the useful idiots think the intelligence arrives from?
So like the power wasted in Coin Mining, and Phone warz on the wall … Gi’e the man a job and he’ll be happy. No more Angry people standing watching the world go by…. ‘what / why am I doing standing here on the planet ?’