Does AI really "consume" water? Surely it's a closed loop
>>108576071do you know what happens to your pee
>>108576075>do you know what happens to your peeNot after your mom wipes it off her face, no.
>>108576071It's a closed loop, but not all water in the loop can be used.
>>108576075Closed loop!
>>108576071>Surely it's a closed loopNo, industrial cooling systems are open loop.They cool by evaporating water, the vapor then escapes to the air and has to be replenished.They could also cool with radiators in a closed loop, but that's far less efficient so nobody does that at scale.
>>108576071A lot of the data centers use cooling systems where the condenser loop is fed from cooling towers. Cooling towers lose water by design as they rely on evaporation for cooling.
>>108576094Drinking your own pee is actually a very bad idea in survival situations. You're increasing waste concentration in urine, making your kidneys work harder and waste even more water than if you did not
>>108576071>>108576129I do want to add that in places like the Californian coastline the evaporated water will likely rain/snow down back on the mountains it came from.Which should lead to slightly more water in the rivers flowing to the datacenters.So in that sense perhaps no water is wasted.
>>108576165I tell my organs to work smarter, not harder and they do, so I think them and we continue living. Sucks to suck, but not for me cus I suck and win.
it's consumed in the sense that it's used for that purpose rather than something else, not that it's destroyed. it eventually makes it's way back into the water cycle
Do people believe water just floats away into space? Why aren't they freaking out about helium then?
>>108576211I think that chart only shows the water consumption of the queries, not the training when all the hard number crunching gets done.
>>108576228you make it sound like queries are trivial. go tell that to the local model threads
>>108576224>Why aren't they freaking out about heliumWe should.Helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction.And when it escapes to the atmosphere it does escape into space since it's so light.So if we use less natural gas in the future we'll have less helium to do cool stuff with like make quantum computers.Wasting helium on party balloons is absolute insanity.
>>108576242AFAIK they use many times more electricity training the models than querying them.
>>108576094The people who made this meme have kids who are adults
>>108576198>I suckWe know, but linkedin is not your personal blog, xir.
>>108576211>2023Already obsolete.
>>108576211THIS GOES AGAINST MY NARRATIVE reeeeeeeeeeee
>>108576250It can be artificially produced by bombarding lithium or boron with high energy protons. Not really used because gas is far cheaper but it's a possible alternative for restricted applications.
>>108576369Yeah at extreme cost and low yield.
>>108576342>heee hee hee mammy imma trollan dem ludice
>>108576165Wrong
>inserts nanobots into water
>>108576075It gets "cleaned" and then I drink it. I drink your pee and it gives me life. You piss and I am alive. This is beautiful. This is piss. My life is your piss. Thank you, pissboy.
>>108576071All water is closed loop.
>>108576796The earth loses about 95,000 tonnes of hydrogen every year.
>>108576211How does watching TV for one hour consume water?
>>108576596True
>>108576211>"one hamburger"this chart is bait, they include the entire cow's life
>>108576166The water needs to be filtered so it doesn't contain any impurities that would gunk up the cooling system. They need the most pristine water possible and that's in limited supply.
>>108576833>hydrogenliterally the most abundant element in the known universewe can not run out of it
>>108577020That’s only for the innermost cooling loop, which is closed and recycled as much as possible. The water in the loop open to evaporation comes straight out of the river/reservoir, though often it’s still treated with some disinfectant to prevent legionnaire’s disease.
>>108577051just because it's abundant doesn't mean it's usable, dummy
>>108576224if the water floats to the sea it's as good as gone. retards like you would love to ignore this
>>108576165He doesn't do it for survival, he does it for the love of the game.
>>108576166Most of California's freshwater is wasted on saving tiny fish that have virtually zero impact on the ecosystem.
>>108576944Because that's what it takes to make 6-8oz of beef. Unless you're seriously dumb enough to think it takes just 660 gallons of water to raise a whole beef cow.
>>108577355the problem is that it doesn't factor in the whole training process for the model which is prompted, only the instance running the finished model
no
>>108576071What do you mean by closed loop, exactly? It's a closed loop on a planetary scale due to the water cycle, in the sense that the water used to cool the datacenters doesn't disappear into space or something. If you mean that it's a closed loop in the sense that data centers do not need to be continuously supplied with water then no, that is wrong, they do in fact need a continuous water supply because it evaporates as they cool their shit.There is likely a closed loop as well, as in coolant that circulates within the DC and is not used up, but that coolant itself needs to be cooled and have its waste heat get dumped into the environment and this last step uses evaporative cooling, which obviously needs a continuous supply of water. They use evaporative cooling because it's much more effective and compact.>>108576242They are trivial compared to training, not necessarily trivial in the sense that you can run 'em on a 486 with 8MB RAM.
>>108576071It "consumes water" in the same way anything water cooled would
>>108577343Damn, we should waste it on generating AI images that have absolutely zero impact on the ecosystem instead.
>>108576075tap water is just recycled loli pee. think about it.
It's amazing how little room for nuance there is when this topic comes up. It's either "data centers will drain the Great Lakes" or "erm actually they recycle all the water and here's why it's okay to build multiple gigawatts of compute in the Mojave desert"
>>108577452consider it done
>>108577523I even had the AI make her into a goblin
>>108577127>so the servers dont catch a virussmart
>>108576088Why not?
>>108576138And the water goes into the Minecraft void never to be seen again, thus decreasing the total mass of the Earth.
>>108577497It would be if we have nuclear power plants…
>>108576071Water is a flat circle.
>>108577497Because it's entirely geography dependent and up to local government and regulatory bodies to decide whether permitting a data center, like any other large industry, is viable. The online discussion is just an extension of the endless culture war slap fight.
it is like vegans complaining about how many gallons of water a pound of meat takes to raise compared to onions
>>108578212but i weall weally needed the single avocado that uses 55 gallons of water to grow
>>108577355That's hundreds of burgers, not one.
>>108578289beef cow uses about 21900 gallons of water throughout its life to get to slaughter age. not including the water used to grow its grain feed or the water we spray them with or use for its shit pond
>>108576242>>108577423>They are trivial compared to trainingNot at scale. Queries are extremely costly.I think the reason everyone gets confused by this is that model training is prohibitive.The massive expense of training a new model cockblocks potential competition.Inference is also extremely expensive, but scales with usage. You could start small and grow incrementally if inference was the only cost.
>>108576211i'd like to see that adult cow-sized beef patty
>>108578699anon you retard the hamburger itself isn't 660 gallons
>>108578890but it could be, right? like we have the technology to measure and cook a 660 gallon hamburger?
>>108576166Not all data centers are on the California coastline. That the water is returned to Earth somewhere else is of little comfort for those living in a water poor area that gets a data center plopped down near them.
>>108578911don't see why not
>>108576859I would like you to really think hard about your question and see if you can answer it for yourself. If you can't figure it out, don't worry. Come back here and we can explain it for you.
>>108576081it evaporated from the sidewalk and went back into the sky to become rain another day
>>108578911>>108578939world's biggest burger on record was only 307 gallons
>>108578948I can't figure it out.
>>108578968
>>108579016it would probably only need a few more pattieswe have the technology, but do we have the PASSION
>>108576129Evaporative cooling only works in areas where it's not already stupidly humid.Water chillers are actually quite efficient since they run a refrigerant cycle and work anywhere.
>>108576211It's probably worth remembering that the water sources used on farms and in cities are generally not directly connected.So even if a farmer cuts his water consumption by half, that doesn't mean that water becomes directly available for people in a city to use. Whereas data centers that are built in cities are drawing directly from the city water supply.
>>108576071I have an vidya buddy who lives down south. He lives out in the sticks. And they put a data center near his land. And the lakes are low and streams have stopped flowing. He has a little creek that runs the length of his property. Its usually 2-3 feett deep at its deepest point. But now its but a trickle. His groundwater has also gone dry. His wells have zero water in them. He cant water his crops or his livestock. His electric bills have also gone up. He told me that their might be a reverse bundy ranch at that datacenter because so many of his neighbors also got fucked.
>>108579228there are a lot of factors involved, which is kind of the point. people read "ai is using MILLIONS OF LITRES" and people have no sense of scale regarding water usage at this scale and that millions of litres is fucking nothing compared to tons of other uses
>>108579237evidently putting a datacentre in a place with limited local water supply is a shit idea
>>108577497Chink shills keep trying astroturf an anti datacenter movement to delay them.They’re also withholding industrial components for datacenter projects as we speak so it’s not just shilling.
my sides are leaving with the water
>>108576211>2023ChatGPT and AI in general wasn't being used nearly as much at that time as it is now nor were the models at the point they are now.
>>108576166go learn about water tables
>>108578108cheapening out on engineering
>>108576796I mean, why not just say everything is a closed loop at the scale of the known universe? When people are talking about water use/wastage, they are talking about the available clean potable water available at right now to maybe a few months period at their geographical location, localized to a few hundred square miles. That evaporated water might get blown as clouds to another continent and fall down as rain there, taking years to eventually return.
So what are we working on?
If AI is so smart, why can't it generate water?
>>108576071You better fucking believe it does, hoss.
>>108578988I wish that anon answered you because I'm curious but not enough to go look it up. Some guesses that I can pull out of my ass are hydroelectric water "use," cooling for nuclear power, and I guess coal power probably has some cooling requirements too. Four gallons for one hour of TV sounds crazy though. Or maybe it's 1 gallon for 300 queries that's really crazy.
>>108578948I know they use liquid crystals these days but TVs aren't heavy, what gives, it cannot be 4 gallons in there`
>>108576071The only water related story I've seen that holds any weight was some semi-rural people that had their wells fill with sediment because a data center build nearby. But that would have happened with literally any big construction because it wasn't the water usage but the soil disruption causing it.
>>108579291>Siver Loauoaing PrecipitationNice AI-slop you have there, anon.
>>108580584
>>108580615Astroturfed word.
>>108576211Cool story bro, you convinced me to skip my lunch hanburger so that I can do 300 chargpt queries.
>>108576211One prompt can be thousands of queries in current "reasoning" (lmao) modes, and people don't eat burgers every few seconds.
>>108576071They found a way to create tokens through nuclear annihilation. Sadly the tech works aneutronic and needs hydrogen to properly function, water is the best source of it.
>>108576071can someone explain how come Anthrophics' servers are soo shit compared to OAIs'?
>>108580441Gotta wash the coal too
>>108579318I don't know where you live, but datacenters are certainly not expanding slowly in my country. Every week a new one is announced
>>108576071No idea how much water they use. When I searched it all the websites seemed to be written by green people, so it is probably drenched with agenda.
>>108576071They make potable water into non-potable water and and the water would need to be cleaned again for human consumption. They do this because it's cheaper to just buy municipal water than to find another solution.
Why don't they build the data centers in a cold place in the arctic circle and just use the cold air??? They all seem to be built in hot places which would surely make it even harder to cool everything.
it is a closed loop in the sense that the water enters the atmosphere and isnt detroyed or vented into space
>>108576081fucking bodied that jeet into the stratosphere GODDAM lol
Whatever happened to stirling engines cooling? There were these small engines that would harvest the heat from your CPU and use it to run a fan to cool itself down, it couldn't keep up with the housefire CPUs of today on a reasonable size for a PC case but surely it can be scaled up to the size of a datacenters cooling tower.
>>108576250US sold all its helium to Germany at 95% discount. What the heckin
>>108580623no the only astroturfed word is slop
>>108577051Helium is the 2nd most abundant and we can run out of that.
>>108581964>Helium is the 2nd most abundantin the universe***Not earth sadly
Not all helium is equal, I think MRI grade helium can only be found on an underground well in the US.
>>108581927I'm a bit out of my depth on this to do the actual hot air buoyancy calculations, but anything more than a chimney will be a detriment to cooling efficiency. Doesn't matter whether it's stirling or peltier, it's only sensible on a stove that's meant to heat the room.
>>108581927I could work actually. But you have to dissipate heat somehow. And maybe you can't run it hot enough to have enough thermal energy to actually run the stirling engine. It requires temp difference to extract energy and make it kinetic.
>>108581975so set up a big hose and just suck it into earth from space? are americans stupid??
>>108578988>>108580441TVs use more electricity than than you might think. Their wattage is relatively high. As well, we use them for longer than most other electrical devices, certainly much longer than it takes for a ChatGPT answer to generate. This means watching television uses a lot of electricity. Generating electricity uses water, because most electricity is generated through heat based methods like nuclear, natural gas or coal, and any heat based method will heat water into steam to turn a turbine.The heat exchange between the primary cooling loop and the secondary one is more efficient if the water is colder, so instead of using a closed loop, power plants almost all have an open loop which dumps heat back into the environment and gets new cold water from there too. Sometimes that means venting steam, and sometimes it means letting it cool down to hot water and pouring that out. It raises the temperature of the environment a little bit, but the environment is huge so it doesn't really matter in most cases. Compare it to the amount of heat from the sun each day and it is irrelevant.In that sense it uses more water, but that's the same sense in which any cooling process "uses water". It's a bit of a silly metric to begin with, but yes it does "use" more.
>>108580615>>108580623luddchud bros....
>>108581927Those large cooling towers don't even need a fan.They are called natural draft cooling towers.Because heat rises you get a natural updraft inside the tower.Unfortunately this only works at a given scale, smaller cooling towers need a fan.But the fan doesn't consume that much energy.
>>108581993No, it would not work. As an analogy, it would be like building a dam to generate electricity to run a pump to deal with a flooding issue.
Why not build them in the ocean? Infinite water
>>108582325environmental activists wont let them do that either, ironically.
>>108577141so why does it matter if it's "lost" then, what is the point you're trying to argue?
>>108582325Heating up bodies of water can fuck up the wildlife, like spur the growth of algae, or make fish gay.
>>108582021Why doesn't the graph show electricity consumed if water consumption is just a proxy for it? Probably because the point is to fool retards like you into vastly underestimating the costs of LLM inference. A TV in a living room is just a TV. There's no other infrastructure for it other than the cable or network router. Generated heat is neglible and dissapates into the environment. GPUs meanwhile are the center of a large system of compute and storage infrastructure which all generate intense heat and must be cooled with industrial HVAC systems. AI use has exploded. Every internet search now hits a hot-running GPU. Every rufus interaction on amazon. People run agents grinding interactions many hours a day. These datacenters are running GPUs grinding inference 24/7.
>>108582388Power plants are often located next to a sea or a large lake to use the water for cooling.It does raise some environmental concerns but it's cheaper than building cooling towers.
>>108582519It wasn't necessary to call me a retard and make a bunch of baseless assumptions about what I'm saying or what the graph means.>Why doesn't the graph show electricity consumed if water consumption is just a proxy for it?Because people have latched onto water use as a concern around AI, and the graph is attempting to address that. It does that by comparing it to the largest water user - agriculture - in a way people can use for context quickly: a burger. Agriculture uses a little over 70% of all the world's water.>>108582519>A TV in a living room is just a TV. There's no other infrastructure for it other than the cable or network router. Generated heat is neglible and dissapates into the environment. GPUs meanwhile are the center of a large system of compute and storage infrastructure which all generate intense heat and must be cooled with industrial HVAC systems.If you would like to talk about electricity usage instead of water usage, we can do that too. We don't have to do this guess work you're doing about whether the infrastructure adds up to more than the television does or whatever. We can just look at the numbers directly.AI accounts for around about 0.2% of all global electricity usage. Datacentres as a whole account for 1.5%. AI is not even the majority of datacentre power consumption, but people latch onto whatever hot button issue is new and flashy, and assume it is the root cause for everything.TVs account for around 3% (at the low end of the estimates) of all global electricity usage. They're more widespread, and they are used for a much longer duration than AI inference is.Those are the figures for water and electricity usage for AI versus TVs. What more is there to say?
>>108583009Hold on hold on hold onNTA but>Datacentres as a whole account for 1.5%>AI accounts for around about 0.2% of all global electricity usageSo slop is taking over 13% of datacenter power? And this is not a problem?
>>108583053I don't see why it would be. Most people assume that's it's nearly 100% of datacentre usage, because they haven't looked into the matter. How much did you think it was going to be?Global AI electricity usage: 0.2%Global TV electricity usage: 3%TV is "slop" too and 15x the usage of AI. You can think of the best TV shows and those aren't slop, but then recall that it's mostly going to be used for daytime television and the news.Maybe we should spend less electricity on slop, but just in terms of resource usage, AI is a small fish. If that's going to be your cause you fight for, start somewhere more effective.
>>108583069I hoped it was maybe 2%, but dumping over 10% so that people could go insane gassed up by electronic opium? And Altman is asking for more billions because AGI is around the corner? Nah man, this is madness.
>>108583069Look at the slope of the line though. AI is just getting started.
>>108583009People latched on to water, then disingenuous assholes make a fake comparison between a fully-loaded cost of running a TV and a specific water cost of running a query. It's not a fair comparison.And again, AI is growing rapidly. Datacenters for other computing have been growing for 30 years, the AI LLM craze has been less than 5.
>>108578108interest
>>108576211>one hamburgerAnyone that falls for this is a retard. This is the MARGINAL COST of the VERY FIRST hamburger produced. Meaning in order to make a hamburger, you must create the ENTIRE supply chain involved in creating that hamburger, so technically yes the cost of the FIRST hamburger is equal to the TOTAL COST of the supply chain, but the MARGINAL COST of hamburgers drastically drops as more are produced, until production capacity is reached for that current supply chain with that current capital. It's like Carl Sagan saying "In order to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." In that case it's meant to be an absurdity but this marginal cost trickery is used as misinfo and propaganda. Guys, stop being fucking retards.
>>108583510uh no, the marginal cost is over 20,000 gallons of water. that's the actual cost per burger.
>>108576071People working the data centers do
>>108577496
>>108583545What's with a burger in general? Apples to orangutans comparison.
I'm getting the distinct impression that you guys aren't actually interested in how much water AI uses, and that you'll bitch about whatever amount of water it uses, or however it uses it.
>>108576071Many industries have to balance draining fossil water faster than it is replaced. Then the little people have to run thick copper deeper and deeper down just to reach the water table.New York and Quebec/Ontario water quantities are underneath the rest of the continent but they have to fight for depth and volume, as in i drink your milkshake or forget it jake, it's chinatown.
>>108576165it's better than drinking nothing, obviously>waste even more water than if you did notwhat the fuck are you even talking about retard
>>108583663In reality no one gives a fuck, it's just the thing to be outraged about.Once you realize the truth of the matter. (DCs being built in undesirable/poor areas, not the nice suburbs /g/ cares about) you also realize just how much hypocrisy is being delivered here.
>>108577496thank you anon. my wife has been nagging me to drink more water and I've been too lazy, but now finally I have the motivation
>>108576228>>108576260That's no longer true, ever since the reasoning models with their massive context lengths and token spam during inference, inference is a large majority of compute usage for the big AI labs. Like around 10-20x more going into the inference (the queries) than the training depending on the model.
>>108576071It uses water in one area, water evaporates and might not fall down in the same place causing a few local droughts if the area was poorly picked.This isn't much to do with AI, it's the same as any industrial use and if the above occurs it's the fault of the (probably burgerland) regulations letting a poorly fitting industry choose the area.China has basically zero problems with this because they use so much hydroelectric power and just move people out of areas for industry lol
>>108576211>it eventually makes it's way back into the water cyclecool, can I poison all the drinking water in the US then since it doesn't matter as it will eventually go back to being drinkable during the water cycle?
>>108576211Wow another retard using fake numbers. The bullshit high water usage lie for farm animals is using RAINWATER to inflate the numbers over an entire cows life.
>>108584625source: your ass
>>108583984because it takes more water to process something so concentrated than if you simply didn't process it? are you an esl nigger?
>>108576071>Surely it's a closed loopNo. Cold water in, hot water out.
>>108576211>it eventually makes it's way back into the water cycleYou are completely ignoring the fact that the water cycle is uneven. In some places, it can span years/decades/centuries.
>>108576796That image is lying to you. >>108584944
>>108576071>Africans and Indians drink waterCheckmate anti-AI doomers!
>>108584944>builds a dense technologically advanced civilization in a desert>runs into water trouble>crys about itSorry but this is literally not my problem, if they had half a brain they would build this garbage in naturally cold climates that all have an over abundance of fresh water, the global majority of it in fact. But they don't, because then they'd have to live and work in winter and that's unacceptable so instead they just drain extremely small and limited water reservoirs until they disappear and then blame the goyim for showering too often and flushing too much. That sucks but oh well
>>108577051max IQ to think like this?
>>108585038>Please watch me pretend it isn't my problem
some of you motherfuckers are so dumb and retarded, i am not even engaging with any of this shit man fuck you all
I'm planning to grow crops on a new piece of land soon, it's going to use about 5000 gallons of water per day.That water is going to turn into clouds and rain somewhere and then either evaporate into clouds again or drain back into the water table for some other crop owner to use.
>>108576689>t.
>>108578419How much water does a human use throughout its life? For every human that uses AI we could replace 99-999 humans with more AI and maintain the same level of productivity. We should be doing this so AI can expand.
>>108579249they do use millions of liters. It's not closed loop
>>108576165It has Nitrogen so it is a good plant fertilizer.If you burn pee you get CO2, Water, and Nitrogen Gas.The Nitrogen makes it rather explosive.
the water is transmuted directly into tokens. it's a big deal, the earth is drying up.
AI doesn't use any more water than a water cooled gaming PC. It's fuckin nothing compared to all the other insane wastes of water going on these days, draining aquifers and lakes to grow alfalfa and nuts in the fucking desert
>>108576071the water usage is vastly overstated, people have it in their head that these data centers are just running a faucet over a burning hot CPU that just vaporizes it all into steam
>>108587325There's extra steps but that's literally it. And they jack up the prices of municipal water, so it's not a nothingburger.
>>108578108bidenflation
>>108576071It's because most of energy powering the servers is generated by steam. Massive amounts of steam.
>>108576071>Closed loopThat's the fucking problem. It's pretty much water hoarding. You can't use that water because they're using it.
>>108576088>evaporation cooling>closed loopKill yourself
>>108588821it's closed loop but not 100% efficient. It's why you refill your AIO and any that claims there's no need for a refill are talking out of their ass.
I like to run the hot water 24/7 when I stay at a hotel, The sound of the water is nice ambience and it helps make me feel like I got my moneys worth, So I'll just leave the sink or tub flowing.
