> Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.<p>> Suggests<p>So it’s a complete guess, cool.<p>> Trained<p>I… don’t care? That’s a one-time cost, talk about how much inference costs and also make me understand why that matters. The water wasn’t destroyed in the process.<p>I’m having a hard time taking this article seriously, so data centers had more emissions than commercial flights (I’d like to see the numbers instead of this person’s word given other questionable things they say, like above), data centers provide a lot more value IMHO so that’s not surprising to me.<p>The answer to high emissions from energy production used to run something is not to shut down the thing using power (if it’s useful, crypto is a different beast), it’s to change the source of the energy. What would this author have us do? Shut down data centers than run the internet because they use power that comes from less desirable sources? Absurd.
I have never been able to understand the argument about the supposed high water use - the water doesn't magically cease to exist after it's been used to cool a datacenter. You put freshwater in and get the same, but warmer, freshwater out. Probably doesn't require much (if any) in the way of treatment to become potable again.<p>Am I missing something or is it a bit of a disingenuous argument?
> The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates<p>This is nothing special.
Some months ago was considered normal that Bitcoin farms eat the energy of one town.
And it is still normal for Electron programms to eat a lot of resources. Because they can.
There is a lot of people that claim to care about climate, gender equality, human rights, working conditions etc... and then they keep using this shiny useless thing that goes in the opposite direction...