this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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166
‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought (www.thetimes.com)
submitted 8 hours ago by cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Writing a 100-word email using ChatGPT (GPT-4, latest model) consumes 1 x 500ml bottle of water It uses 140Wh of energy, enough for 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max

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[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

140Wh seems off.

It's possible to run an LLM on a moderately-powered gaming PC (even a Steam Deck).

Those consume power in the range of a few hundred watts and they can generate replies in a seconds, or maybe a minute or so. Power use throttles down when not actually working.

That means a home pc could generate dozens of email-sized texts an hour using a few hundred watt-hours.

I think that the article is missing some factor, such as how many parallel users the racks they're discussing can support.

[–] teh7077@lemmy.today 4 points 51 minutes ago

That's what I always thought when reading this and other articles about the estimated power consumption of GPT-4. Run a decent 7B LLM on the consumer hardware like the steam deck and you got your e-mail in a minute with the fans barely spinning up.

Then I read that GPT-4 is supposedly a 1760B model. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4#Background) I don't know how energy usage would scale with model size exactly, but I'd consider it plausible that we are talking orders of magnitude above the typical local LLM.

considering that the email by the local LLM will be good enough 99% of the time, GPT may just be horribly inefficient, in order to score higher in some synthetic benchmarks?

[–] vinnymac@lemmy.world 11 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Why does the article make it sound like cooling a data center results in constant water loss? Is this not a closed loop system?

I’m imagining a giant reservoir heat sink that runs throughout a complex to pull heat out of the surrounding environment where some liquid evaporates and needs to be replenished. But first of all we have more efficient liquid coolants, and second that would be a very lazy solution.

I wonder if they’ve considered geothermal for new data centers. You can run a geothermal loop in reverse and use the earth as a giant heat sink. It’s not water in the loop, it’s refrigerant, and it only needs to be replaced when you find the efficiency dropping, which can take decades.

[–] JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 hour ago

It highly depends on every data center, but it is very likely that they do use municipal water for cooling. Mainting a Reservoir is extremely expensive for the amount of thermal mass it requires, these things kick off HEAT.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, the vast majority are closed loop systems and the water isn't really used up, like a lot of these headlines imply.

That's not to say the energy being used can't be put to better uses, though.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 8 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Not used up per se but sequestered. It's water that nobody will ever get to drink or use for crops, etc.

[–] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 4 points 1 hour ago

The math on this doesn't really check out. The USA uses 322 billion gallons of fresh water per day. A hyperscale datacenter uses only 5 million gallons per day.

There are about 1,000 hyperscale datacenters in the USA, so that comes out to 5 billion gallons of water every day.

That's 1.5% of our annual freshwater usage, half of which is in closed loop systems and not going anywhere, and the other half being returned to the atmosphere where it will rain back down as fresh water again.

And of course, the water cycle doesn't really care about national borders or annual evaporation rates so much, and there is about 1 quintillion gallons of liquid fresh water available worldwide, so its not like sequestering 5 million gallons really offsets the available freshwater needed for hydration and agriculture.

[–] frunch@lemmy.world 23 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I'm sure I'm missing out, but i have no interest in using chatbots and other LLMs etc. It floors me to see how much attention they get though, how much resources are being dumped into their development and use. Nuclear plants being reopened for the sake of AI?!!

I also assume there's a lot of things they're capable of that could be huge for science, and there's likely lots of big things happening behind closed doors that we're yet to see in the coming years. I know it's not all just chatbots.

The way this article strikes me though, is that it's pretty much just wasting resources for parlor-game level output. I don't know if i like the idea of people giving up their ability to write a basic letter or essay, not that my opinion on the matter is gonna change anything obviously 😅

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago

Think of it like this: rich people accumulate more wealth by paying fewer people to accomplish more work faster, so it's worth burning through the worlds resources at breakneck speed to help the richies out, right?

[–] narr1@lemmy.autism.place 37 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Hah! Haha! Hahahaahah! Ties well with this one news article that I glimpsed that claims that by 2030 the need for fresh water will be 140% of the world's freshwater reserves. Infinite growth forever!

[–] frunch@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Time to buy stock in water lol

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 7 points 4 hours ago

So, Nestlé stocks?

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

New admin will do its part by discouraging pregnancy and encouraging people to die sooner.

[–] AkatsukiLevi@lemmy.world 16 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

473164-rain-world-review-great-ideas-bland-gameplay-1496651536

[–] zecg@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

Absolutely my favorite game ever

[–] ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

yeah, but it can do really cool things like "suggest a name for my project that does X".

surely that game's worth the candle, yes?

[–] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

The real surprise for me is how little the battery of my iphone holds. Especially compared to my ev6 or what my heat pump guzzles daily. Crazy.