I make more than enough to offset that at this point in my career, so no.

For someone younger starting out? Absolutely a decent deal.

Trump isn’t running.

Why is that a problem?

Did you not read the next sentence in my comment?

They really became a lot less of a desirable option as EVs started to get better. EVs have a couple of downsides (weight, charge time) but pretty much everything else about EVs is easier. Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to store in a compressed state, the engines are for more complex than an electric motor, EV charging is easy and obviously far more available at this point, etc.

You’re right that some places do that, but it’s very rare comparatively.

Irrational protests are not helpful. Doing something just because it’s popular is called a fad.

Anti-corporate sentiment and protests are hilarious, there’s already an easy mechanism to punish companies. Don’t buy their shit, or support other companies that buy their shit. However, that rarely works because “the public” doesn’t actually care and just wants cheap shit.

We could put oil companies out of business in a couple of years by simply changing our collective individual purchasing habits. That would require a sacrifice in lifestyle quality that most people aren’t willing to provide though.

I wonder how many people go to these ai-datacenter protests, then go home and ask chatgpt to help them write a birthday card joke for their friend/family member. I would bet large amounts of money that it’s a sizeable percentage of vocal critics.

A) That’s called a hydrogen car, and they exist already.

B) Never, the output is water. Then you just use enegy to split the water back into hydrogen and oxygen before burning it back into water. Just add energy from your preferred renewable source.

See this is part of the problem, people aren’t paying attention to the words and spin that is being used to deceive you.

It’s not 5% of enegy use, the statistics you see for that number are for “electricity use” which is not the same.

Electricity production/consumption only accounts for around 35% of global energy use (and not all of it comes from fossil fuels). Most global energy use is fossil fuels being burned directly in vehicles (trucks, mining, etc.) or industrial processes (fertilizer production, gas refineries, etc.)

The US also hosts a very large percentage of the world’s datacenters. That 5% number also includes All types of datacenters, not just AI which still make up a large portion of that number.

So when you actually complete the math, the current AI enegy use is around 0.5% of global energy use.

For comparison, meat production takes around 15% of global energy use.

Feel free to double check the facts and math on this, it’s all available publicly.

That is the most defeatist argument I think I’ve heard. You’re essentially suggesting that it’s too late to fix the biggest issues, so you’re going to protest things that won’t actually have an impact just because it’s easier.

You’re right that people could be doing multiple, I’m just pointing out they aren’t doing that.

At this point it’s clearly either just performative activism, or people are using the environment as an excuse to hide their worries about the economic impacts that may affect them (completely valid)

The third option is that people are so poorly educated that they actually can’t think rationally about this issue. I’m not ruling that out at this point.

Where’s the protests over golf courses though? Why are you showing up to an Anti-AI protest, but not organizing one for golf courses?

This is the biggest thing that’s pissing me off about these anti-AI for environmental reasons folks. People are literally getting into giant SUVs to drive to anti-AI datacenter protests, then stopping off to get a steak to cook for dinner on the way home.

The amount of fuel they just burned, and the amount of energy and pollution beef production generates for that steak are quite literally orders of magnitude worse for the environment than AI datacenters.

Yet nobody is protesting combustion vehicles, or even oil and gas companies at this point, and very few people choose to not eat meat (and even a lot of those don’t do it for environmental reasons).

Rational people worried about the environment, pollution, or water usage would target the worst offenders. Yet here they are protesting in massive numbers for something that’s less than well under 1% of global energy use.

Hot pot works too.

The one exception (it did age decently) is Austin Powers.

They must have used the time machine to look forward and figure out what they could get away with and then danced as close to the line as possible.

I would honestly say it’s more Apathy than Propaganda.

Most people simply don’t think they can do anything, that it wastes their time, and therefore just tune it out and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Lots of companies are a risk to consumers. Tobacco ringing any bells?

I was looking for this particular users idea, not the broader definition. I work in this field and am well versed on ML.

A) most of the pollution from humans doesn’t come from electricity usage, or more specifically the fossil fuels used to make electricity. It comes from direct fossil fuels used in heating, combustion engines, and industrial processes like making fertilizer. Fossil fuels used to make electricity only make up something like 30-35% of global use.

B) while you’re right that humans don’t go away, the entire datacenter industry right now only uses about 0.5% of global energy. Even if we expanded datacenter enegy use by 10x what we currently have it still makes up about the same total global enegy use as what currently goes to raising cows, and meat production as a whole is about 15% of global energy use.

C) Nuclear plants are pretty clean energy. I don’t have anything wrong with building more of them as long as the costs are transferred to the users properly and there isn’t government/business bullshit downloading externalities to individuals.

“the environmental costs for mainly doing things humans could have done”

/me checks how much the environmental costs of humans doing those tasks would be…

shocked Pikachu

AI causes a tiny fraction of the environmental impact that a human causes, Humans emit more pollution commuting to offices than the entire datacenter industry will use in the next few years, and transportation is only the third largest way that a human pollutes (on average) with the other two larger cases being home heating/cooling and food consumption.

I’m not saying humans are bad, but you cannot be going around making that comparison that AI is worse for the environment than humans.

The whole who controls it thing is a massive problem, no argument there.

How do you differentiate AI and Generative AI?

Do you mean Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) as in what we see with large language models?

The investment bubble may collapse on them, but the usage isn’t going anywhere but up. I don’t know why you think it’s some sort of scam. If it was such a scam, companies that have been using it for two years already would be throwing it in the trash and instead they’re buying up more capacity.

I have legitimate business use cases for it today, and my company can’t get hands on hardware or even available compute from the big players because it’s in such high demand.

It used to be that most of the compute was going to training models, but that hasn’t been the case for a year now. The majority (and it’s increasing fast) is inference at this point and while it doesn’t live up to the “It will do your entire job and get you fired” it’s definitely useful in many situations.

Cooking food, and especially my two instantpots