Comment on How does AI use so much power?

ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

It’s mostly the training/machine learning that is power hungry.

AI is essentially a giant equation that is generated via machine learning. You give it a prompt with an expected answer, it gets run through the equation, and you get an output. That output gets an error score based on how far it is from the expected answer. The variables of the equation are then modified so that the prompt will lead to a better output (one with a lower error).

The issue is that current AI models have billions of variables and will be trained on billions of prompts. Each variable will be tuned based on each prompt. That’s billions to the power of billions of calculations. It takes a while. AI researchers are of course looking for ways to speed up this process, but so far it’s mostly come down to dividing up these billions of calculations over millions of computers. Powering millions of computers is where the energy costs come from.

Unless AI models can be trained in a way that doesn’t require running a billion squared calculations, they’re only going to get more power hungry.

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