Comment on What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 1 day agoFrom the video:
Even under the maximlist goals of AI companies, the projected increase of water use is small compared to what cities and industries already use.
He even mentions how US corn uses 80x more water than worldwide AI use; with 40% of that corn burned as ethanol.
Corn ethanol being stupid doesn’t make AI less stupid.
There’s plenty of stupidity out there. That logic would make everything useless.
By that logic, no one outside the US would care about voting, since they already reached peak stupidity, so voting for a better president in Argentina will not get rid of trump.
It is useful if you’re trying to figure out what to focus on. In this case, the concern is wasteful water usage. If you point to a larger area of wasteful water consumption, it would make more sense to target that first.
Except we are already focusing on AI data centers. By bringing up corn you’re just unfocusing. Which is the opposite of what you want.
Yes, both are bad, and we should get rid of both. But both things can be done at the same time. You don’t need to steal the focus from another issue to try to redirect it.
Instead of “why are we caring about data centers? Corn is worse!”. Try “while we are fighting data centers, we should also look at corn, they’re bad too”.
I made a point to update my post, not only with your link, but also with your timestamped link.
This is why I’m here, to ask questions and seek answers…
I appreciate it. <3
nightwatch_admin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s amazing that Hank can come to this conclusion since basically every genai company is hiding their resource usage. (Well, actually not that amazing as Hank has gone completely on the side (and gets sponsored by) these companies and is strongly biased).
Have a look at eg pivot-to-ai.com/…/how-much-water-do-the-data-cent…
Bazoogle@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That link shows Altman saying current datacenters use closed loop systems and make vague rhetorical questions. That’s not a source