midian18

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A hot potato: There have been plenty of warnings about the massive increase in energy use as a result of AI systems, but Bill Gates thinks we don't need to worry. The former Microsoft CEO and co-founder says AI will be able to reduce global energy usage and make electricity grids more efficient, offsetting the tech's own power consumption.

Speaking at a London event last week hosted by his Breakthrough Energy venture fund, Gates said, "Let's not go overboard on this."

"Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly," the billionaire added.

It's been estimated that a query run through ChatGPT requires almost ten times as much electricity to process as a Google search. As a result, carbon emissions from data centers are expected to more than double between 2022 and 2030.

The International Energy Agency is more pessimistic, saying it could take just four years for electricity usage from AI and data centers to double from the 460 terawatt hours (TWh) level recorded in 2022.

Microsoft said in May that its greenhouse gas emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, largely due to the construction of data centers that were required to meet customer demands for online services, including AI.

Gates believes that tech giants will be willing to pay higher prices as they look for new sources of clean power, especially as it will allow them to "say that they're using green energy."

"The tech companies are the [ones] willing to pay a premium, and to help bootstrap green energy capacity," he added.

The Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy group, which boasts investors such as Jeff Bezos, Masayoshi Son, and Jack Ma, has invested in more than 100 companies involved in developing sustainable energy and other technologies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

AI and deep learning technologies have been used to improve the energy efficiency of data centers for years, In 2016, a few years after it had acquired DeepMind, Google said the technology was being used to cut the amount of energy used for cooling in its data centers by 40%, which equated to a 15% reduction in overall Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) - the ratio of the total building energy usage to the IT energy usage.

Gates did warn, however, that despite the efficiency advancements brought by AI and more advanced renewable technologies, the increasing demand for electricity meant the global aim of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 was likely to be missed. "Another 10 or 15 years might be more realistic," he said.

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Bill Gates says we don't have to worry about AI energy use

 
Saying power is only for the peasants.
Billionaires with their huge mansions, yachts, super cars, parties, and megalomaniac projects don't need to bother with saying the planet.
 
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So he is literally saying ai will compete with our electricity bill in most of our lifetime. In 2065 he is predicting we will achieve net zero. Regulators have a conflict of interest to regulate their favorite investment ( ai). Like I said before regulators will attempt to regulate the individual before the megacorps.
 
We won't have to worry because the billionaires will be buying the power companies to reallocate power needed by the World.
 
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Maybe we should focus on real problems (current wars), like old sicko evil politicians that can end this planet at any time with one push of a button. Let's focus on the problem that can happen even an hour from now or a week, month or year. Maybe it's just me but take a look, we have narcissistic old leader's that are afraid of dying from old age so they want to take as many people with them as possible.
 
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ZedRM said:
Oh yeah, let's trust Bill Gates, a KNOWN professional liar...
(in case it wasn't clear, /S)
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Cuz the guy has tons of the real determinant of truth... money. When you have enough money, you can make truth lies and lies truth.
 
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One thing to keep in mind is that much of this "growth" or consumption is reactive and will not be sustained.

Countless companies that didn't exist a few years ago are springing up and risking irresponsibly vast amounts of capital on technology that they do not understand at even the most superficial levels.

There will be a bust.
 
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Meanwhile Tesla's AI software and chips have to run efficiently because they're powered by batteries, run all the time the car is driving, and the more power they use the less range your car has. However the training doesn't have to run on-demand; any data collected for that can be processed in data centers later on. And unlike on smartphones where AI queries can simply be run in the cloud (as opposed to a battery powered device), self-driving cars cannot depend on an unreliable network because safety is critical. Tesla is well aware of this so their target for an AI chip is 100 watts or less (as of a few years ago): https://www.tesla.com/AI

This is a fraction of how AI will be used in the real world. But I think Tesla will be surprising the world in the next year or two with the results they achieve in AI. It's taken priority for their CEO for a number of years, and the rest of their business is well developed at this point. I guess we'll get a preview of how Tesla envisions the future when they unveil the "Robotaxi" next month: https://electrek.co/2024/04/05/tesla-robotaxi-unveiling-august-8/
 
Vanderlinde said:
And pretty much all that power, is converted into heat.
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Why can't people do math? The sun is continually heating the earth to the tune of 173,000,000,000 megawatts. Compared to that, any heat from land-based sources is infinitesimal.

AI is already driving innovation in fields from logistics to cancer research to metallurgy and materials science. And AI-based autonomous vehicles not only have the capability to save one million death per year from auto accidents, but also reduce transportation energy usage by 30% or more in the process -- while getting us back and forth even faster than ever.
 
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Gates putting the cart before the horse. Once again, he shows he is clueless, and he's another person clueless people listen to because his billions must mean something.

I wonder how much investment Billy Boy has in AI?
 
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I tend to agree that all IT technology including AI is ultimately a net energy savings for the same "work" done. It just took a lot more energy to get things done the old way, especially once you include the energy for indirectly supporting the workers who had to spend a lot more time do it manually.

What that maybe leaves out is that the end result is usually a lot more work being achievable, so even if each unit of work was more efficient, the economy could be generating a lot more units of it = more energy overall. I also think we could see an initial deficit period where a lot of energy goes into AI doesn't actually accomplish that much more/better than previous methods.

Either way I'm pretty uninterested. The totals at play here tend to be small fractions of other factors, and often I find the same person who wants to complain to me at length about server energy usage is suddenly completely silent on the topic of, say, population growth.
 
wiyosaya said:
Gates putting the cart before the horse. Once again, he shows he is clueless
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You're far off target. AI is already generating advances in nearly every field of research. When it helps develop a material 10% stronger, it means we need 10% less of it produced, and the products it makes are 10% lighter, meaning we ship them for 10% less energy. When AI helps a major shipping firm route deliveries 10% more efficiency, it saves that much in energy as well.

I could name hundreds of other examples, but I'll note that one of the most significant advances in fusion research involves not trying to prevent plasma instabilities -- which we've failed miserably to do -- but rather to use an AI model to predict them, and counteract them as they occur.

Honestly, what the bleep is wrong with you people? This is supposedly a tech enthusiast site, and you're knocking the greatest tech advance in 100 years? There's far, far more to AI than LLM chatbots.
 
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Endymio said:
Why can't people do math? The sun is continually heating the earth to the tune of 173,000,000,000 megawatts. Compared to that, any heat from land-based sources is infinitesimal.

AI is already driving innovation in fields from logistics to cancer research to metallurgy and materials science. And AI-based autonomous vehicles not only have the capability to save one million death per year from auto accidents, but also reduce transportation energy usage by 30% or more in the process -- while getting us back and forth even faster than ever.
Click to expand...

Trust Bill "The *****" Gates who said your all stupid, planting trees won't help the planet, only removing people will...
 
JamesBlond said:
Trust Bill "The *****" Gates who said your all stupid, planting trees won't help the planet, only removing people will...
Click to expand...
The weird thing is, he got half of that right. Planting trees will always help. But so will reducing population.
 
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JamesBlond said:
Trust Bill "The *****" Gates who said your all stupid, planting trees won't help the planet, only removing people will...
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I'm not asking you to trust Bill Gates. I'm asking you to understand that 2 + 3 = 5. Gates has no more authority on this -- or any global topic -- than anyone else on the planet. His argument, however, carries weight.

ZedRM said:
The weird thing is, he got half of that right. Planting trees will always help. But so will reducing population.
Click to expand...
100% incorrect on both counts. Planting trees is great for virtue signaling, but does little to affect the global fast carbon cycle. And reducing population is one of the most spectacularly wrong-headed ideas to ever cross a mongoloid's mentality.
 
Endymio said:
You're far off target. AI is already generating advances in nearly every field of research. When it helps develop a material 10% stronger, it means we need 10% less of it produced, and the products it makes are 10% lighter, meaning we ship them for 10% less energy. When AI helps a major shipping firm route deliveries 10% more efficiency, it saves that much in energy as well.

I could name hundreds of other examples, but I'll note that one of the most significant advances in fusion research involves not trying to prevent plasma instabilities -- which we've failed miserably to do -- but rather to use an AI model to predict them, and counteract them as they occur.

Honestly, what the bleep is wrong with you people? This is supposedly a tech enthusiast site, and you're knocking the greatest tech advance in 100 years? There's far, far more to AI than LLM chatbots.
Click to expand...

Well in my line of work (I run a small Digital Marketing Agency + web development) it is helping tremendously. We are talking about hours and hours of work saved daily. From coding to stupid legwork tasks.

Here is a really simple task that would take hours:

I.e. We get a list of 100 institutions that are partners of a client. We ask AI to find and complie a list of links to their websites. Then it helps us write a script to import and make those appear dynamically on a web page. I am shortening it quite a bit but you get the idea.

We are suddenly able to use really advanced formulas in Excel to analyze and sort data without needing a genious Excel wizzard or searching for hours on the internet for VB scripts we have never touched before.
We are suddenlty able to write Adobe Illustrator Scripts for anything that we can imagine.
And on, and on, and on....for Marketing, for Business process for content writing (overviewed by our Pro copywriters)

You certainly need to have the base knowledge to feed AI with the appropriate prompts, but damn it has opened up huge possibilities in our workflow and continues to do so while it keeps improving by the day. And did I mention we have learned so much through using it?
 
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