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<blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 9291648" data-attributes="member: 93119"><p>Concern about the energy uses for GenAI are disingenuous at best and insipid at the worst. Computers use electricity. The CPU cycles and thus power used to generate this forum post and transfer it over the Internet and then render on your screen are no more <em>useful </em>than CPU/GPU cycles used to generate a paragraph of text or an image. It's a thing you chose to do with the electricity you paid for, both directly and by proxy of paying your utility and ISP bill. I don't get to dictate that maybe you shouldn't "waste" electricity by posting. Nor do I get to say watching a movie on your 50" 4K TV is a "waste" of electricity. Idling on Fortnite is "wasting" far more electricity rendering a bunch of useless frames on your GPU than the handful of seconds it takes for Stable Diffusion to generate an image of a cat wearing a suit of armor. You paid your utility bill, I don't get to dictate what you do with it.</p><p></p><p>If you're worried about electricity use and pollution, worry more about smelting bauxite ore using coal power or other inefficient industrial processes. Eat less red meat to require fewer cows which produce literal shitloads of methane which is roughly 40x worse of a greenhouse gas than CO2. Be more concerned about people running Bitcoin miners buying bulk electricity from coal power plants because it's cheap. Vote in green energy initiatives in your state/country so any electricity use is greener and pollutes less than coal and oil. Stop NIMBYs from opposing wind and solar projects. Do those things <em>before</em> getting your panties in a bunch because someone used a computer to make a picture with a computer.</p><p></p><p>Comparing the electricity use to training of inference of AI models to a human just doesn't make any naughty word sense. All of the training data for AIs already exists. The electricity used to generate all of it is a sunk cost, you're not going to somehow get that power back. So generating training data has already happened. The actual training process doesn't actually use all that much electricity compared to a lot of other things. You can't train a large model in your garage on a single GPU but it's something that can be done renting some capacity from a cloud provider which also already exists and it a sunk cost and would be used for something else if not training an AI model. Microsoft's investment in OpenAI comes mostly in the form of Azure credits to let them do training and inference on Azure hardware that would normally cost many millions of dollars at retail rates. But again those data centers and equipment already exist and are sunk costs. They'd be used for something else when not training an AI model.</p><p></p><p>The power a human takes to draw an image is never going to be less than an inference takes. My laptop can literally run Stable Diffusion locally and generate an image in a few seconds. The utility company wouldn't even be able to bill me for such little electricity usage. It's far less power than if I was drawing in Procreate. Even if I was a super artist that could sketch some great picture of a cat in a suit of armor in a few minutes I'd be using order of magnitude more electricity than running Stable Diffusion on the same machine.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="giant.robot, post: 9291648, member: 93119"] Concern about the energy uses for GenAI are disingenuous at best and insipid at the worst. Computers use electricity. The CPU cycles and thus power used to generate this forum post and transfer it over the Internet and then render on your screen are no more [I]useful [/I]than CPU/GPU cycles used to generate a paragraph of text or an image. It's a thing you chose to do with the electricity you paid for, both directly and by proxy of paying your utility and ISP bill. I don't get to dictate that maybe you shouldn't "waste" electricity by posting. Nor do I get to say watching a movie on your 50" 4K TV is a "waste" of electricity. Idling on Fortnite is "wasting" far more electricity rendering a bunch of useless frames on your GPU than the handful of seconds it takes for Stable Diffusion to generate an image of a cat wearing a suit of armor. You paid your utility bill, I don't get to dictate what you do with it. If you're worried about electricity use and pollution, worry more about smelting bauxite ore using coal power or other inefficient industrial processes. Eat less red meat to require fewer cows which produce literal shitloads of methane which is roughly 40x worse of a greenhouse gas than CO2. Be more concerned about people running Bitcoin miners buying bulk electricity from coal power plants because it's cheap. Vote in green energy initiatives in your state/country so any electricity use is greener and pollutes less than coal and oil. Stop NIMBYs from opposing wind and solar projects. Do those things [I]before[/I] getting your panties in a bunch because someone used a computer to make a picture with a computer. Comparing the electricity use to training of inference of AI models to a human just doesn't make any naughty word sense. All of the training data for AIs already exists. The electricity used to generate all of it is a sunk cost, you're not going to somehow get that power back. So generating training data has already happened. The actual training process doesn't actually use all that much electricity compared to a lot of other things. You can't train a large model in your garage on a single GPU but it's something that can be done renting some capacity from a cloud provider which also already exists and it a sunk cost and would be used for something else if not training an AI model. Microsoft's investment in OpenAI comes mostly in the form of Azure credits to let them do training and inference on Azure hardware that would normally cost many millions of dollars at retail rates. But again those data centers and equipment already exist and are sunk costs. They'd be used for something else when not training an AI model. The power a human takes to draw an image is never going to be less than an inference takes. My laptop can literally run Stable Diffusion locally and generate an image in a few seconds. The utility company wouldn't even be able to bill me for such little electricity usage. It's far less power than if I was drawing in Procreate. Even if I was a super artist that could sketch some great picture of a cat in a suit of armor in a few minutes I'd be using order of magnitude more electricity than running Stable Diffusion on the same machine. [/QUOTE]
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