“People don’t realize that ‘the cloud’ is real...” says Aurora Gómez, ...“People are not aware of the amount of water that goes into watching a kitten meme.”
Meanwhile Jeff Dean was mad cause our #Section3 of Stochastic Parrots talked about the environmental impacts of LLMs and not how "carbon neutral" Google was 🙄
"Some of the cooler, wetter hubs in northern Europe, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, have blocked the development of new data centers because of concerns about energy consumption, leading companies to start looking farther afield."
" The race to build large language models used in generative AI has created a surge in demand for more powerful processors. The specialized chips required for AI—broadly known as accelerators—emit so much more heat than general-purpose chips do that data center operators are having to rethink their cooling systems entirely, says Colm Shorten, a data center sustainability expert at real estate investment firm JLL.
We didn't see it coming at all 🙄
""Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside, has conducted research estimating that training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s US data centers directly consumed 700,000 liters of water in about a month—not including the indirect water use associated with electricity generation. The team has also calculated that every short conversation of 20 to 50 questions and answers with ChatGPT represents about 500 milliliters of water."
