as it gets better
Bold assumption.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
(www.technologyreview.com)
Historically AI always got much better. Usually after the field collapsed in an AI winter and several years went by in search for a new technique to then repeat the hype cycle. Tech bros want it to get better without that winter stage though.
AI usually got better when people realized it wasn't going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.
Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.
Like the cliché goes: when it works, we don't call it AI anymore.
The smart move is never calling it "AI" in the first place.
Unless you're in comp sci, and AI is a field, not a marketing term. And in that case everyone already knows that's not "it".
The major thing that killed 1960s/70s AI was the Vietnam War. MIT's CSAIL was funded heavily by DARPA. When public opinion turned against Vietnam and Congress started shutting off funding, DARPA wasn't putting money into CSAIL anymore. Congress didn't create an alternative funding path, so the whole thing dried up.
That lab basically created computing as we know it today. It bore fruit, and many companies owe their success to it. There were plenty of promising lines of research still going on.
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The spice must flow
Each winter marks the beginning and end of a generation of AI. We are now seeing more progress and as long as there is no technical limit it seems that its progress will not be interrupted.
The issue this time around is infrastructure. The current AI Summer depends on massive datacenters with equally massive electrical needs. If companies can't monetize that enough, they'll pull the plug and none of this will be available to general public anymore.
This system can go backwards. Yes, the R&D will still be there after the AI Winter cycle hits, but none of the infrastructure.
We'll still have models like deepseek, and (hopefully) discount used server hardware
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The energy issue almost feels like a red herring for distracting all idiots from actual AI problems and lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It's so tiring.
That's because it IS an issue, together with many other issues like disinformation, over reliance, wrong tools for wrong (most) jobs, etc.
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lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It's so tiring.
Are you fucking serious? All I ever see on Lemmy is prople saying "AI slop" over and over and over and over again... in like every comment section of every post. It could be a picture that was actually hand-drawn, or a photograph that was definitely not AI, or articles written by someone "sounding like AI". The AI hate on Lemmy is WAY overpowering any support.
I think you misunderstood me here as we're in agreement already
I definitely did! I guess maybe you can see why I was so exasperated. 😳
How does crypto mining play into all of the electrical need? I know they used to use a butt load.
I found this article from last year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.
The wide range should not be too surprising, it's a mess to keep track of, especially with the current administration. Since then, with Trump immediately pledging to support the "industry", I can only imagine it consuming even more now.
That's a huge amount of electricity even at it's lowest. Are they building the AI to crypto mine is also another question. I could see these sneaky bastards combining the two somehow.
As for OpenAI and Microsoft, they're betting on energy with a company called Helion Energy. They say they'll have it ready by 2028. Whether they'll achieve that? We'll see.
I looked that up and it's a fusion reactor, apparently, from what I can figure out from their nigh-illegible website.
...[reads further] ...
It skips the steam cycle. That's fucking cool. I really hope they get it working.
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It should be clarified that it's 99.99% Bitcoin mining that's wasting all that energy, any other crypto that still uses mining is basically irrelevant when compared to it
Solar powered server farms in space. Self-powered, self-cooling, 'outside the environment'. Is this a stupid idea?
Edit: So it would seem the answer is yes. Good chat :) Thanks.
Launch cost is astronomical.
Maintenance access is horrible.
Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.
I don’t understand the self-cooling. Isn’t it harder to keep things cool in space since there is no conduction or convection cooling? I mean everything is in a vacuum. The only place for heat to go is radiative and that’s terribly inefficient. Seems like a massive engineering problem.
It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won't melt.
I thought so.
You can cool servers way better on Earth than you can in space. Down here you can transfer heat away from the server with conduction and convection, but in space you really only have radiation. Cooling spacecraft is an engineering challenge. One might imagine a server stuck inside a glass thermos that's sitting out in the sun.
If the end goal is so little Timmy can ask a robot if nazis exist and it spits out misinformation or so Ai bots can flood social media with endless regurgitated bullshit, then no, it's just more garbage in space.
Ai is interesting,... necessary? A lot of people can be fed and housed for the cost of giant, experimental solar powered Ai computers in space so that they have more excuses not to pay people a living wage.
When I think about the potential of AI, I like to think of Iain M. Banks' Culture more than Skynet. We could probably all live in a post-scarcity society even without AI if we put our minds into it, but let's free ourselves of unnecessary or unwilling labour while we're at it, eh?
I'm glad someone's hopeful. Any time I see a new technology, I wonder what the worst possible outcome could be, and it usually makes it there.
Sorry, I just have zero faith in humanity.
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Afaik space isn't self cooling. Overheating of spacecraft is a thing. I think they can only cool through infrared radiation or something.
Do you know how much energy you need to launch a kilogram into Earth orbit?
So someone thinks it's not entirely stupid
I assume yes, I know very little but I know space is very hard and harsh environment. Also it would be very expensive I assume. And it would need to be big.
very stupid. One of the most difficult things in space is cooling stuff. Sending up a bunch of space heaters in a box (almost all of the energy pumped into a computer is turned into heat. The actual computatiion takes next to nothing in comparison) is definitely not a good idea. Definitely not one thought up by a technical person.
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Its worth it for school essays and prawn jesus though.
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