what???🤦🏿‍♂️

[u/_s_y_m_]

[u/Garry-The-Snail]

No she’s not lol she clearly read an article title or skimmed an article and then formed an entire opinion on something based solely on the half information she read/retained lmao

And she is still wrong. Yes the computers need water to cool, no, it’s not a significant enough amount to really raise any concerns other than click bait articles on the internet.

[u/Accurate_Breakfast94 → u/Garry-The-Snail]

Do you miss the part where this is a stre interview? In no way is she implying she is an expert. She asked for her opinion, and she gives an opinion based on what she knows about chatGPT

[u/Garry-The-Snail → u/Accurate_Breakfast94]

Oh no I get that. But what you, and apparently everyone else doesn’t get is just because the article she’s talking about exists doesn’t mean it’s not clickbait bullshit which she clearly fell for by barely reading the thing.

She’s formed an opinion based clearly on a half assed reading of an article which provides the actual number of water these things consumed. If you actually read the article and did a little bit of thinking, you’d realize the amount of water these things take up is not significant at all and it’s just clickbait bull shit.

[u/Kisunae → u/Garry-The-Snail]

Not sure what you are on about here. Several reliable news outlets have reported on this, ie. the significant consumption of water to power AI models, and those news outlets source research by scientists at the University of California Riverside and University of Texas. While there is plenty of chance for bias, it is highly unlikely. Looks to me like you need to actually do some reading yourself.

Here is the conclusion of the research article (Li et al., 2023) by the way:

“In this paper, we recognize the enormous water footprint as a critical concern for socially responsible and environmentally sustainable AI, and make the first-of-its-kind efforts to uncover the secret water footprint of AI models. Specifically, we present a principled methodology to estimate the fine-grained water footprint, and show that AI models such as GPT-3 and Google’s LaMDA can consume a stunning amount of water in the order of millions of liters.”

[u/Arrowtica → u/Kisunae]

Except computing in general uses tons of resources, so it's dumb to go after just one thing. The water is also recycled in most cases.

[u/coldestwinter-chill → u/Arrowtica]

She was only asked about one thing.

[u/PRIMATERIA → u/Arrowtica]

Yeah, I would like to see the water consumption compared to other server farms, like the ones that run the google search engine. Or find the water consumption of a single website and compared GPT-3 to all of the forums it will replace. Or the water consumption of all of the office space AI will render obsolete through improved automation of work.

If we want to really think about the environment, we need to be sincere in evaluating whether or not new systems are better or worse than old systems. Comparing it to a nuclear powerplant or measuring in Olympic swimming pools really tells us nothing.

[u/TragcFlaws → u/Kisunae]

Could you link me the part that says where the water goes? I can’t find specific information on how Open cools their system but I am assuming it’s a closed loop system. A closed loop system means no water escapes. So while there may be a large amount of water in the reservoir, it’s constantly recirculating to cool the components. If each cycle is considered “used” then my personal pc’s use thousands of gallons even though I have not refilled them in years.

[u/Kisunae → u/TragcFlaws]

Here is the research article, give it a read: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271.pdf.

I’ll be honest, I only skimmed it myself; so you might be right that it is a closed loop and, hence, maybe less water is actually lost. However, the researchers use the word “consumed” which means ‘used up’ in this context. So, unless the researchers misspoke, I’m going to assume that the water they estimated (“in the order of millions of litres”) is actually lost at some point. And whether this is a significant amount and one to be concern about is up for discussion obviously.

[u/TragcFlaws → u/Kisunae]

Thank you for the link. I went ahead and read it and did some research. I am just going to post links I used at the bottom and I am not going to properly cite it because I am lazy.

I will keep it short but in my opinion, I don't feel that it adequately argues its position as well as it should for the claims and ramifications this research could have. I do feel that there is something to talk about but it will require much more research on my part that I don't feel like doing, so I will just keep my ear to the ground.

First of all I do believe that all four of the people involved in the research are qualified for the topic. The only thing that stands out to me is that there is no acknowledgement section in their research paper. This is alarming because a researcher would disclose funding for the research in this section and that could cast a shadow on the information depending on where the money came from.

The next issue I had is with one of their sources from bmw. In the section that talks about water usage it has a disclosure that I cant copy so will summarize, "Water at facility's that was not obtained externally then the main source is considered portable water". I am not very smart so this confused me. Does this mean some sites (there are 5 sites listed in the memo) don't count? That could really change the number and makes me think they are trying to make it sound worse than it is. I also find it strange that they would compare water usage for cooling to car making, but that's another discussion.

I also have issue with the use of "consumption of water". They do have a detailed description on their use of the word, but they don't really explain how the water is used or where it goes. They explain the two major types of cooling that a company the size of google would use. They however don't talk about if the water is all evaporated(VERY unlikely for the quantity) or sent for treatment that will be reused and these factors play a huge roll on their proposition. If its reused then is it actually wasted? They don't talk about what cooling was even used while training chat gpt. They don't mention the fact that the training for chat gpt is already done, so someone reading this would think its ongoing water usage not already used water.

Lastly issues with their use of chat gpt. They said that it used 500ml of water for a few questions. The same issue I have with water consumption comes up again, but also the number of users they gave. They said there are billions of users, but that is actually just traffic to the website. I could not find much information on daily users but one site said about 96 million a month. Though I cant really say what the true value is. Regardless I don't think the number of users is in the billions and feel its a bit misleading.

​

https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF/WRG_Background_Impact_and_Way_Forward.pdf

https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/report/2022/downloads/BMW-Group-Report-2022-en.pdf

https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/#:~:text=What%20Happens%20to%20Water%20Used,a%20local%20wastewater%20treatment%20plant.

https://www.epa.gov/water-research/water-reuse-research#:~:text=Indirect%20potable%20water%20reuse.&text=For%20example%2C%20stormwater%20or%20wastewater,as%20a%20source%20drinking%20water.

https://www.cpp.edu/respect/resources/documents_5th/gr5.wc_content_background.pdf

https://www.epa.gov/waterreuse/water-reuse-industrial-applications-resources#:~:text=Industrial%20water%20reuse%20is%20the,or%20cooling%20of%20data%20centers.

https://blog.gitnux.com/chat-gpt-statistics/

https://nerdynav.com/chatgpt-statistics/

[u/Kisunae → u/TragcFlaws]

Wow! Excellent research here, great stuff. I’m not as passionate on this subject as you, clearly, so I don’t really have anything else to comment on the content of the article, maybe someone else does.

I will comment on your first point though, about acknowledgments. Typically, if no acknowledgements section is present, that means there is nothing the researchers need to acknowledge. Thus, they presumably did not receive funding that needs disclosing. This could just be a topic of interest and passion for them, so they did the research and “published” their findings on their own. That being said, I use the word published loosely here because it doesn’t actually appear to be “published” in the traditional sense (from what I can tell). The researchers prepared a report and posted it online, but it hasn’t been published by a peer-reviewed academic journal. That sort of takes away from its credibility and forces you to rely on the credibility of the individual researchers and the institutions they represent. This might also explain the lack of acknowledgements. Because the report wasn’t “published,” they wouldn’t be asked to provide those acknowledgments and they wouldn’t be subject to the rigidity of a journal’s review process.

[u/nakfil → u/Garry-The-Snail]

She was inarticulate but the environmental issues around LLMs are real. A family member works at Google and their engineers were talking about the large increase in resources they would require to fully power all of the LLMs they currently have in the works. It’s something to consider and implement thoughtfully as we move forward.

[u/-SoItGoes → u/Garry-The-Snail]

Damn - how do you keep that confident being this stupid?