• NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 hours ago

    Global solar generation has increased by 50% in the last 2 years, meanwhile a token is something like 900 times less energy consuming than it was a year ago?

    Something comes first, almost free energy and deeply embedded ai usage or total environmental collapse, capitalism deems that we will find out which in due course.

      • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 hours ago

        You’re forgetting that usage can still go up while token cost goes down.

        Or rather, efficiency and usage can increase at the same time.

        • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          4 hours ago

          The reason I dont believe you, is software efficenies are WAY cheaper than a data centre. If they could devlope existing infrastructure to hold the increase of usage like that, then they wouldn’t expand hardware.

          • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 hours ago

            You’re just repeating the same point I’ve just addressed, so I’ll explain in more detail.

            Data centres expanding is perfectly compatible with huge efficiency gains per token. If the cost of inference falls, companies can afford to run vastly more inference, serve more users, use larger models and embed AI into more products.

            It’s the same reason more fuel-efficient cars didn’t eliminate demand for roads or petrol. Efficiency lowers the cost of using something, which can increase total consumption.

            So “if software got more efficient, they wouldn’t need more data centres” is basically backwards. The relevant question is whether total AI demand is growing faster than efficiency is improving.

          • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 hours ago

            You can find token energy efficiency information studies online, I was smashed when I pulled that figure out of my arse but the numbers are similarly huge.

            They’re already orders of magnitude more energy efficient than we predicted just a few years ago and both the software and the hardware continue to accelerate that.