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Used to cool the servers.

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A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

AI bots generate a lot of heat, and keeping their computer servers running exacts a toll.

 
5 min
317
September 18, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
 

Roughly a quarter of Americans have used ChatGPT since the chatbot’s 2022 release, according to the Pew Research Center — and every query exacts a cost.

Chatbots use an immense amount of power to respond to user questions, and simply keeping the bot’s servers cool enough to function in data centers takes a toll on the environment. While the exact burden is nearly impossible to quantify, The Washington Post worked with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to understand how much water and power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model released in March 2023, consumes to write the average 100-word email.

 

Let’s look first at water.

aifootprint-water-xlarge.png?v=23

A 100-word email generated by an AI chatbot using GPT-4

Once requires 519 milliliters of water,

a little more than 1 bottle

Once weekly for a year requires 27 liters,

about 1.43 water cooler jugs

Once weekly for a year by 1 out of 10 working Americans (roughly 16 million people)

requires 435,235,476 liters, equal to the water consumed by all Rhode Island households for 1.5 days

 
 

Each prompt on ChatGPT flows through a server that runs thousands of calculations to determine the best words to use in a response.

In completing those calculations, these servers, typically housed in data centers, generate heat. Often, water systems are used to cool the equipment and keep it functioning. Water transports the heat generated in the data centers into cooling towers to help it escape the building, similar to how the human body uses sweat to keep cool, according to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor at UC Riverside.

Where electricity is cheaper, or water comparatively scarce, electricity is often used to cool these warehouses with large units resembling air-conditioners, he said. That means the amount of water and electricity an individual query requires can depend on a data center’s location and vary widely.

Even in ideal conditions, data centers are often among the heaviest users of water in the towns where they are located, environmental advocates said. But data centers with electrical cooling systems also are raising concerns by driving up residents’ power bills and taxing the electric grid.

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Here is how much a query draws in electrical power.

aifootprint-power-xlarge.png?v=27

A 100-word email generated by an AI chatbot using GPT-4

Once requires 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh)

of electricity, equal to powering

14 LED light bulbs for 1 hour

Once weekly for a year requires 7.5kWh,

equal to the electricity consumed by

9.3 D.C. households for 1 hour

Once weekly for a year by 1 out of 10 working Americans requires 121,517 megawatt-hours (MWh), equal to the electricity consumed by

all D.C. households for 20 days

Data centers also require massive amounts of energy to support other activities, such as cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has only increased that load, Ren said. If a data center is located in a hot region — and relies on air conditioning for cooling — it takes a lot of electricity to keep the servers at a low temperature. If data centers relying on water cooling are located in drought-prone areas, they risk depleting the area of a precious natural resource.

In Northern Virginia, home to the world’s highest concentration of data centers, citizen groups have protested construction of these buildings, saying they are not only loud energy hogs that don’t bring in enough long-term jobs, but also eyesores that kill home values. In West Des Moines, Iowa, an emerging hotbed of data centers, water department records showed that facilities run by companies like Microsoft used around 6 percent of all the district’s water. After a lengthy court battle, the Oregonian newspaper forced Google to disclose how much its data centers were using in The Dalles, about 80 miles east of Portland; it turned out to be nearly a quarter of all the water available in the town, the documents revealed.

 
 

Before chatbots can even fulfill a request, a huge amount of energy is spent training them. The large language models that allow chatbots like ChatGPT to generate lifelike responses all require servers to analyze millions of pieces of data. (The Post has created a tool, Climate Answers, that asks ChatGPT to summarize Post climate coverage. Because it searches a limited universe of information, its queries are designed to be less resource-intensive.)

It can take months to train these advanced computer models, according to AI experts and research papers, and tech companies such as Google, Meta and Microsoft are scrambling to build data centers.

Each one continuously churns out heat.

aifootprint-manufacturing-xlarge.png?v=1

100lbs

Training GPT-3 has the same water cost as producing 100 pounds of beef, nearly double the amount an average American eats in a year.

Microsoft’s data center used 700,000 liters of water while training GPT-3.

It takes about 6,992 liters of water to produce 1 pound of beef, mostly used to grow feed, clean the farm and hydrate cows.

4,439lbs

LLaMA-3’s water cost equals about 4,439 pounds of rice, about what 164 Americans consume in a year.

Meta used 22 million liters of water training its LLaMA-3 open source

AI model

It takes about 4,956 liters of water to produce 1 pound of rice, which is grown almost completely submerged under water.

Big tech companies have made numerous pledges to make their data centers greener by using new cooling methods. Those climate pledges are often not met.

In July, Google released its most recent environmental report, showing its carbon emission footprint rose by 48 percent, largely due to AI and data centers. It also replenished only 18 percent of the water it consumed — a far cry from the 120 percent it has set as a goal by 2030. “Google has a long-standing commitment to sustainability, guided by our ambitious goals—which includes achieving net-zero emissions by 2030,” said Mara Harris, a spokesperson for Google.

“AI can be energy-intensive and that’s why we are constantly working to improve efficiency,” said Kayla Wood, an OpenAI spokesperson. Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement that the company prioritizes “operating our data centers sustainably and efficiently, while ensuring that people can depend on our services.” Craig Cincotta, a general manager at Microsoft, said the company “remains committed to reducing the intensity with which we withdraw resources,” and added that Microsoft is working towards installing data center cooling methods that “will eliminate water consumption completely.”

 
 

Tech companies such as Nvidia will keep creating computer chips that generate more kilowatts of power per server to do more computations, experts said. AI is creating unprecedented demands on data centers that far outpace any in recent history, Ren said.

“The rapid rise of AI has dramatically changed this trajectory,” Ren said, “and presented new challenges the industry has never met before.”

Methodology

Water and electricity costs were calculated by Ren for ChatGPT-4 at an average American data center. A full methodology can be found in their paper “Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models.”

D.C. electricity consumption figures calculated from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2023 state energy reports. Rhode Island daily water use from the National Environmental Education Foundation. Beef and rice per capita consumption numbers from U.S. Department of Agriculture food availability data and the OECD’s agricultural outlook. Water footprint estimates sourced from: Livestock Science’s “Assessing water resource use in livestock production: A review of methods” and Science’s “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers.”

About this story
Editing by Kate Rabinowitz, Karly Domb Sadof, Alexis Sobel-Fitts and James Graff. Project editing by KC Schaper. Copy editing by Brian French. Additional support from Jordan Melendrez, Kathleen Floyd and Victoria Rossi.
About the Power Grab series
The artificial intelligence industry is driving a nationwide data center building boom. These sprawling warehouses of computing infrastructure are creating explosive demand for power, water and other resources. Power Grab investigates the impacts effects on America and the risks AI infrastructure creates for the environment and the energy transition.

 

Edited by HenryJames
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6 minutes ago, Parliament said:

How is that even possible?  Does it take that much electricity the power plant needs so much water?

Datacenters mainly use evaporative cooling. You go through alot of water when its sole purpose is to be heated up and change phase to carry the heat away. 

Another way to look at it is: more compute being used == more water being used to keep it cool. And large language models use a TITANIC amount of compute to train and operate at enterprise scale

Edited by Captainant
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4 hours ago, Parliament said:

How is that even possible?  Does it take that much electricity the power plant needs so much water?

How much water does it take to generate a realistic deepfake sex clip featuring Sela Ward, Susanna Hoffs, and a generic middle-aged dad-bod type, where Sela keeps her stockings on and Susanna is wearing a 1986 vintage headband?

Asking for a friend.

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20 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

How much water does it take to generate a realistic deepfake sex clip featuring Sela Ward, Susanna Hoffs, and a generic middle-aged dad-bod type, where Sela keeps her stockings on and Susanna is wearing a 1986 vintage headband?

Asking for a friend.

Snl Queen GIF by Saturday Night Live

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On 9/18/2024 at 10:49 AM, Captainant said:

Datacenters mainly use evaporative cooling. You go through alot of water when its sole purpose is to be heated up and change phase to carry the heat away. 

Another way to look at it is: more compute being used == more water being used to keep it cool. And large language models use a TITANIC amount of compute to train and operate at enterprise scale

If it's a closed system, the water "loss" would be relatively negligible.  If it uses open-air chilling towers, though, I guess less so.

Nonetheless, a shit ton of water is taken out of the water system for these purposes.  At some point, most of it would be returned, seemingly.

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Been banging this drum for a while, but here's some reporting and a full report on how deeply and constantly tracked we are online across websites, wether we like it or not. Lotta kids knowingly being used as test subjects by adtech

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/social-media-companies-engaged-vast-surveillance-ftc-finds-calling-sta-rcna171814

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Social-Media-6b-Report-9-11-2024.pdf

The report, which stretches more than 100 pages, details the data, advertising and recommendation-system efforts by these companies, and how they rely on information about users to sell ads. Users also “lacked any meaningful control over how personal information was used for AI-fueled systems” on the companies’ platforms, according to the report.

 

“While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a press release.

The report includes staff recommendations calling for federal privacy legislation, as well as more efforts from companies to prioritize privacy in their data collection and recommendation systems. It also said parents should have more control over what information is collected from children and teenagers.

"Protecting users – especially children and teens – requires clear baseline protections that apply across the board," the FTC said in the report.

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Comedian John Mulaney brutally roasts SF techies at Dreamforce

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Comedian John Mulaney brutally roasts SF techies at Dreamforce

A man in a navy suit and black tie is holding a microphone and speaking on stage. The background is dimly lit, focusing attention on him.
John Mulaney has Dreamforce and its attendees firmly in his sights during his set Thursday. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
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By Kevin V. NguyenPublished Sep. 19, 2024 • 6:14pm

“Let me get this straight,” John Mulaney said. “You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?” 

Everyone inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned. Any notion that the award-winning comedian would play the corporate gig safe (and clean) were thrown out the window Thursday, when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, started roasting his host, Salesforce, and the audience sitting right in front of him.

“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” Mulaney said.

“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said, looking out to the crowd from center stage. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”

He added, “Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?”

In a wide-ranging, 45-minute set, Mulaney did not hold back when it came to joking about the cartoonish conference, which aspired to be the “largest AI event in the world.”

“You’re an account executive at Top Low?” Mulaney asked an audience member, who clarified that she works at Tableau, a data visualization company. “You know in your goddamn bones that a bunch of you are working on products that are just OK, but you have to vamp and make up terms to make it sound more awesome than it is.”

“You’re a VP of customer success?” he asked another attendee. “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”

Between anecdotes about his aging parents, his stint in rehab, and fatherhood, Mulaney worked the crowd, poking fun at tech workers and their buzzwords.

“What’s important here is that we’re looking for solutions,” he said sarcastically. “And in looking for solutions, what we’re really after is insights, which then lead to success. Now, start prepping the humans for robots.

“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days,” he continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”

Since 2020, Mulaney has married actress Olivia Munn, had a son, and released a Netflix special called “Baby J,” detailing his struggles with drug addiction, and a limited series, “Everybody’s in LA.”

In addition to the Dreamforce set, Mulaney is headlining a show Thursday evening at the Golden Gate Theatre. 

The comedian rounded out his Dreamforce appearance by thanking attendees “for the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”

Mulaney then shared an anecdote about how he and his son, who is nearly 3, like to play baseball in their front yard.

“We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he said. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”

 

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Hope yall don't like deli meats

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boars-head-plants-nationwide-now-part-of-law-enforcement-investigation-usda-says/

Boar's Head processing plants nationwide are now part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture disclosed Thursday, in the wake of a deadly outbreak blamed on some of the company's now-recalled deli meats. 

At least 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths have been linked to a listeria strain traced back to Boar's Head products distributed from a now-shuttered plant the company ran in Virginia. 

That Boar's Head plant in Virginia had been written up dozens of times by inspectors over violations, CBS News first reported in August, based on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Violations flagged at the plant by agriculture officials included mold and insects found throughout the site. 

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30 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Hope yall don't like deli meats

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boars-head-plants-nationwide-now-part-of-law-enforcement-investigation-usda-says/

Boar's Head processing plants nationwide are now part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture disclosed Thursday, in the wake of a deadly outbreak blamed on some of the company's now-recalled deli meats. 

At least 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths have been linked to a listeria strain traced back to Boar's Head products distributed from a now-shuttered plant the company ran in Virginia. 

That Boar's Head plant in Virginia had been written up dozens of times by inspectors over violations, CBS News first reported in August, based on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Violations flagged at the plant by agriculture officials included mold and insects found throughout the site. 

None of this will matter until executives in $5,000 suits go to fucking prison for homicide.  Fines don't matter, bankruptcy doesn't matter (they all got paid.  A lot.  They don't give a fuck anymore).  SEND.  CRIMINALS.  TO PRISON.  THEY FUCKING KILLED PEOPLE, AND THEY KNEW THAT IT WAS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN.

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58 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

None of this will matter until executives in $5,000 suits go to fucking prison for homicide.  Fines don't matter, bankruptcy doesn't matter (they all got paid.  A lot.  They don't give a fuck anymore).  SEND.  CRIMINALS.  TO PRISON.  THEY FUCKING KILLED PEOPLE, AND THEY KNEW THAT IT WAS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN.

They won't. 

 

images (19).jpeg

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

None of this will matter until executives in $5,000 suits go to fucking prison for homicide.  Fines don't matter, bankruptcy doesn't matter (they all got paid.  A lot.  They don't give a fuck anymore).  SEND.  CRIMINALS.  TO PRISON.  THEY FUCKING KILLED PEOPLE, AND THEY KNEW THAT IT WAS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN.

 

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On 6/22/2024 at 11:26 AM, HenryJames said:

1. lol

2. would

9144844a-834a-49d7-8645-0828df664b90.png

Spoiler

OpenAI Executives Exit as C.E.O. Works to Make the Company For-Profit

Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, and two others are leaving as leaders including Sam Altman work to transform the start-up.

Sept. 25, 2024

Mira Murati said she was stepping away from OpenAI to “create the time and space to do my own exploration.”Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mira Murati, the chief technology officer at OpenAI, the influential artificial intelligence start-up, said on Wednesday that she would leave the company after working there for more than six years.

In a memo she sent to employees and later shared on X, Ms. Murati said she was stepping away to “create the time and space to do my own exploration,” though she did not elaborate on what those next steps would be. “For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built,” she said.

Hours later, OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a vice president of research, Barret Zoph, announced their plans to leave as well. Mr. Zoph said in a post on X that he was “exploring new opportunities,” while Mr. McGrew said in a separate post that it was “time for me to take a break.”

The OpenAI executives are exiting the start-up as its chief executive, Sam Altman, and others are working to transform it into a traditional for-profit company, according to two people familiar with the talks. OpenAI is now controlled by the board of a nonprofit organization that Mr. Altman and his co-founders created in late 2015 to oversee the start-up’s technologies.

While becoming a for-profit company is not expected to happen until next year, OpenAI is in talks for a new round of investment that could value the company at as much as $150 billion, a huge leap from its last round at $80 billion. The United Arab Emirates’ technology investment firm, MGX, is among the potential investors, which also include Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple and Tiger Global, three people familiar with the conversations said.

OpenAI is seeking cash because its costs far outpace its revenue, the three people said. It annually collects more than $3 billion in sales while spending about $7 billion.

After years of public conflict between management and some of its top researchers, OpenAI is trying to look more like a more traditional tech company that can be a leader in the industry’s drive toward artificial intelligence.

But Wednesday’s executive departures followed months of similar exits by other OpenAI leaders. And they bookend a turbulent year for the company, which included the surprise ouster of Mr. Altman as chief executive and his reinstatementfive days later.

Ms. Murati, who had joined OpenAI in 2018, was appointed to lead the company after Mr. Altman’s removal, but rejected the role just two days later. She has remained one of the public faces of the start-up, making frequent public appearances to discuss its technology.

A spokeswoman for OpenAI declined to comment beyond what the executives posted online.

In a reply to Ms. Murati on X, Mr. Altman thanked her for her years at the company and said he would provide more information on the leadership transition in the coming days.

“It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” he wrote.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Altman said on social media that the departures of Mr. McGrew and Mr. Zoph were unrelated to the resignation of Ms. Murati but that “it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership.”

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

In recent months, OpenAI has added a number of seasoned executives, including new heads of product, a new chief financial officer and a head of global policy to handle relationships in Washington and across the world. Over the past nine months, OpenAI has more than doubled in size, with over 1,700 employees, while publicly stressing that it was focused on making its technology safe for widespread use.

But as new executives have come in, a number of longtime OpenAI managers and researchers have headed out the door. Of the 13 people who helped found OpenAI in 2015 with a mission to create artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — a machine that can do anything the human brain can do — only three remain.

One of the remaining founders, Greg Brockman, the company’s president, has taken a leave of absence through the end of the year, citing the need for time off after nearly a decade of work.

The two executives who announced their departures after Ms. Murati’s resignation were among those who formed the core of OpenAI’s research team over the past several months.

While Mr. Zoph was a key hands-on researcher, Mr. McGrew was more of a project manager who helped map out strategy and oversaw other employees. He was closely aligned with Ms. Murati.

Mr. Zoph was closely aligned with John Schulman, a founder who left OpenAI this summer.

The company has also added key researchers, most notably Noam Brown, a former Meta researcher who specializes in the “reasoning” techniques that help drive OpenAI’s latest technology, called OpenAI o1.

Designed to reason through tasks involving math, science and computer programming, the new technology can in some cases reduce the mistakes and “hallucinations,” or made-up information, produced by the company’s ChatGPT chatbot.

 

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22 hours ago, Captainant said:

Hope yall don't like deli meats

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boars-head-plants-nationwide-now-part-of-law-enforcement-investigation-usda-says/

Boar's Head processing plants nationwide are now part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture disclosed Thursday, in the wake of a deadly outbreak blamed on some of the company's now-recalled deli meats. 

At least 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths have been linked to a listeria strain traced back to Boar's Head products distributed from a now-shuttered plant the company ran in Virginia. 

That Boar's Head plant in Virginia had been written up dozens of times by inspectors over violations, CBS News first reported in August, based on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Violations flagged at the plant by agriculture officials included mold and insects found throughout the site. 

Maybe it's just me, but buying processed lunch meat from a brand called "Boar's Head," should be a warning.

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