💭 Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? - YouTube
Waylon Walker
Learning in Public @_WaylonWalker
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I did not realize all the places to be considered as AI water usage. Hank goes deep highlighting all of the sources he is aware of, most reports leave off a lot of these sources, some reports go maybe too far adding sources that may not make sense depending on the question you are asking.
As someone that runs computers with gpus in their house, and watching LTT make AIO installs on GPUs I've wondered what would AI use water for, now I understand that its a lot. No where near agriculture, but a lot.
Unlike running a gpu in your house, potentially with a closed loop AIO, data centers are filled with hardware making heat and it all must go somewhere. Current technology has this done with evaporative cooling, i.e. its not a closed loop, the water goes into the sky.
He goes on to point out that its not just the data center, using water, but also chip fab and power plants.
Something I hadn't put a lot of thought into is the type of water. While a lot of agriculture and power applications do not use municipal water, a lot of data centers do, putting excess strain on water treatment.
Something I find interesting is that Altman is doing the same thing here that he does on his financial numbers. Stating they use almost nothing on inference. Missing training, missing training for models that turned out to be a flop and never made it anywhere, but they learned how to make better models from it. Missing chip fab, construction, transportation, and power. The way report numbers bases on a small subset of their entire business feels wrong.
Anyways Hank does a great job at saying this is not a simple answer, its complicated. Things are moving so fast that its hard to be accurate, its hard for infrastructure to keep up. There's a lot more to think about than the water use on a single query.
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