Google’s carbon emissions have soared by 51% since 2019 as artificial intelligence hampers the tech company’s efforts to go green.
While the corporation has invested in renewable energy and carbon removal technology, it has failed to curb its scope 3 emissions, which are those further down the supply chain, and are in large part influenced by a growth in datacentre capacity required to power artificial intelligence.
The company reported a 27% increase in year-on-year electricity consumption as it struggles to decarbonise as quickly as its energy needs increase.
Datacentres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. The International Energy Agency estimates that datacentres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by the research firm SemiAnalysis.
Google CO2 emissions were 1.5 MTo in 2010. By 2018 they were 13 MTo. In 2023 they were 14 MTo.
I’m sorry but there’s more to the story that what’s being told in the article. For starters any dataset that takes 2019/2020 as their base line is skewed, we all know what happened that year.
And, on the other hand, Google emissions increased by almost a 1000% in ten years before AI.
Truth is more important than that agenda or the dogma. That article does the wild assumption that a big share of the increase in electricity usage is because AI. It may be, or it may not be, but the article presents zero evidences for that claim. And data in hand we know that google can use a ton of electricity without AI. So the impact of AI may or may not be as big as portrayed by the article. And it also disregards completely the massive increases in google emissions before 2019.
the company also said AI could have a “net positive potential” on climate
It’s going to get us Net Fucked by 2030
ah, but on the flip side, ai can conjure up an email summary within seconds that can shave off up to 5 whole minutes from someone’s extremely busy day.
surely that’s adequate recompense for all that energy spent?
conjure up an email summary within seconds that can shave off up to 5 whole minutes
… but can it? Like actually, can one do that?
Sure an LLM can generate something akin to a summary. It will look like it’s getting some of the points in a different form… but did it get the actual gist of it? Did it skip anything meaningful that once ignore will have far reaching consequences?
So yes sure an LLM can generate shorter text related to what was said during the meeting but if there is limited confidence in the accuracy and no responsibility, unlike somebody who would take notes and summarize potentially facing negative consequences, then wouldn’t the reliance on such a tool create more risk?
I’m looking forward to 10 years from now, when this new novelty called, WRITING YOUR OWN SHIT (and reading it!) comes back into prevalence, and everyone thinks it is such an original idea.
(If we, or the Internet, are all still around then, anyway.)
This is amazing, because their AI is useless garbage.
murderers of our children
don’tbe evilBut it’s critically necessary for functionality.
Got a question? Google it an boom there’s an AI summary for you. Now you’re engaged in scrolling past the dubious response and the sponsored links before you can get to the results you want.
It’s called ‘enhancing the user experience’. It was tedious to ignore the paid ads where you were likely to be misled for profit, but now it’s enhanced tedium where you’re likely to be misled for no fucking reason.
you’re likely to be misled for no fucking reason and to juice up a few executives quarterly bonuses, because Google faces no real competition, because existing anti-trust laws haven’t been meaningfully enforced anywhere in the world for the entire time that Google has existed.
They just heating up the oven to bake people alive.
I’ve been assured that AGI is right around the corner and will solve climate change (in a way that is economically palatable to the rich and powerful)
Starting to look like the biggest f*cking corner humanity ever faced.
This is great. /s
AI will never be able to do the stuff Sam Altman pretends is just around the corner. But it’s great at giving the Right plausible fake news machines. Let’s torch the earth for that!
