Mastodawn

Anthropy Mar 23, 2024

> "A datacenter uses lots of power"
True, but what do you think the internet runs on? What do you think the fediverse runs on? Many of the servers are in these datacenters, and honestly, a datacenter is far more efficient than running a bunch of servers at home, because of the centralisation and sharing of resources.

I'd be far more concerned about efficiency and productive use of power.. Speaking of which, how much are gamers using? and how much LESS are they using because of ML/AI upscaling?😶‍🌫️

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Anthropy Mar 23, 2024

That is of course not to say we should not care about the power usage of datacenters, nor that we can't be even more efficient and more careful with choosing what to spend our energy on.

But I think a lot of people are missing the perspective of the bigger picture there, a lot of this stuff is far more complicated than just "cloud bad" or "AI/ML bad"; yes these things can be abused or get the wrong focus, but AI/ML CAN in fact help us spend LESS energy when used right, we just need to focus it🙃

mightyweasel Mar 23, 2024

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Anthropy

"how does ML/AI cause less power usage?"

e.g upscaling uses less power for the same reason you can achieve higher FPS; you need less power for upscaled lower resolution images than native higher resolution images.

Other examples:

- GraphCast is a weather prediction toolkit that does the work of a whole datacenter inside one PC, with more accuracy https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for-faster-and-more-accurate-global-weather-forecasting/
- Likewise, AlphaFold means you can fold proteins with a single PC, or even search, instead of a DC: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/

GraphCast: AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting

Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute

Google DeepMind

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Anthropy Mar 23, 2024

and again, I'm not saying everything venture capitalists or big tech comes up with is a good idea, I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful what to spend our resources on-- but that's also exactly why I think people should be more careful than just pointing at something and going 'This Bad!', and instead actually look at what are sensible solutions in the bigger picture.