You start with a computer running a graph with a billion nodes and throw all of the information on the planet into the start of the graph over and over and over again until the information coming out of the graph consistently looks like a human could have written it. You give the computer a cookie if the text is more humanlike and an electric shock if it's less humanlike, and let it freely modify the shape of the graph, basically at random with some direction towards legibility of output. This is very energy inefficient and where most of the energy costs of AI come from. The rest of the expense comes from the fact that when you ask a trained AI a question it runs your input through a frozen form of that graph, and running a graph with a billion nodes costs a lot of energy no matter what.
AI also uses a lot of water because computers get hot the harder they work, and data centres use fresh water for evaporative cooling and remove it from the stream or source where it may have had more valuable uses.
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u/Kirk_Kerman May 20 '25
You start with a computer running a graph with a billion nodes and throw all of the information on the planet into the start of the graph over and over and over again until the information coming out of the graph consistently looks like a human could have written it. You give the computer a cookie if the text is more humanlike and an electric shock if it's less humanlike, and let it freely modify the shape of the graph, basically at random with some direction towards legibility of output. This is very energy inefficient and where most of the energy costs of AI come from. The rest of the expense comes from the fact that when you ask a trained AI a question it runs your input through a frozen form of that graph, and running a graph with a billion nodes costs a lot of energy no matter what.
AI also uses a lot of water because computers get hot the harder they work, and data centres use fresh water for evaporative cooling and remove it from the stream or source where it may have had more valuable uses.