AI is already straining electricity systems – and we’re just at the beginningThe Spinoff Daily, Monday July 29
Ahiahi mārie, welcome to The Spinoff Daily. Today on The Spinoff: What it’s like having shingles, must-sees at this year’s film festival and a ranking of the Olympic sports.
“Just how much energy does one AI request use? Estimates vary, but it’s well known that training AI models is resource intensive. ‘You basically need to run a lot of very powerful computers for a long time,’ Robins says. Thousands of chips process thousands of gigabytes of information to make connections and associations that allow AI interfaces to make music, answer questions (not necessarily accurately) and create images (not necessarily within copyright law). AI companies keep their training processes secret, so information is based on best guesses. One estimate, where researchers ran different generation examples on a variety of test models, concluded that generating one AI image uses about the same amount of electricity as charging a phone. ‘If you’re doing that 50 or 100 times to get the image you want, it might feel efficient to you, but you’ve used more electricity than most people appreciate,’ Robins says.”
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The Sunday Essay: Remembering my brother “In the spring of 1980, in Dunedin, shortly before his death, someone took a photograph of my brother John. The photograph doesn’t look out of place today, but when it was taken it wasn’t ordinary. It shows John – in a white, Japanese styled, loose-fitting top and trousers, a bleached white crew-cut, his black beard closely cut – as a fearlessly gay man, at a time when his sexuality was illegal.”
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AI is already straining electricity systems – and we’re just at the beginning
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