Not even. The internet is the highway. The datacenters running the internet are the department of transportation. Average internet users are the compact hybrids, EVs, and cyclists who use the road. Prompts and outputs are the couriers driving various kinds of vehicles. AI datacenters are the giant trucks with smokestacks that smokescreen all the old grannies behind them.

The prompts and outputs traveling over the internet consume a negligible amount of energy. The bulk of it is consumed by training giant LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters. A lesser portion is consumed by the inferencing those models do to produce outputs, which is done at the AI datacenters, and not what travels over the internet via internet datacenters.

You’ve misunderstood. AI datacenters are not the highway. Prompts and Outputs are the cars and trucks, the AI data centers are the factories making the cars. The highway is datacenters and transmission media that do not house AI and do not require the immense cooling or power that the AI datacenters use. The highway and the things on the highway are two entirely decoupled things.

i don’t care about fucking semantics

It's not semantics you fucking clod. They just gave an incredibly apt analogy in an attempt to explain how things actually work but you continue on with your ass-sourced "70% of the intetz iz botz hurr durr" shit without even attempting to understand why you're dead fucking wrong.

It’s not semantics, the context of this entire thread is about the difference in ecological impact of two entirely different and unrelated technologies. This isn’t a philosophical debate. Life must be so difficult for you if you can’t ever see the forest for the trees because you can’t see things as they are.

This isn't about semantics, you're just a dumbass.

Wow, you really are braindead. No one here is arguing against there being an enormous amount of bot traffic. Learn to interpret what you read.

I never said anything about the relative proportion if internet traffic that is or isn't bots. Does your only argument require a severe misrepresentation of what anyone else is saying?

The fact is that the datacenters that have been rapidly accelerating the demise of the planet and its climate over the last 5-6 years are specifically AI datacenters. Getting rid of those, completely frivolous and unnecessary as they are, will go a long way to reducing the severity human-induced climate change.

Getting rid of the datacenters that make the internet possible would be negligible compared to that. But I'm just restating what I've already said at this point, because you're apparently either a troll or incapable of reading and understanding. Maybe both.

Taking away the internet from the billions of humans who use it just because it's flooded with bot traffic is a really stupid idea, when you could instead get rid of the datacenters that make the bots possible. The vast majority of compute operating these bots is happening at the bot-side of the internet, not at the datacenters running the internet. The actual amount of energy/compute used for that web traffic to travel from client to server is tiny compared to what's consumed at the bot farms.

What you're proposing is more akin to tearing up the highways in order to prevent drug trafficking. It doesn't solve the problem you're pretending to want to address, it's just a red herring that makes things worse for everyone else.

You're the one who's saying we should get rid of all the datacenters, not just AI. That includes the ones that enable the internet. You think that's not the same thing as destroying the internet?

Literally, it's what your first comment was about. It's not a strawman. This entire comment chain is about exactly that! People telling you it's a bad take, and you doubling down and being smug about being wrong.