It makes sense with the context in the article, but "triples that of 650 million" is a very strange way to say "almost 2 billion".

Why mix units? Match 1.3billion for water. Why not say match 1.95 billion for power, instead of 3x650 million.

Fuck this.

I remember in the 00s imagining what AI might be like.

I did not imagine soulless chat bot that was going to steal all the water.

Once again: stop letting them use potable fucking drinking water it makes no sense

triples that of 650 million

Wouldn't saying nearly as much as 2 billion people be the same and more efficient?

Good use of our resources

Why is the article using "match" and "triple" in the same sentence for things that are pretty much in the same order of magnitude?

A note: “AI” doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s not using evaporative cooling out of necessity. It’s just the absolute cheapest, fastest way to cool en masse. Just like slamming a gas generator down on a site, or housing servers in tents:

They could take an extra second to build something efficient, and they did not.

Or, they could just not use waste so many GPUs on “intelligence scaling” that does not scale. Like most non-US firms do, just fine. But FOMO.

In other words, non technical decision makers, who don’t understand how transformers models even work, dictated this would happen. It’s not even a sane business planning decision, and they’re too rich to face any consequences now.

And it will be our fault that there aren't enough resources for the data centers just like it's our fault the climate is changing. If only we didn't use AC when it was needed, we could have saved the world /s

The Epstein class will never be at fault.

What if we as a society decided to just not?

Why don't they make this the first problem AI should solve?

This completely ignores that fresh water production is regional. I'm tired of that shit. It's something else to use x amount of water in Amazon jungle and something else to use same amount in the desert. The notion that you could just provide third world countries with water from US is moronic.

Don’t forget to shower less and only use paper straws

You'll tell people that and then they keep using AI...

It's stupid how much they are pouring into hardware that might be vastly obsolete. By the time AI becomes truly intelligent, there may be specialized chips that are efficient at running models that blow GPUs out of the water.

Look at how it happened to bitcoin mining. Nobody serious is using a GPU to mine when ASIC is available.

However, I don't see all this hardware hitting the second hand market once a better solution is found. I'm sure they will keep trying to make compute hard to get for the average person so they can rent out their servers for a crazy price.

Then they'll "lay off" those people.

I might be going against the grain here but honestly it doesnt seem like that much. This article is really misleading in how it frames these stats.