Seagnal #1 - Powering AI with clean energy
Welcome to Seagnal, your weekly digest of crucial trends and insights for a sustainable future.
📊 #1 Trend - Data power consumption
Whether you've heard about Sam Altman wanting to raise substantial amounts of money to build new AI chips, or you're kicking yourself for not investing in NVIDIA, you might have worried about the environmental impacts of AI.
And you’re not alone, the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently reported that data centers accounted for 2% of the total global electricity demand in 2022, estimating that this demand will grow 35-125% by 2026.
Source: IEA, Electricity 2024, CC BY 4.0, www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024.
While traditional data centers and cryptocurrencies use more energy, the real trend here is the consumption of AI data centers. To provide another reference point, a query on OpenAI's ChatGPT is 10 times more energy-intensive than a Google search, at 2.9 Wh [1] it represents 25% of an iPhone 12 battery. (Another fun one: at approximately 80 queries today, my AI energy consumptions equates to about 1.5-2 km in a Tesla Model 3.)
As intelligence shifts from our energy-efficient brains to semiconductors, we will need to optimize efficiency of these services, and explore opportunities, such as:
Smartly locating data centers (e.g. near renewable energy, in colder climates).
Using data centers for demand flexibility (e.g. spinning up computations when carbon-free energy is available).
Developing efficient and suitable AI models for different tasks.
In the words of ChatGPT: “This journey towards AI isn't just about mitigating risks; it's an opportunity to redefine how we harness energy for technological advancement, ensuring that as we advance into this new frontier, we do so responsibly and with a keen eye on the environmental legacy we leave behind.”
The flow of capital towards AI presents an immense opportunity not only for efficiency gains to trickle down to clean power generation but also to leverage new infrastructure developments for a more stable and sustainable energy grid.
💡 #2 Insight - Cultivate your surroundings
We’ve all heard: “Your network is your net worth”, but this concept really hit home will reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography. Not only did Leo grow up in and around Florence, a city that “had more wood-carvers than butchers”[2], but he was also seeking masters in specific fields to satiate his curious mind, as one of his 7200 pages of notes demonstrates:
“Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle. . . . Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled. . . .Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders. . . . ”[2]
Are you surrounding yourself with the right people, and leveraging internet to satisfy your curiosity with insights from the relevant 'masters' ?
🔗 #3 Check these out
Goodreads: The best software for staying on top of reading list - my profile.
Antifragile, Things that benefit from disorder by Nassim Taleb: This year’s best read so far, whose concept of the noise-to-signal ratio inspired this newsletter.
A personal project update on developing an educational video game: Check it out if your interest in video game design, EdTech, or AI workflow for pixel art !
References:
[1] The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence, Alex De Vries.
[2] Leonardo Da Vinci, The biography, Walter Isacson.
Further reading:
https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations - Slides 183 to 187
- Data centers efficiency is no longer improving.
- GPU are more polluting then CPUs to produce (but less to run - per TeraFlops).
Further reading:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/13/climate/electric-power-climate-change.html?smid=nytcore-android-share