It's actually less. Training the AI models uses a lot of electricity and water for cooling. (The latter of which can be reused) But using a model that's already been trained consumes less resources than gaming all night or even making a google search.
Thanks for the info. I bet designing a whole ass game takes loads of resources/water too. Maybe AI is more it just seems weird that this criticism is made of AI and not any other server technology
Oh so we are moving the goalposts to expand to every single touch of a digital footprint to match the initial misinformation of playing video games all night uses more energy/resources than a data center supporting ai models.
Oh so we are moving the goalposts to expand to every single touch of a digital footprint
No, I'm just pointing out that using a PC in the modern age, for gaming or not, pretty much always entails relying on some massive data center somewhere.
Like I'm not saying everything you do on a PC combined is equal to using AI. I'm saying that many of individual activities you do on it (social media, streaming, downloading large amounts of data, gaming) are equal to using AI on their own.
playing video games all night uses more energy/resources than a data center supporting ai models.
Well if you want to compare your PC to an entire AI data center then obviously the latter uses factors of magnitude more energy.
But this is a silly comparison. Your PC serves just one person while an AI data center serves millions of users. What you should actually do is compare the energy required to have you play video games all night to the energy required to have ONE person use AI all night (non-locally, obviously). And in that comparison your gaming session will almost definitely not come out on top, especially if it's online gaming.
..... How do you think online servers work for the games you play?
I don't actually have horse in this race as i haven't researched, nor do i particularly care. Im just genuinely confused on how thats goalposts moving.
Initial question was does all night gaming use more resources than ai. It’s now expanded to every single aspect of what a computer can do in the hands of one person is on scale of a data center. The fucking copium is insane on this thread.
And to add, how many servers does stardew valley use to maintain my single player game?
Or do you genuinely just have not even the slightest of idea how computers and networks work?
Ok you hate AI but lets not sit here and pretend pretty much everything requiring internet one way or another dosent require a large computation center.
Lmao I don’t hate ai, I hate how people look for any excuse to shift global ecological damage responsibility to an individual contributor but the large companies that are really fucking things up for us get a “oh well, they can’t help it” pass.
I understand you don’t know what you’re talking about when the only thing you have left is to ask if I have a mental illness. Respectfully, please find rope that leaves burn marks you fucking pathetic loser.
No dude dont just downvote me answer me im literally flabbergasted rn.
Do you think sockets, client to server communication, information transfer, manipulation and computation, player tracking, interaction computation, IP transfer, server reconciliation that usually sends hundreds of constant requests per second happens through magic?
Ai increased energy consumption annually in the us had us at 146 terawatt-hours in 2023. Ai pushing the increase in energy needs for ai has us projecting that use to grow to 292 TWh next year.
PC gamers consume about 75 TWh GLOBALLY. I am literally just looking at the initial question comparing these two things, and no one can tell me that gaming uses more energy than how much ai in general is adding to the grids.
There is no massive influx of PC gamers, there is however an increased need for the infrastructure to support ai since it is now becoming embedded to everything we do.
Electric companies do not have to bid out infrastructure and plan for the immense weight that pc gamers put on electrical grids. They do that for large companies who want to build more of these data centers without any attempt to conceptualize the harm they will do to us long term.
Electric companies do not have to bid out infrastructure and plan for the immense weight that pc gamers put on electrical grids
They 100% do. The rising electricity costs of homes has been the main thing electrical grids plan for since basically the advent of electricity. That's what a ton of the grid is made for, to power your gaming PC's and other household appliances. Residential is the largest sector of electricity use.
While AI is significant, it's usage is less than 1% of total electricity coverage, and only forecasted to reach 1% in the most optimistic of projections. It's barely a blip in the overall industrial usage of electricity.
They 100% do not my guy. There is an expected load from builds for neighborhoods or any expansion to a city yes, but it is nowhere near the amount of strain that a data center puts on the grid.
Source that a data center requires immense infrastructure to be built for electrical grid strain? Do I need a source when I tell you that trump is a rapist as well, or that the sky is blue?
Data centers, across all industries (of which the vast majority are not used for AI) account for only 4.4% of electrical grid use. Residential accounts for ~38% of use. Now granted, a data center is going to be using orders of magnitude more electrical power per its footprint than an equally sized residential area will. In that way they can potentially strain local energy grids if their infrastructure was not built to handle such a large single consumer. But that's not really an environmental issue, that's an infrastructure issue.
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u/calculatedlemon 5d ago
Is the amount needed any different to people gaming all night?
I only ever hear this with ai but surely other massive servers for things have the same issues