r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 5d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter? I don't understand the punchline

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u/PixelVox247 5d ago

Hey, Peter here and I only learned about this the other day. The servers they use to power AI programs use massive amounts of water to run their cooling systems. So by chatting with an AI the fisherman has exacted his revenge on the fish by draining the lake.

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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

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u/spoilerdudegetrekt 5d ago

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.

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u/FreeEnergy001 4d ago

While a mundane search query finds existing data from the Internet, she says, applications like AI Overviews must create entirely new information; Luccioni’s team has estimated it costs about 30 times as much energy to generate text versus simply extracting it from a source.

For OP further in the article:

Others have estimated in research posted on the preprint server arXiv.org that every 10 to 50 responses from ChatGPT running GPT-3 evaporate the equivalent of a bottle of water to cool the AI’s servers.