Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa – with a lot of water::As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption.
Why does every fad tech come with a huge environmental cost?
Eating burgers to destroy the environment was good enough for my pappy and it’s good enough for me! Kids these days with their new-fangled environment destruction techniques. Pshaw.
On a more serious note, people are eager to criticize stuff that has a relatively tiny effect while there’s a much bigger problem they’re part of.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.
Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.”
In response to questions from The Associated Press, Microsoft said in a statement this week that it is investing in research to measure AI’s energy and carbon footprint “while working on ways to make large systems more efficient, in both training and application.”
Microsoft first said it was developing one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for OpenAI in 2020, declining to reveal its location to AP at the time but describing it as a “single system” with more than 285,000 cores of conventional semiconductors, and 10,000 graphics processors — a kind of chip that’s become crucial to AI workloads.
It wasn’t until late May that Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, disclosed that it had built its “advanced AI supercomputing data center” in Iowa, exclusively to enable OpenAI to train what has become its fourth-generation model, GPT-4.
In some ways, West Des Moines is a relatively efficient place to train a powerful AI system, especially compared to Microsoft’s data centers in Arizona that consume far more water for the same computing demand.
The original article contains 1,284 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Could this be somehow combined with salt water, so the evaporated water would then be drinkable?
I’m not an expert, but I think saltwater has a lower heat capacity than freshwater (like how pasta water boils faster with salt in it)
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So, they’re using evaporative cooling for this?
If it becomes illegal or taxed enough to hurt, they could start using heat pumps and burriwd exhangers
