Yesterday the Wall Road Journal reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman needs to lift as much as $7 trillion for a “wildly-ambitious” tech undertaking to spice up the world’s chip capability, funded by traders together with the U.A.E. — which in flip will vastly broaden its skill to energy AI fashions.
Whereas this will merely be a dreamy moonshot on Altman’s half, or an Elon Musk-like hype-generator, what is just not doubtful is the environmental influence of such an enormous effort, in keeping with Sasha Luccioni, local weather lead and researcher at Hugging Face.
“If it does work out, the amount of natural resources that will be required is just mind-boggling,” she advised VentureBeat. “Even if the energy is renewable (which it isn’t guaranteed to be), the quantity of water and rare earth minerals required is astronomical.”
For comparability, in September 2023 Fortune reported that AI instruments fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption; Meta’s Llama 2 mannequin reportedly guzzled twice as a lot water as Llama 1; and a 2023 research discovered that OpenAI’s GPT-3 coaching consumed 700,000 liters of water.
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And past the environmental influence, shortages of uncommon earth minerals resembling gallium and germanium have even helped inflame the worldwide chip warfare with China.
Luccioni criticized Altman for not specializing in extra environment friendly AI strategies to develop AI. As a substitute, she stated, “he’s taking a brute force approach and people are calling it.. visionary?”
GPU entry has change into key Silicon Valley AI battle
However the reality is, Altman’s need to deal with the present GPU shortages and reshape the semiconductor panorama is just not uncommon. Final summer time, VentureBeat reported on how entry to Nvidia’s hard-to-come-by, ultra-expensive, high-performance computing H100 GPU for big language mannequin (LLM) coaching was changing into the “top gossip” of Silicon Valley.
And simply final week, Meta supplied a deep dive into its AI technique in its newest earnings name, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that to construct AI “full general intelligence” the primary key requirement is “world-class compute infrastructure.” Zuckerberg went on to repeat what he had lately disclosed in a current Instagram Reel: that by finish of this 12 months Meta could have about 350k H100s — together with different GPUs the whole will probably be round 600k H100 equivalents of compute.
The corporate plans to proceed investing aggressively on this space, he defined: “In order to build the most advanced clusters, we’re also designing novel data centers and designing our own custom silicon specialized for our workloads.”
Luccioni has been vital about Nvidia’s transparency in regards to the carbon footprint of its merchandise (that are designed by the corporate however manufactured by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm: “Nvidia has yet to publish any information about the environmental footprint of their manufacturing,” she stated, including that e-waste as an entire can be a “huge issue because people want the new GPUs and they’re essentially throwing out the old ones after a year or two.”
In Nvidia’s 2023 Company Duty Report, the corporate stated “emissions are generated at every stage of our product lifecycle, including manufacturing within our supply chain. Since 2014, we’ve expected our key silicon manufacturing and systems contract manufacturing suppliers to report their annual energy and water usage, waste, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and reduction goals and objectives through the RBA Environmental Survey or CDP. We also expect suppliers to have their GHG emissions verified by a third party. We use this supplier data to better understand our product manufacturing impact and allocate carbon emissions to our customers.”
Extra transparency from OpenAI is unlikely
Total, Luccioni maintains that there’s much less transparency immediately in the case of the environmental influence of AI — and is unlikely to alter anytime quickly with Altman’s new fundraising march.
“If you look at the PaLM 1 paper from Google, which was in 2022, and then Palm 2 [released in May 2023], the amount of information they provided drastically dropped,” she stated. Within the unique paper, she defined, Google shared sufficient data in order that energy-use estimates could possibly be made.
“Now [companies] don’t even say how long it took [to train], how many chips they used, there’s absolutely no information provided anymore,” she stated.
However general, Luccioni says she isn’t too frightened: “I think this is just a moonshot project that won’t actually pan out,” she stated. “But that will put [Altman] on par with Elon in terms of outlandish projects that attract attention and generate hype.”
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