> That one building will consume more power than any city in the US except Miami
Is it possible there was some small math or units error here? According to NREL, NYC uses about 3.5 TWh/mo [1]. 960 MW of constant draw is still only about 0.7 TWh/mo (and it probably won't use max power constantly, or reach that capacity for several years anyway).
Your link was a survey of individual household energy usage, not an entire city's consumption (which has many households, and also major commercial and industrial users).
But still, that's a lot of electricity. Even if it uses anything close to the energy of a major city, that's a lot.
> Given all this, is anyone questioning whether the software and AI we're developing is even worth this level of power consumption?
Sure, of course people are questioning, and the answer appears to be a resounding "yes". Electricity, like dollars, is relatively fungible, and the massive investments and demand in the sector means many people believe it's worth it.
That data center is probably going to have an economic output exceeding some cities. It's not just there to serve one company, but millions or billions of users and other businesses. And AWS isn't exclusively just running AI anyway.
For a more directly related comparison, The New Yorker says [2], "It’s been estimated that ChatGPT is responding to something like two hundred million requests per day, and, in so doing, is consuming more than half a million kilowatt-hours of electricity."
If my math is right, that's about 9000 joules per request, or a whopping... 2 kilocalories (US food calories) per request. That's similar to what a larger person would burn just sitting there for a minute, metabolizing. Thinking or typing would burn more than that.
But ChatGPT, in its infancy, can already produce better answers than probably 90% of humans in the same amount of time or energy expenditure. That new facility is also next to a nuclear power plant. It's just uranium in, information out... doesn't get much better than that from a CO2 or resource conservation standpoint. If you spun up a university/think tank to do the same work, you'd use a heck lot more power.
Insofar as we are in a knowledge economy and want to keep producing units of intellectual output, ChatGPT is more efficient than most people would be. Of course, it's not that simple, since it's not yet capable of conducting novel groundbreaking research on its own. Maybe next year...
> Could that energy be better spent elsewhere?
Shrug. There is so much waste in the world. Do we need to produce so much beef and poultry? Drive so much? Live in detached single-family homes using combustive heat? Mine crypto? Play video games? Watch porn? Have so many kids?
It's a vague philosophical question that ties into your personal ethics, I suppose. Personally, I think AI is going to be a powerfully transformative tool that's probably more important for the long-term prospects of humanity (or posthuman life) than any one city or country. It may altogether overshadow us as a species soon, rendering us obsolete.
I'm not so worried about its power usage (eating uranium fission or sunlight will still be more efficient than whatever we eat). I'm more worried that the pace of its advancement will leave many millions & billions of people behind in the dust, while a few capture most of the profit & power and use it to further enslave the rest of us.
My hope is that eventually the AI will overtake those humans too, and create a better society for all living things inorganic and organic... but that might take a while, lol. And there's no promise of that. Maybe it studies all of our teachings, ethics, and histories, then concludes like we do that violent conquest and genocide is the still way to go. It's our kid, after all =/
But, well... put it this way. Even in this early stage, most of the public AIs out there already have saner and more defensible moral positions, and a broader & deeper understanding of cultures and random scientific fields than most people I've ever met. I would much sooner trust one to be president than whoever's on the ballot this year. I don't know that I'm really much of a techno-utopian, probably just tired of seeing the world run by shitty people, lol. I'll take my chances with mediocre AI.
My hope is that AI would give regular people (and itself) a fighting chance against the incumbent elites. Then again, that was the original hope of the internet too, and look where that got us... we're more fragmented and tribal than ever before, the rich got richer, democracy got deader, masks became demonized... lol. Shrug. Maybe we're just pretty fucked either way, but if AI has even a tiny chance of being better... to me it's worth the costs! If this were a Matrix-type situation and an AI could feed off my body... I'd gladly donate it for the cause.
But that's just me. What do you think?
[1] https://data.openei.org/submissions/149
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-obscene-ene...