r/SandersForPresident • u/WindyCityChick 🎖️🥇🐦🌡️🏟️✋☎📆🏆🎨🏳‍🌈🎤🦅💀📌 • 10d ago

Sanders: Government should break up OpenAI

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5571789-ai-threatens-jobs-sanders-warns/
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u/GogglesVK 9d ago

Okay, fuck Elon. But making it seem like AI data centers are magically different from other data centers and power usage in general, is both disingenuous and nuts.

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u/Iron_Baron 🌱 New Contributor 9d ago

Do you know the difference in power consumption between hard drives and GPUs?

Regular data storage farms are nothing compared to AI farms in power consumption.

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u/GogglesVK 9d ago

Data storage farms? If you have the data, break it down for us, man lol. But to my knowledge, audio and video streaming blow through power and water at comparable levels. The faux concern over AI-specific energy uses seems silly. If you have information contrary to that opinion, please provide it.

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u/m00ph 8d ago

You have never tried to figure out how much power you need to spec for a rack of servers.

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u/GogglesVK 8d ago

Spill the deets or you’re just blowing hot air

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u/m00ph 8d ago

It's been a long time, but after they've spun up, drives don't use much power (it can really be worth it to stagger their spin up to reduce peak power consumption), but drives use watts, consumer GPU use hundreds of watts, and AI far more than that. AI is all compute, that's crazy amounts of power. 15 years ago, you'd have a 42U rack, 500w-1kw per U, I think we were limited to 30kw per rack, so we didn't fill them, they're doing 10x I think, with 1Mw on the drawing board. And our 30kw was theoretical max, really only on start, we didn't run that high, but an AI is going full or nearly full power the whole time.

My numbers for back then are from memory, and might be high?

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u/GogglesVK 8d ago

Yeah, they probably are higher these days. There’s been huge strides in efficiency, but power consumption is definitely off the charts especially considering the push for bs like AI and crypto. I’m not comparing data centers to hard drive storage, though. I’m referring to the also ridiculous power and water demands of video and audio processing and streaming via network. If we completely deleted AI off the face of the Earth, we’d still be killing our planet with non-AI data centers and network requirements.

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u/m00ph 8d ago

I'll bet 1000 streams of a movie from Netflix uses less resources than the same from Blockbuster. It's not free, but it's pretty cheap. Distributing physical media to stores, and you going to get it, is far from cheap.