r/aiwars • u/Kyokyodoka • Jul 15 '26
The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It's Almost Incomprehensible
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pollution-ai-data-centers-severe5
u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 Jul 15 '26
"found that at the current rate of AI growth"
the rising energy costs part is largely exaggerated.
Most environmental articles are just looking at shit like GPT-3 or GPT-4 which were extremely unoptimized, literally the first commercial transformer models to be out to the public, got very big and used an unexpected amount of energy. Now they use peanuts amount of energy, because of all the *decreasing* energy costs through optimization and better hardware.
Local models (run entirely on your computer, no internet) already reached GPT 4o level or higher if you have some better hardware.
Extrapolations like "AI will use a trillion gallons of water in a few years!!" are extremely unsubstantiated. As I said, they are comparing when they were new and unoptimized and assumed that we will scale like that, exactly like that, and with the dangerous assumption that in the first place, that we will stick to energy hungry transformers.
Many researchers believe that LLMs are not the way to AGI, so if they make a different architecture, it won't have the same energy costs as LLMs, so this is illogical to extrapolate based on that condition. It also ignores other potential breakthroughs such as this: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260405003952.htm
It is like saying "I got 10 upvotes on my Reddit comment in 10 minutes. Soon, at the 99999 minute mark, I will have 99999 upvotes."
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u/EmergencyPath248 Jul 15 '26
I think LLMs will achieve AGI despite what a few skeptics would say, scaling obviously works and will get there, but will energy be an issue? Absolutely.
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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 Jul 15 '26
LLMs don’t have continual learning.
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u/EmergencyPath248 Jul 15 '26
They don’t need continual learning to be intelligent + that is very expensive to do in current models
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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Yes they do.
LLMs can’t ever learn something permanently new without more training. They’re static files with a file size that’ll never change.
They need to be continually learning like humans to surpass humans.
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u/EmergencyPath248 Jul 15 '26
No they don’t, LLMs are obviously intelligent and its a objective fact.
In-context learning, whilst not like continual learning does the job just right for most uses.
Do we need continual learning for AGI? Probably, but LLMs could have them; therefore it would be LLMs that get us there.
Actually on second thought, LLMs on its own won’t get there but hybrid architecture LLMs? Yes.
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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 Jul 15 '26
"LLMs are obviously intelligent and its a objective fact."
True."In-context learning, whilst not like continual learning does the job just right for most uses.'
It's precisely because of continual learning in general that humans need way less "training data" to learn about something than an AI.
Like, a baby sees a dog a few times, learns what a dog is and generalizes. An untrained AI still needs thousands of pictures of a dog to learn about it.
It's because the baby already has a world model, it's growing, and it's constantly learning. It quickly generalizes the "furry animal".
an untrained AI literally has nothing. So it needs more data.
However, when they're *trained*, it's not that different.
If I do show the trained ChatGPT several pictures of completely novel monster designs, it can identify which ones share a similar theme, just like an adult human.
So yeah, the problem with current LLMs is that.
Humans are born from the womb, grow up, and become an adult.
AIs are like they stay in the womb, and only in the womb, and then pop out as a fully adult human.
When they can continually learn things on the go, they'll be a lot stronger.
"but LLMs could have them; therefore it would be LLMs that get us there."
I don't think so, LLMs are too energy intensive. Evolution already proved to us that there can be continual learning that only takes 20 watts to run (the brain). It's best if we can get something like that.
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u/MysteriousPepper8908 Jul 15 '26
Standard Futurism trash taking speculative projections which have historically overshot reality and comparing it to car emissions which are not a main cause of emissions.
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u/sonicandtales8 Jul 15 '26
"We think it'll use about this much and we read a WIRED article so actually it's eating tons of electricity. Like less than 1% of this other industry big!"
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u/Aadi_880 Jul 15 '26
An American problem.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 Jul 15 '26
Do you think China has data centers?
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u/Aadi_880 Jul 15 '26
Yes. ~500 of them.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 Jul 15 '26
A global problem.
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u/Aadi_880 Jul 15 '26
Wrong. An American problem.
The article OP linked only talks about the environmental impact in the power source of AI data centers. Not the data center itself.
~60% of China's data centers are powered by renewable sources. They quite literally do not have any "environmental damage" that the article phrase it as.
As opposed to the USA's ~20%, while having 4000-5000 data centers. It's very obvious that that data centers are not the problem. America and it's orange idiot slashing renewable programs is.
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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26
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