Alright, so, I keep running into people who not only think AI is the ultimate evil, but actually think AI is terrible for environment.
their argument is that AI uses water to cool itself down, so it "wastes" water, along with creating heat which contributes to global warming.
My issue with these arguments is that they dont make much sense to begin with. All devices which use electricity produce heat.
When I use local AI on my smartphone, the amount of heat produced is less than when gaming. And my phone doesnt have any type of water cooling, obviously.
So if my phone, which isnt even a high end device, can run AI without wasting water or producing heat, I cant really imagine some ChatGPt which is installed on very high end devices and accessed by people through internet, producing some extreme heat or using too much water. I mean, computers dont usually produce plenty of heat, otherwise they would melt. they also cant use too much water, not more than what I use when I have a shower. But keep in mind chatGPt responds to over 200 million people daily, and its responses are rather cost effective, 3 watts hours per response from what I can find, which is very low energy use, google uses 0.3 watts hours from what I can find. So using google 10 times is same as using chatGPt once, so those opposed to ChatGPt should logically oppose internet search too.
As for water use, it uses less than a liter of water per response. I use more each time I wash hands. Also, water isnt a finite resource, I am not sure whats even the concern there. You literally cant run out of water.
So I really dont get the hype against AI based on environment reasons.
As AI improves, it requires less and less power because more cost effective models are developed. Soon you are going to have local AI on every smartphone which comes installed by default, for those too stupid to install local AI from a google play store.