AI: Is It Ruining the Environment?

0:00Hi, I'm Rose Rimler. I'm filling in for Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus. This is the show that pits facts against filling the world with AI data centers.

0:15Today on the show, AI and the environment. Lately, we've been hearing a lot about how power-hungry AI is. AI uses a shit ton of electricity. Straining the nation's aging power grid and creating more planet-warming emissions. And how thirsty it is. The amount of water that AI uses is astonishing. Asking chat GPT to write one email is the equivalent of pouring out an entire water bottle. One bottle of water. Let that sink in. Let that sink in. And the major culprit here is the data centers. Warehouses full of computer servers that AI needs to function. And tech companies are trying to build more of these data centers.

0:55But people who live nearby are protesting them. Often saying that they're going to compete for their electricity and use up their water. We do not want a data center built in St. Charles City.

1:13Because of all this, around some corners of the internet, using AI has become kind of a faux pas, especially if you use it for something silly. You are actively contributing to global warming and climate change, all because you want to Photoshop Chris Brown into your picture. So next time you use AI to generate an image for a meme, think about the impact on the environment first. Stop ruining your planet for a f***ing Instagram post. But on the flip side, we've got people pushing back against this idea. They say that these reports are skewed or misleading, and that the impact of AI on the environment isn't nearly as bad as a bunch of other stuff we're already doing, like eating meat or taking international flights.

1:55In fact, recently, some of the big AI companies have said that their products only use a tiny bit of power and a few drops of water for each prompt. So what's really going on here? Is AI actually ruining the planet? Or have the bots been framed? Because when it comes to AI and the environment, there's a lot of... Stop ruining your planet for a f***ing Instagram post. But then there's science. And that's coming up after the break. And full disclosure, some AI companies do advertise on Science Versus.

2:39Welcome back. I'm Rose Rimler. I'm a senior producer at Science Versus, and I'm here with our editor, Blythe Terrell. Hi, Blythe. Hey, Rose. Blythe, it seems like you're my AI buddy. I invite you to talk to me about controversies when it comes to AI. It's because I'm part robot. I would say that of the team, you're the person who is like most tuned into this idea about AI, using up all the energy, using up all the water. You've been into this for a while. Yes, this is actually, I am one of those people who probably shared a meme, Rose, without knowing if it was true. On the water use or the whatever.

3:18Like, I do remember seeing those memes and being like, is this true? And then honestly, for me, it did make me take a step back from AI and be like, before I get involved in this, I do want to know the truth. Like, is this actually terrible for the environment? Is this actually terrible for the water? Because why would I want to integrate it into my life if it is? Right. So the first question is, why do we think AI would use so much more energy than all the other stuff that we do in our digital lives? just like messing around on the computer, posting on Instagram, watching Netflix. Like this is all stuff that we do pretty routinely and don't think a lot about the like footprint of that behavior.

3:58Right, like looking at pictures of Jeff Goldblum. Yeah. How much energy is that using? Just as an example, hypothetically, photoshopping Jeff Goldblum as your prom date. You know, I don't know who you might be talking about, Rose, but that sounds like a pretty good use of electricity and energy and water, no matter how much it takes. So that kind of stuff also requires data centers and energy to run them. But the thing that's different about AI is that their servers are using a different kind of computer chip. So normal computing uses a CPU, but AI uses a GPU. And if you're familiar with video games, you might think of this as like a graphics card.

4:38But it's actually become the powerhouse behind machine learning. this is an extremely visual and potentially copyrighted analogy but I was looking around on YouTube I love a copyrighted analogy the Mythbusters guys they did a demonstration of a CPU versus a GPU and in their demonstration they used paintball guns the CPU was like programming one paintball gun to draw a happy face with like one paintball pellet at a time, like firing at a piece of paper on a wall. Okay. That's a CPU. A GPU was like 200 paintball guns all bound together. Making it like a mega gun? A mega paintball gun. And like one switch is hit and they all fire at once.

5:27And the image that they create is the Mona Lisa. Oh, man, those guys are good. Mythbusters. So the point is that while CPUs are good at doing one task after another, the GPUs are good at doing a bunch of tasks at once. And that requires a lot more energy. Okay. How much energy? Are we ready for that? Yeah, we're ready. And I got a bit of an assist here. I talked to some journalists who have covered this stuff for years. My name is James O'Donnell. I'm a senior reporter for AI at MIT Technology Review. I'm Casey Cronhart. I'm a senior climate reporter at MIT Technology Review. So James and Casey both report a lot on AI and energy use.

6:09Mm-hmm. Okay. And about a year ago, they started a project trying to figure out, like, how much does an average query or prompt to, say, ChatGPT, how much energy does that use? And they were inspired to do that because they were seeing all these numbers out there floating around that just didn't seem all that reliable. Here's Casey. These kind of wild estimates of, you know, oh, a query to something like ChatGPT uses this much water and this much energy and isn't that so much? And so I think that started to kind of get our gears turning and wondering, you know, is that right? How can we add all of this up?

6:45What does it all add up to? So Casey and James looked around for the real number, but... We learned very quickly that it's not going to be so easy to know that number. companies, they're not particularly willing to share the details of how much energy their AI models require to answer one question. And so, you know, we weren't going to get it from them. And so... What did they say when you reached out and asked? They said, in so many words, no. So, James and Casey went a different route. There are AI models that are not proprietary. Anybody can use them, even download them, host them on their own computer, as long as they have the power to do that.

7:27These are open source models. And you can kind of open the hood, poke and prod them. And so James and Casey teamed up with experts, including academics at the University of Michigan, to measure it themselves. So they ran a bunch of different prompts through an open source large language model called LAMA. Okay. And then they were able to actually measure how much energy those requests required. And so they got some answers. Are you curious? Yes, I would love to know. Give me the answers. Well, there's a range here. I was really struck throughout this project of, I think we went in and I was looking for kind of one definitive answer.

8:10You know, like, what is AI's energy burden? And I think that one of my biggest takeaways was just how much it depends. It depends on the model. It depends what you're asking. And so there's just this really big range. That was one of my biggest takeaways. Hmm. So, you know, basically when people like us say, I asked AI, you know, we kind of act like AI is this one thing. And it's totally not. There are all these different models. And these models come in different sizes. So a model, sorry, a model is like a ChatGPT or a Gemini or a Claude or whatever. Yeah, and they're within ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.

8:50There are multiple models. Within Llama, there are multiple. And some are bigger, some are smaller. If you imagine that this AI model, like imagine it's the command of a spaceship, or actually my favorite is like a switchboard with tons of knobs and dials. You can kind of imagine that's what these parameters are. James says... Each of those knobs is helping the AI come up with a better answer, but also each of those knobs requires energy to operate. So the smallest model that the team looked at for this analysis had 8 billion parameters. So 8 billion stops. That sounds big. The biggest one they looked at had 400 billion parameters.

9:36400 billion? And when it comes to the big players here, we actually don't know how many parameters they have. But James said if he had to guess, it's... You know, in the order of trillions. Whoa. Really big. A lot of knobs. A lot of knobs. I mean, I'm imagining basically like a switchboard, but now I have to completely change it because it's like a switchboard that goes on for miles. Yes, that's right. So these parameters you're talking about, which is like sort of what underpins the model, I guess, they are numbers, values, and the more of them that there are, the better the model is at learning patterns and making predictions, which is how large language models work.

10:24Okay. Okay. So say I have like one request and I pop it into a model with 8 billion parameters. Uh-huh. And then I pop that like same request into a model with like 400 billion parameters. Uh-huh. That same request is going to use different amounts of energy based on the model that I'm using. Yes. And actually we can move into, we don't even have to hypotheticalize here. I have real numbers for you. Oh, nice. Okay. So the smallest llama model that the team used, they fed in some prompts like, teach me about quantum computing or suggest some travel tips. And then they measured, you know, how much energy that used.

11:06The smallest model, when it spit out an answer, used on average 114 joules. Oh, great, great. That's very helpful. Are you being sarcastic? Do you want some other way to think about this? Yes, please give me something more concrete. Well, I didn't. You know, it was James and Casey. So they came up with something for some context. One thing they converted these energy units into is a fun new type of unit called microwave seconds. I love the microwave seconds unit. It's so much more relatable than joules or watt hours. Casey gets me. All right. So 114 joules is roughly a tenth of a second in a microwave.

11:48Okay, so that's one query, small model, a tenth of a second in the microwave. Yeah. Okay. The biggest model, which was 50 times bigger, that was like zapping something in a microwave for eight seconds. Oh, so that's the biggest model was still only, for one query, the biggest model was still only eight seconds. Okay, that doesn't even get my rice remotely hot. Right. I mean, and after James and Casey published their article, frustratingly for them, OpenAI and Google did release a little bit of information on how much energy their text prompts use on average. And what they said suggests that a text query is equivalent to one or two seconds in the microwave.

12:31Okay. So basically what we can tell you is like a text prompt to a large language model is probably on the order of zapping something in the microwave for less than 10 seconds. Mm-hmm. Okay. And then for images, this is a different kind of machine learning, but it also uses a fair amount of energy. And I would have assumed that this image-making thing is inherently more energy-sucking than text-making. But as it turns out, that is not necessarily the case. Here's James. If you have a really big, large language model that's generating text and answers, it may actually use more energy than generating an image.

13:12And that was kind of counterintuitive for me because, you know, you think about like these AI models that come up with fantastical images that we've all seen over the past few years. And it just seems like such an intense process to kind of create that from scratch. Yeah, because it always takes longer, too, than getting your text back. Yeah, exactly. But what we found was that if you have a really large text model, it has so many parameters, so it has so many knobs and dials, that it actually can use up more energy than generating certain types of images. They found that making an image was like running a microwave for five and a half seconds.

13:48So a big language model can be like eight seconds of microwave time. So that's a little less. Okay. Right. I'm with you. And, you know, for all this stuff, if you don't like microwave time, you could also think about it in light bulb time. So it's like running an LED light bulb for somewhere between 10 seconds and two minutes. So I guess, Rose, what this maybe tells me is that if I wanted to make my Jeff Goldblum prom picture with AI, that is a slightly less energy-intensive process than perhaps using AI to write romantic Jeff Goldblum fanfiction. Possibly if you use a really big model to write your Jeff Goldblum fanfiction.

14:30Obviously, I would need a very large model for this work, Rose. Okay, got it. And then there's video generation. This might not surprise you to hear that that used the most energy. So the team, what they did was they looked at an open source video generation model. And they just made like a crap video. It was 16 frames a second, five seconds long. They compare it to like the quality of a silent film era type film. Okay. And that one. That would be the equivalent of over an hour in the microwave. I don't think I've ever microwaved anything for an hour. I don't think I have either. A long time in the microwave, for sure.

15:10That one scares me more because I'm seeing a lot of AI-generated videos out there. Yeah, that's what's huge right now and getting bigger, right? There's a ton of, what is it, Sora? Yeah, Sora is big right now. Yeah. And they can look incredibly realistic, right? Right. We don't know if that's also using up as much energy. We asked OpenAI, which makes Sora, and they didn't give us any information on Sora's energy use. and James and Casey didn't want to speculate. It's a different model. But it's probably using a fair amount of electricity. I think that's safe to assume. So, I mean, but, okay, so what we have so far is all about, like, individual use.

15:48Yeah. But what I want to know, though, is, like, obviously lots of us are doing this, lots of us are using this. Like, what is the impact if you, like, add it all up, if you, like, scoop up all the AI use that we're doing? Like, what do we know about that? Right. It's interesting. like on an individual level, certainly like the texting and image generation stuff, they're not that crazy energy intensive. But that doesn't leave AI off the hook because when you do zoom out, and to answer your question, it really adds up fast because OpenAI says it receives two and a half billion prompts per day from people around the world.

16:26And AI in general is getting integrated into all these institutions, which I think a lot of us are noticing. In fact, one survey of a variety of organizations around the world found that 78 % of them are now using AI to some extent. That is a lot. And so nerds have looked at how much electricity is going to data centers to see if AI has made an impact. And they saw that from 2014 to 2023, the electricity consumption of data centers tripled. That's according to a report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Oh, wow. So like in this, and that's the AI period. Like that's like sort of.

17:05That is like, yeah, basically the age of AI, like taking off. Taking off. And the energy suck is expected to keep sucking up more and more. One analysis predicts that by 2028, AI data centers will use as much electricity as a quarter of U.S. households use per year. Wow. Imagine adding 25 % more households to the U.S. in 2028. That's what the prediction is that these AI data centers are going to use up. That doesn't sound good. Well, I mean, Casey, who's a climate reporter, she was like, you know, it's not the electricity per se that's the problem here. That's kind of the crucial thing that I like to bring up and really harp on is that, you know, if we had abundant solar and wind power and batteries, you know, we might be less concerned about some of this energy demand.

17:57But the reality is that grids around the world are still largely relying on fossil fuels. So it's not good. Right now in the U.S., only 9 % of the country's power comes from renewable sources. It's still mostly fossil fuels that we use to power our electric grid. A third of our energy comes from petroleum. A third comes from natural gas, which is another fossil fuel. Both are greenhouse gas emitters. And coal? Coal is in the mix, too. It's 8%. So just a lot of this energy is dirty. And of course, there are other countries with cleaner energy grids than the U.S., but more than half of the data centers for the world are here in the U.S.

18:39Well, and you know, I feel like the headlines, some of the headlines I've seen around this, rows have been like related to nuclear energy because there were headlines a while back that one of these companies was going to reopen Three Mile Island, which is this nuclear plant that was shut down because of an accident. And so there was talk of like that being reopened and like, you know, really a lot of these companies being very interested in what's going on with nuclear. So it does make me wonder, could nuclear help if we can get that ramped up? I asked Casey about that and she was like, the thing about nuclear reopening or building a new nuclear plant, it takes so long.

19:16The last nuclear plant that we built in the U.S. took 15 years to complete. And companies are just not going to wait for that to happen. And they're not. They're not waiting for it. I mean, look at XAI. They brought in gas-burning generators to run their data center in Tennessee. Right. Okay. Okay. Well, that sucks.

19:44Yeah, so I reached out to XAI and I didn't hear back. I also contacted Google and Anthropic just to ask about all the stuff that we've been talking about. I didn't get answers from them by our deadline. OpenAI did get back to me. They mostly pointed me to stuff that's already publicly available, open letters and blog posts, that kind of thing, talking about their energy use and how they see that in the future. And basically what OpenAI is saying is that they want to work with the government to add capacity to the grid. And they say that they want that energy to come from all kinds of sources, including renewables.

20:22Uh-huh. Okay. And just overall, I will say there might be some changes coming for the positive. So the energy that AI requires to answer your query or make your image or your video, that could be going down. Because a lot of the tech companies are trying to make their models more efficient. One way they're doing that is by turning off some of the parameters that we talked about earlier when they don't necessarily need them to answer a particular question or do a task. So that's like shrinking the switchboard essentially as needed. So there is some evidence that like the tech companies are like trying to adjust to make this thing.

20:57Yes, it might get better. Okay, so that's energy, Rose. But I know there's another piece to this. Yeah. What about water? What is going on with water? Right. So we're going to talk about that after the break.

21:38Yes, and she also answers questions. 24-7 and without a German. That's just the app that understands us. Payment completed with VisoSteuer. Now try to try it out.

22:08but he focuses on sustainability. Most people in his field look at, you know, energy, greenhouse gases, like we were just talking about. But Shalai has kind of forged his own path because he's thought about conserving water for just a lot of his life. I spent my first few years in a small town back in China. We just had access to fresh water, drinking water for half an hour each day. During those half an hour, we had to use a big bucket to collect the water and use it for the rest of the day. So in my memory, I never thought water is something unlimited. It's just, it's a finite resource. You've never taken it for granted.

22:51Right. And so one reason AI uses a lot of water is something that you probably heard before. The data centers get really hot because they're running all these fancy chips doing all this computation, like we were talking about earlier. And so these buildings, they often use a cooling tower that uses water to cool everything down. Just like our human bodies, we sweat and we feel cooler. For data centers, if you use water evaporation, you can take away the heat very naturally, very efficiently. And where do they get that water from? Most typically, it's from the municipal water infrastructure system.

23:26So the same as where if I lived there, if I were to turn my tap on. Yeah. So they get water for where everyone gets water. From the faucet, basically. And the reason for that is they want, like, clean filtered water because if there was salt or minerals or, like, gunk in it, then it could gum up this system, basically. Okay. So as the water cools, the Dana centers, it, you know, it evaporates away. It evaporates. And if I remember my, like, kindergarten, you know, the water cycle, when water evaporates, it eventually comes back as rain, right? So why do we need to worry about this? So the evaporated water, yeah, it still stays within our global water cycle system.

24:05It doesn't go away from the Earth. But still, when the water will be coming back and where it will be coming back, that's highly uncertain. And it's very unevenly distributed across the globe. So due to the long-term climate change, we're seeing more and more uneven distribution of the water resources. So essentially the wetter regions are getting wetter and drier regions are getting drier. So even if the water is evaporated in, say, Arizona, that doesn't mean it'll come back as rain in Arizona, at least not anytime soon. Correct. Okay. Oh, okay. So the argument is, it's using a bunch of water.

24:48It's drawing it out from where everyone else is getting their water. And it's not necessarily going to be replenished that easily. Well, yeah. Yeah. It's going to evaporate the drinking water in Tucson. And that water might next show up as a flood in Shanghai. Right. Okay. So let's talk about how much water is actually getting used here. Shaolay and his team, they went down this rabbit hole fairly recently, and they published a paper that kind of went viral. In fact, a lot of people turned their results into a meme, basically saying that every time you use AI, they'll say it in different ways.

25:27Like, every time you chat with ChatGPT, every time you write an email with AI, you're consuming a bottle of water. Have you seen this, Blythe? Yes, yes. This was one of the memes I first saw and shared without evidence. I've seen videos of people filming themselves with a nice, beautiful, fresh bottle of water from the store, opening it up and pouring it down the drain and saying, this is what you're doing when you use AI. Or someone will be dressed up and pretending to be AI, dressed as a robot, and they're just guzzling water. But that's not quite accurate. Yeah, so that's a distortion of the message that we show in the paper.