Disallow or discourage use of "AI" tools (Christoph Cullmann)

[Alexander Semke]

On 16/05/25 02:22, Justin Zobel wrote:
> [...]
>
> Using a mobile phone cannot be compared to the power used by data 
> centres to train AI in the slightest.
>
> Just straight off the top of my head, your phone and computer 
> automatically go to sleep by default. Servers do not.
>
> It's also a matter of how these data centres are powered. Corporations 
> will often go for the cheapest source which is often dirty 
> non-renewable sources of energy.
>
The world is more complicated. You might want to check how the 
hyperscalers are over-commiting/over-provisioning the hardware to avoid 
idle servers and how the workloads are shifted to make more use of 
renewables and how the data center and the power supply strategy looks 
like for these companies. Resources like 
https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows/ 
and the publications from Google, Meta, etc. around 2020 in this context 
provide interesting insights into this topic. "Net-zero" commitments are 
present also outside of the tech field, also because of political 
obligations. Of course there are still "dirty components" in many cases, 
but the over-generalization you did above doesn't describe the current 
reality well enough.


-- 

Alexander