What really happens after you hit enter on that AI prompt? WSJ’s Joanna Stern heads inside a data center to trace the journey and then grills up some steaks to show just how much energy it takes to make an AI image and video.
Move Slow and Build Things: WSJ
The Wall Street Journal article and video noted here talks about the huge amount of investment ongoing in data centers. Perhaps unprecedented amounts… but in any case, ginormous amounts of cash have been rapidly committed and expended for chip purchases and construction of server farms… including big time infrastructure for cooling etc.
Such big dealing suggests a commensurate “big deal future” coming our way.
(Or one of history’s biggest wrong turns ever, though that would mean all the smart money wasn’t.)
And then the video takes us to a data center to get a sense of how much energy is being used every time we prompt AI. Currently, that’s a whole lot of energy, but there are large improvements in efficiency occuring too.
Energy requirements could become a “bottleneck” for increasing use in the not too distant future. But it’s very hard to predict what innovations will arrive to meet the demand. For example, SGI that teaches itself how to be smarter might figure out how to dramatically increase efficiency in the needed chips.