Raw LLM Responses

I agree with 99.9999% of what you said here, but I do need to push back on one bit of persistent, viral misinformation that refuses to die: the idea that AI data centers consume huge, unsustainable amounts of water. This isn't true, and it's a misconception based on people simply not understanding what "a lot of water" is. Data centers use the equivalent of something like 10,000 residential houses worth of water, which is really not that much, because residential houses are a tiny, tiny, tiny part of national water consumption. The totality of the data centers that trained GPT-3 consumed less than 1% of the amount of water used in a single year by farmers in just the state of Nebraska alone. Agriculture is far and away the biggest consumer of water in the country. Everything else is peanuts, including data centers. What's more, data centers recycle their water, circulating it through cooling towers to use again and again and again. Around 50-80% of water in data centers gets recycled this way, and tech companies are working on ways to push that number even higher. If you want to focus on resources, the main issue with data centers is electricity, not water. They do consume genuinely obscene amounts of electricity and it's a big reason why people's power bills have been trending up rapidly in the last few years.