The UN just dropped a report on what AI is actually costing the planet and I wasn't ready for these numbers

Reddit r/ArtificialInteligence News

Summary

A UN report reveals that by 2030, AI data centers could consume water equivalent to the basic annual needs of 1.3 billion people, with 80-90% of energy used for daily operations rather than training. Generating a single AI image uses over 1000 times more energy than a basic text task.

Saw this on UN News and one stat just stopped me. By 2030 AI data centres could use enough water to cover the basic annual needs of 1.3 billion people. just for cooling servers and 80-90% of that energy isn't even from training models. It's just daily usage every prompt, every search, every image. Generating one AI image uses over 1000x the energy of a basic text task and i had no idea the gap was that big. How is this not being talked about more
Original Article

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