I just had "the talk" with my 9yo.
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo Except none of it us true ... evaporative cooling is almost entirely unused in the AI industry because it doesn't work.
Every NVIDIA chip (which is like, almost the entire industry at this point) uses either air cooling with giant fan walls, or closed loop water cooling with heat exchangers (For GB200-GB300s)
Not arguing the business model of large AI labs though ...
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo typo: ineffitiency
Great post. Very good idea to show it that way.
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@momo
I suspect your 9 year old now has a better understanding of #AI than politicians whose stated aim is to "mainline AI into the veins" of the UK
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai@OliverNoble
Honestly, his dad works for (checks calendar) 28 years in IT now, mostly as sysadmin. And politicians are used to not listen to their specialists if they don't like their explanation. So I guess he has an advantage here. Also, his mum worked as a project manager in IT projects, so he already knows what a business plan is (because I'm not allowed to buy any shit unless I can present a valid usecase and how the benefits outweight the cost of buying it. This household, let me tell you...
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@momo And excellent example! And faster still if you just used the onboard calculator which provides instant results to math questions.
@Alison
Oh, I use linux and have KDE Plasma installed as my current desktop environment. Kcalc IS the onboard calculator in that scenario. I thought about doing something like ```echo "9+7" | bc``` on the shell, but that felt too much for him in that situation... -
I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo Guess I should have "the talk" with my 69yo. dad, too...
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@Alison
Oh, I use linux and have KDE Plasma installed as my current desktop environment. Kcalc IS the onboard calculator in that scenario. I thought about doing something like ```echo "9+7" | bc``` on the shell, but that felt too much for him in that situation...@momo Still over kill when a basic system calculator would do the job. Excellent job showing him the AI is a massive energy burn.
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
Good on ya. The youth need facts, not marketing bullshit. Way to raise yours right
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
This nine-year old child is amazingly good at listening.
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@momo they should do this to Government ministers to explain why they shouldn't throw taxpayers money at this hustler. Most of them should get it....most of them.
Here in the US, we used to have an "Office of Technology Assesment" which could produce explainers like that for Congress. It apparently had a tiny budget and yet was very useful.
It was dismantled in 1995 by the newly-dominant GOP who, according to Science magazine, saw it as "duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party."
The final part of that, to my mind, has always been the tell.
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Here in the US, we used to have an "Office of Technology Assesment" which could produce explainers like that for Congress. It apparently had a tiny budget and yet was very useful.
It was dismantled in 1995 by the newly-dominant GOP who, according to Science magazine, saw it as "duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party."
The final part of that, to my mind, has always been the tell.
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo That is some good work you are doing, sir.
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo no, needing fans means he's not one....
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@momo Except none of it us true ... evaporative cooling is almost entirely unused in the AI industry because it doesn't work.
Every NVIDIA chip (which is like, almost the entire industry at this point) uses either air cooling with giant fan walls, or closed loop water cooling with heat exchangers (For GB200-GB300s)
Not arguing the business model of large AI labs though ...
-
I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo "When a billionaire and his money love each other very much…"
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo There are datacenters that use less water by using actual normal cooling systems, but they still use water too when they "overheat" (so probably all the time) & still too much of it. No matter what, these LLM datacenters are a waste of water, power, & money.
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo we are trying to leave a better planet for our kids, so if they realise this AI is actually going to ruin their future (environmentally and also morally, socially and psychologically), we have hope!
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I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo Thank you for this nice story. I will send it to all my annoying colleagues who love their AI "tools".
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@Orb2069 @momo Great, a lovely article with no reference to what hardware its talking about except "AI data centers" as a label, truly authorative.
No .. Virtually all AI focussed chips, at least the ones NVIDIA makes, are either air cooled or in closed water loops.
You can look up their spec sheets, they're public. -
@Orb2069 @momo Great, a lovely article with no reference to what hardware its talking about except "AI data centers" as a label, truly authorative.
No .. Virtually all AI focussed chips, at least the ones NVIDIA makes, are either air cooled or in closed water loops.
You can look up their spec sheets, they're public. -
I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"
So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.
Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.
And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.
He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.
I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.
Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.
@momo better honest on that one than lying…
