One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water.
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.
I feel like we need some citations for these figures. Our World In Data [1] disagrees. I've not seen any analysis that puts any plant milk at a higher water use figure than dairy.
If you want to play these stupid games how much water did you think was used to make the concrete for the data centers? Or how much water was used to cool the steel? How much water did all the workers drink while building the data center? How much water did they use to build all those GPUs?
Almonds provide a real utility for humans: food. LLM slop has done nothing but made the public miserable to help prop up the delusional fantasies of the tech elite (all of which hold deeply anti-human + anti-democratic views).
Now when I use an internet search, the top answer is an AI guess/approximation to the result and can be completely inaccurate. I have to ignore that and move onto the traditional results and hope that they aren't A.I. slop websites.
>A BBS chatbot from the 80s (LISA) was almost as good as modern LLMs and that was just based on key words.
Of course, because it's not like whole world went crazy after ChatGPT and hundreds of billions of dollars are being constantly invested into many of technology stacks - software, hardware, semiconductor engineering in order to push this technology even further, lol.
It's really weird to me that datacenter fans all have detailed knowledge of almond farming, but never seem to notice that the nutritional value of ChatGPT is not on par with your average box of almond milk.
Because nutritional value is not the only thing of value. We invented this clever way of uniformly valuing things called "money" that abstracts over all of those differences though.
It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.
There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.