To Build Their AI Tech, Microsoft and Google are Using a Lot of Water – Slashdot

Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading! Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday September 10, 2023 @04:59PM from the cool-it dept. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares this report from the Associated Press: The cost of building an artificial intelligence product like ChatGPT can be hard to measure. But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing. As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption. But they’re often secretive about the specifics. Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.” Building a large language model requires analyzing patterns across a huge trove of human-written text. All
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