打造ChatGPT这样一款人工智能产品,其成本可能难以衡量。
但微软(Microsoft)投资的OpenAI开发的技术离不开一种东西,那就是大量的水。该公司从美国艾奥瓦州中部的浣熊河和得梅因河流域抽水,为其功能强大的超级计算机降温。这台超级计算机负责训练其人工智能系统模仿人类写作。
微软、OpenAI和谷歌(Google)等主要科技开发商争相抓住生成式人工智能掀起的狂热,与此同时,这些公司也承认,随着对其人工智能工具的需求日益增长,从昂贵的半导体到用水量增加,这些需求产生了巨额成本。
但它们通常对具体成本守口如瓶。在艾奥瓦州,当地很少有人知道那里是OpenAI最先进的大语言模型GPT-4的诞生地,直到微软的一位高管在演讲中表示它“诞生于得梅因河以西的玉米地旁”。
打造一款大语言模型需要分析人类书写的海量文本的规律。这些计算需要消耗大量电力,并且会产生大量热量。为了在炎热天气中降温,数据中心需要注水,通常是注入到建在仓库大小的数据中心外的冷却塔里。
微软在最新环境报告中披露,2021年至2022年,其全球用水量暴增34%(接近17亿加仑,超过2,500座奥运会级别的游泳池的水量),与之前几年相比大幅增长。外部研究人员认为,微软的用水量增加与其人工智能研究有关。
美国加州大学河滨分校(University of California, Riverside)的研究人员任绍磊(音译)表示:“微软的用水量增加,可以说大部分要归因于人工智能”,包括“微软对生成式人工智能的巨额投资以及与OpenAI的合作”。任绍磊一直在尝试计算ChatGPT等生成式人工智能产品的环境影响。
他的团队在将于今年晚些时候发表的一篇论文里估计,用户每次向ChatGPT连续提问5个至50个提示词或问题,它就要消耗500毫升水(相当于16盎司的水瓶的容量)。具体用水量取决于其服务器所在地和季节。这个估算中包括公司未衡量的间接用水量,例如为数据中心供电的发电厂制冷用水。
任绍磊说:“大多数人并没有意识到ChatGPT的资源消耗。如果你不清楚资源使用情况,也就无法帮助节约资源。”
谷歌表示,同期其用水量增长了20%,任绍磊同样将其主要归因于该公司的人工智能研究。谷歌用水量增加的情况并不一致,其在俄勒冈州的用水量引起了公众的关注,因此保持稳定,但其在拉斯维加斯郊区的用水量却增长了一倍。谷歌在艾奥瓦州同样大量用水,其康瑟尔布拉夫斯数据中心抽取的饮用水量远超过其他地区。
上周,微软在回复美联社(The Associated Press)的问题时,在一份声明里表示,该公司正在研究如何衡量人工智能的能源和碳足迹,“并且想方设法提高大型系统在训练和应用中的效率”。
该公司的声明称:“我们会继续监控我们的排放,加快发展进度,同时在数据中心增加使用清洁能源,采购可再生能源,并采取其他措施实现公司到2030年达到负碳排放、水资源正效益和零废弃物的可持续发展目标。”
OpenAI在9月8日的声明中附和了微软的说法。它表示,公司正在“慎重考虑”如何最充分地利用其算力。
该公司称:“我们承认训练大模型是一个能源和水密集型过程”,并且公司将努力提高效率。
2019年,微软在位于旧金山的OpenAI首次投资10亿美元,两年多后,该初创公司推出了ChatGPT,人工智能的发展在全球掀起热潮。作为投资协议的一部分,软件业巨头微软将提供训练人工智能模型所需要的算力。
为了至少完成部分任务,两家公司选择了美国艾奥瓦州西得梅因。这座城市有68,000人口,十多年来,微软在这里修建了多座数据中心,用于支持其云计算服务。其第四座和第五座数据中心将于今年晚些时候投入运营。
微软初到此地时担任市长的史蒂夫·盖尔说:“他们在尽快建设数据中心。”盖尔表示,该市承诺建设公共基础设施并通过税款拿出一笔“惊人”的金额,以支持微软的投资,这些承诺吸引了微软。
他补充道:“但众所周知,他们对在当地开展的业务守口如瓶。”
微软先是在2020年声称正在为OpenAI开发全球最强大的超级计算机之一,当时微软拒绝对美联社透露这台超级计算机的位置,只是表示它是一个有超过285,000个常规半导体核心和10,000个图形处理器的“单一系统”,图形处理器已经成为对人工智能工作至关重要的芯片。
专家称,在一个地点“预训练”人工智能模型是合理的,因为这个过程需要在计算核心之间传输大量的数据。
直到5月末,微软的总裁布拉德·史密斯才披露,公司在艾奥瓦州建设了“高级人工智能超级计算数据中心”,专门用于支持OpenAI训练其第四代模型GPT-4。目前,这款模型被用于驱动ChatGPT付费版以及微软的部分产品,并掀起了与控制人工智能的社会风险有关的辩论。
史密斯称:“这款模型出自加州优秀的工程师之手,但它的诞生地却是在艾奥瓦州。”
从某些方面来说,西得梅因是一个训练强大人工智能系统相对高效的地方,与微软在亚利桑那州的数据中心相比,其效率优势尤其明显。在亚利桑那州,微软满足同样的计算需求用水量更高。
任绍磊表示:“因此如果你在微软内部开发人工智能模型,就应该把训练模型的地点安排在艾奥瓦州,而不是亚利桑那州。在训练方面,两地没有区别。但在用水量或能源消耗方面,两地却有巨大的区别。”
艾奥瓦州全年大多数时间气候凉爽,足以支持微软使用室外空气保持超级计算机恰当运行和从建筑中排出热量。微软在一份公开披露文件里表示,只有温度超过29.3摄氏度(约85华氏度)时才需要排水。
当然这依旧需要消耗大量水,尤其是在夏季。据西得梅因自来水厂(West Des Moines Water Works)披露,2022年7月,在OpenAI宣布完成GPT-4训练前一个月,微软向其艾奥瓦州数据中心集群输入约1,150万加仑水。这相当于当地用水量的约6%,当地还向西得梅因居民供应饮用水。
2022年,西得梅因自来水厂的一份文件称,为了保证居民用水和其他商业需求的供水,该自来水厂与当地市政府“考虑微软未来的数据中心项目”时,微软必须“能够证明并且执行较当前水平大幅降低峰值用水量的技术”。
微软在9月7日表示,它正在与该自来水厂直接合作解决自来水厂的反馈。该自来水厂在一份书面声明里指出,微软一直是优秀的合作伙伴,而且微软一直在与当地官员合作,在满足其需求的同时减少水足迹。(财富中文网)
——马特·奥布莱恩(Matt O’Brien)从美国罗德岛普罗维登斯报道。
译者:刘进龙
审校:汪皓
打造ChatGPT这样一款人工智能产品,其成本可能难以衡量。
但微软(Microsoft)投资的OpenAI开发的技术离不开一种东西,那就是大量的水。该公司从美国艾奥瓦州中部的浣熊河和得梅因河流域抽水,为其功能强大的超级计算机降温。这台超级计算机负责训练其人工智能系统模仿人类写作。
微软、OpenAI和谷歌(Google)等主要科技开发商争相抓住生成式人工智能掀起的狂热,与此同时,这些公司也承认,随着对其人工智能工具的需求日益增长,从昂贵的半导体到用水量增加,这些需求产生了巨额成本。
但它们通常对具体成本守口如瓶。在艾奥瓦州,当地很少有人知道那里是OpenAI最先进的大语言模型GPT-4的诞生地,直到微软的一位高管在演讲中表示它“诞生于得梅因河以西的玉米地旁”。
打造一款大语言模型需要分析人类书写的海量文本的规律。这些计算需要消耗大量电力,并且会产生大量热量。为了在炎热天气中降温,数据中心需要注水,通常是注入到建在仓库大小的数据中心外的冷却塔里。
微软在最新环境报告中披露,2021年至2022年,其全球用水量暴增34%(接近17亿加仑,超过2,500座奥运会级别的游泳池的水量),与之前几年相比大幅增长。外部研究人员认为,微软的用水量增加与其人工智能研究有关。
美国加州大学河滨分校(University of California, Riverside)的研究人员任绍磊(音译)表示:“微软的用水量增加,可以说大部分要归因于人工智能”,包括“微软对生成式人工智能的巨额投资以及与OpenAI的合作”。任绍磊一直在尝试计算ChatGPT等生成式人工智能产品的环境影响。
他的团队在将于今年晚些时候发表的一篇论文里估计,用户每次向ChatGPT连续提问5个至50个提示词或问题,它就要消耗500毫升水(相当于16盎司的水瓶的容量)。具体用水量取决于其服务器所在地和季节。这个估算中包括公司未衡量的间接用水量,例如为数据中心供电的发电厂制冷用水。
任绍磊说:“大多数人并没有意识到ChatGPT的资源消耗。如果你不清楚资源使用情况,也就无法帮助节约资源。”
谷歌表示,同期其用水量增长了20%,任绍磊同样将其主要归因于该公司的人工智能研究。谷歌用水量增加的情况并不一致,其在俄勒冈州的用水量引起了公众的关注,因此保持稳定,但其在拉斯维加斯郊区的用水量却增长了一倍。谷歌在艾奥瓦州同样大量用水,其康瑟尔布拉夫斯数据中心抽取的饮用水量远超过其他地区。
上周,微软在回复美联社(The Associated Press)的问题时,在一份声明里表示,该公司正在研究如何衡量人工智能的能源和碳足迹,“并且想方设法提高大型系统在训练和应用中的效率”。
该公司的声明称:“我们会继续监控我们的排放,加快发展进度,同时在数据中心增加使用清洁能源,采购可再生能源,并采取其他措施实现公司到2030年达到负碳排放、水资源正效益和零废弃物的可持续发展目标。”
OpenAI在9月8日的声明中附和了微软的说法。它表示,公司正在“慎重考虑”如何最充分地利用其算力。
该公司称:“我们承认训练大模型是一个能源和水密集型过程”,并且公司将努力提高效率。
2019年,微软在位于旧金山的OpenAI首次投资10亿美元,两年多后,该初创公司推出了ChatGPT,人工智能的发展在全球掀起热潮。作为投资协议的一部分,软件业巨头微软将提供训练人工智能模型所需要的算力。
为了至少完成部分任务,两家公司选择了美国艾奥瓦州西得梅因。这座城市有68,000人口,十多年来,微软在这里修建了多座数据中心,用于支持其云计算服务。其第四座和第五座数据中心将于今年晚些时候投入运营。
微软初到此地时担任市长的史蒂夫·盖尔说:“他们在尽快建设数据中心。”盖尔表示,该市承诺建设公共基础设施并通过税款拿出一笔“惊人”的金额,以支持微软的投资,这些承诺吸引了微软。
他补充道:“但众所周知,他们对在当地开展的业务守口如瓶。”
微软先是在2020年声称正在为OpenAI开发全球最强大的超级计算机之一,当时微软拒绝对美联社透露这台超级计算机的位置,只是表示它是一个有超过285,000个常规半导体核心和10,000个图形处理器的“单一系统”,图形处理器已经成为对人工智能工作至关重要的芯片。
专家称,在一个地点“预训练”人工智能模型是合理的,因为这个过程需要在计算核心之间传输大量的数据。
直到5月末,微软的总裁布拉德·史密斯才披露,公司在艾奥瓦州建设了“高级人工智能超级计算数据中心”,专门用于支持OpenAI训练其第四代模型GPT-4。目前,这款模型被用于驱动ChatGPT付费版以及微软的部分产品,并掀起了与控制人工智能的社会风险有关的辩论。
史密斯称:“这款模型出自加州优秀的工程师之手,但它的诞生地却是在艾奥瓦州。”
从某些方面来说,西得梅因是一个训练强大人工智能系统相对高效的地方,与微软在亚利桑那州的数据中心相比,其效率优势尤其明显。在亚利桑那州,微软满足同样的计算需求用水量更高。
任绍磊表示:“因此如果你在微软内部开发人工智能模型,就应该把训练模型的地点安排在艾奥瓦州,而不是亚利桑那州。在训练方面,两地没有区别。但在用水量或能源消耗方面,两地却有巨大的区别。”
艾奥瓦州全年大多数时间气候凉爽,足以支持微软使用室外空气保持超级计算机恰当运行和从建筑中排出热量。微软在一份公开披露文件里表示,只有温度超过29.3摄氏度(约85华氏度)时才需要排水。
当然这依旧需要消耗大量水,尤其是在夏季。据西得梅因自来水厂(West Des Moines Water Works)披露,2022年7月,在OpenAI宣布完成GPT-4训练前一个月,微软向其艾奥瓦州数据中心集群输入约1,150万加仑水。这相当于当地用水量的约6%,当地还向西得梅因居民供应饮用水。
2022年,西得梅因自来水厂的一份文件称,为了保证居民用水和其他商业需求的供水,该自来水厂与当地市政府“考虑微软未来的数据中心项目”时,微软必须“能够证明并且执行较当前水平大幅降低峰值用水量的技术”。
微软在9月7日表示,它正在与该自来水厂直接合作解决自来水厂的反馈。该自来水厂在一份书面声明里指出,微软一直是优秀的合作伙伴,而且微软一直在与当地官员合作,在满足其需求的同时减少水足迹。(财富中文网)
——马特·奥布莱恩(Matt O’Brien)从美国罗德岛普罗维登斯报道。
译者:刘进龙
审校:汪皓
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 of that computing takes a lot of electricity and generates a lot of heat. To keep it cool on hot days, data centers need to pump in water — often to a cooling tower outside its warehouse-sized buildings.
In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research.
“It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI,” including “its heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI,” said Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside who has been trying to calculate the environmental impact of generative AI products such as ChatGPT.
In a paper due to be published later this year, Ren’s team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what’s in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions. The range varies depending on where its servers are located and the season. The estimate includes indirect water usage that the companies don’t measure — such as to cool power plants that supply the data centers with electricity.
“Most people are not aware of the resource usage underlying ChatGPT,” Ren said. “If you’re not aware of the resource usage, then there’s no way that we can help conserve the resources.”
Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period, which Ren also largely attributes to its AI work. Google’s spike wasn’t uniform — it was steady in Oregon where its water use has attracted public attention, while doubling outside Las Vegas. It was also thirsty in Iowa, drawing more potable water to its Council Bluffs data centers than anywhere else.
In response to questions from The Associated Press, Microsoft said in a statement last week that it is investing in research to measure AI’s energy and carbon footprint “while working on ways to make large systems more efficient, in both training and application.”
“We will continue to monitor our emissions, accelerate progress while increasing our use of clean energy to power data centers, purchasing renewable energy, and other efforts to meet our sustainability goals of being carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030,” the company’s statement said.
OpenAI echoed those comments in its own statement on September 8, saying it’s giving “considerable thought” to the best use of computing power.
“We recognize training large models can be energy and water-intensive” and work to improve efficiencies, it said.
Microsoft made its first $1 billion investment in San Francisco-based OpenAI in 2019, more than two years before the startup introduced ChatGPT and sparked worldwide fascination with AI advancements. As part of the deal, the software giant would supply computing power needed to train the AI models.
To do at least some of that work, the two companies looked to West Des Moines, Iowa, a city of 68,000 people where Microsoft has been amassing data centers to power its cloud computing services for more than a decade. Its fourth and fifth data centers are due to open there later this year.
“They’re building them as fast as they can,” said Steve Gaer, who was the city’s mayor when Microsoft came to town. Gaer said the company was attracted to the city’s commitment to building public infrastructure and contributed a “staggering” sum of money through tax payments that support that investment.
“But, you know, they were pretty secretive on what they’re doing out there,” he added.
Microsoft first said it was developing one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for OpenAI in 2020, declining to reveal its location to AP at the time but describing it as a “single system” with more than 285,000 cores of conventional semiconductors, and 10,000 graphics processors — a kind of chip that’s become crucial to AI workloads.
Experts have said it can make sense to “pretrain” an AI model at a single location because of the large amounts of data that need to be transferred between computing cores.
It wasn’t until late May that Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, disclosed that it had built its “advanced AI supercomputing data center” in Iowa, exclusively to enable OpenAI to train what has become its fourth-generation model, GPT-4. The model now powers premium versions of ChatGPT and some of Microsoft’s own products and has accelerated a debate about containing AI’s societal risks.
“It was made by these extraordinary engineers in California, but it was really made in Iowa,” Smith said.
In some ways, West Des Moines is a relatively efficient place to train a powerful AI system, especially compared to Microsoft’s data centers in Arizona that consume far more water for the same computing demand.
“So if you are developing AI models within Microsoft, then you should schedule your training in Iowa instead of in Arizona,” Ren said. “In terms of training, there’s no difference. In terms of water consumption or energy consumption, there’s a big difference.”
For much of the year, Iowa’s weather is cool enough for Microsoft to use outside air to keep the supercomputer running properly and vent heat out of the building. Only when the temperature exceeds 29.3 degrees Celsius (about 85 degrees Fahrenheit) does it withdraw water, the company has said in a public disclosure.
That can still be a lot of water, especially in the summer. In July 2022, the month before OpenAI says it completed its training of GPT-4, Microsoft pumped in about 11.5 million gallons of water to its cluster of Iowa data centers, according to the West Des Moines Water Works. That amounted to about 6% of all the water used in the district, which also supplies drinking water to the city’s residents.
In 2022, a document from the West Des Moines Water Works said it and the city government “will only consider future data center projects” from Microsoft if those projects can “demonstrate and implement technology to significantly reduce peak water usage from the current levels” to preserve the water supply for residential and other commercial needs.
Microsoft said on September 7 it is working directly with the water works to address its feedback. In a written statement, the water works said the company has been a good partner and has been working with local officials to reduce its water footprint while still meeting its needs.
--Matt O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.