An AI lab out of China has ignited panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing AI models that can outperform America's best despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips. DeepSeek unveiled a free, open-source large-language model in late December that it says took only two months and less than $6 million to build. CNBC's Deirdre Bosa interviews Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and explains why the DeepSeek has raised alarms on whether America's global lead in AI is shrinking.
source: ML guy i know so this could be entirely unsubstantiated but apparently the main environmental burden of LLM infrastructure comes from training new models not serving inference from already deployed models.
That might change now that companies are creating “reasoning” models like DeepSeek R1. They aren’t really all that different architecturally but they produce longer outputs which just requires more compute.
It’s not that unsustainable unless you believe the predicts that your microwave will be building it’s own LLM model every month by 2030
The electricity and water usage isn’t very high in general or compared to data centre usage more broadly (and is basically nothing compared to crypto)
source: ML guy i know so this could be entirely unsubstantiated but apparently the main environmental burden of LLM infrastructure comes from training new models not serving inference from already deployed models.
That might change now that companies are creating “reasoning” models like DeepSeek R1. They aren’t really all that different architecturally but they produce longer outputs which just requires more compute.