> Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort.
Yes, I consider it baseless for the following reasons:
- First, consider the hardware running in data centers, and the iDevices running at the edge – the iPhones, iPads and presumably Macs. There's a massive difference in power consumption between a data center full of GPUs, and whatever the equivalent might be in iDevices. Few chips come close to Apple's M-series in power usage.
- Second, Apple's commitment to making those devices carbon neutral by 2030; I'm unaware of any commitment to make cloud compute hardware carbon neutral, but I'll admit that I don't really keep up with that kind of hardware so I could be totally wrong there.
- Third, consider that an AI compute service (I'm not sure what you call it) like OpenAI is always running and crunching numbers in its data center, while the iDevices are each individually running only when needed by the user.
- Fourth, the people who own the iDevices may charge them using more sustainable methods than would power a data center. For example, Iowa – where I live – generates 62% of its energy from wind power and nearly two-thirds of its total energy from renewable resources [1], whereas California only gets 54% of its energy from renewable resources. Of course this cuts both ways, there are plenty of states or even countries that get most of their power from coal, like Ohio.
That said, neither of us have any real numbers on these things so the best either of us can do is be optimistic or pessimistic. But I'd rather do that and have a discussion about it, instead of dismiss it out of hand like everyone else does by saying "haha dumb, get greenwashed".
You're right that improvements don't need to be suggested to have a conversation about greening/greenwashing. My irritation lies more in the fact that it's almost a trope at this point that you can click into the comments on any HN story that mentions greening/sustainability, and there will be comments calling it fake greenwashing. I don't disagree that it's easy for a company to greenwash if they want to, but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking. Everyone wants to be so jaded about corporations that they'll never trust a word about it.
[1] Although this two-thirds total includes the bio-fuel ethanol, so I feel like it shouldn't be included.
1. Maybe, but wouldn't Apple want to use M-series chips to do this either way?
2. That's an interesting angle.
3. It's the same total amount, and both will go idle when there's less demand.
4. I think the average data center gets cleaner energy than the average house but I can't find a proper comparison so maybe that's baseless.
Also as far as I'm aware, inference takes significantly fewer resources when you can batch it.
> but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking
That does sound tiring, but in this particular case I think there was sufficient critical thinking, and it was originally brought up as just a possibility.
Yes, I consider it baseless for the following reasons:
- First, consider the hardware running in data centers, and the iDevices running at the edge – the iPhones, iPads and presumably Macs. There's a massive difference in power consumption between a data center full of GPUs, and whatever the equivalent might be in iDevices. Few chips come close to Apple's M-series in power usage.
- Second, Apple's commitment to making those devices carbon neutral by 2030; I'm unaware of any commitment to make cloud compute hardware carbon neutral, but I'll admit that I don't really keep up with that kind of hardware so I could be totally wrong there.
- Third, consider that an AI compute service (I'm not sure what you call it) like OpenAI is always running and crunching numbers in its data center, while the iDevices are each individually running only when needed by the user.
- Fourth, the people who own the iDevices may charge them using more sustainable methods than would power a data center. For example, Iowa – where I live – generates 62% of its energy from wind power and nearly two-thirds of its total energy from renewable resources [1], whereas California only gets 54% of its energy from renewable resources. Of course this cuts both ways, there are plenty of states or even countries that get most of their power from coal, like Ohio.
That said, neither of us have any real numbers on these things so the best either of us can do is be optimistic or pessimistic. But I'd rather do that and have a discussion about it, instead of dismiss it out of hand like everyone else does by saying "haha dumb, get greenwashed".
You're right that improvements don't need to be suggested to have a conversation about greening/greenwashing. My irritation lies more in the fact that it's almost a trope at this point that you can click into the comments on any HN story that mentions greening/sustainability, and there will be comments calling it fake greenwashing. I don't disagree that it's easy for a company to greenwash if they want to, but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking. Everyone wants to be so jaded about corporations that they'll never trust a word about it.
[1] Although this two-thirds total includes the bio-fuel ethanol, so I feel like it shouldn't be included.