We’re just started on a Mozilla-funded Friends of the Earth project at the moment around sustainability principles for AI. There seems to be a lot of noise around the amount of water employed to cool the data centres used to train large language models (LLMs).

While we should always be cognisant of the amount of the energy and water used to provide us with new (and existing) technologies, I think there’s a lack of statistical numeracy going on here. For example, in the UK, 51 litres of water per person are lost due to leakage every day. That’s over a trillion litres per year!

Alan Levine shared a link to this visualisation in the thread where I was discussing this stuff on the Fediverse.

<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/139275/2024/iib-water-world-1276x1350-2x-1.png" width=“600” height=“399” alt=“The image is a comprehensive visual diagram titled “Water World,” depicting the distribution and usage of water on Earth. The design employs colored circles and lines to illustrate different categories of water, their proportions, and their utilization.">

Source: Information is Beautiful