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Posted by Shugyousha 1 hour ago

Quili AI(www.quili.ai)
76 points | 42 comments
mawadev 3 minutes ago|
I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality, because I have no idea what this page is about. Something with data centers using up all the water? Reading the comments here and people arguing dcs dont use that much water compared to regular people who drink water, confuses me even more. Like whats next? People are told to drink less and fork over their RAM? That would be wild
jrflo 1 hour ago||
Very fun idea. I do think this puts the water argument into a bit more perspective. Your average person should drink ~3L of water per day, or about 22mL per 11 minute average-length chat that Quili quotes on their site. It's hard to pin down exactly how much water AI uses, but something on the order of 5mL per interaction seems reasonable [1]. So the people doing this are using about 4x more water than an AI model would. Of course, it does matter what happens to that water, whether it turns into water vapor or urine and how much of that water re-enters the water cycle, but it's an interesting comparison.

[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai/

seabass 55 minutes ago||
The people doing this are drinking water either way.
jrflo 47 minutes ago||
That's true, but the people could also be doing some other job with their effort too. If you factor in the water consumption of the energy used to power their laptops while answering these questions (~30W of power for 11 minutes per interaction, 1mL of water per W of power) you get another 5mL of water per interaction purely in electricity use.

Not saying it's a 1:1 comparison but it puts it in perspective.

beepbooptheory 35 minutes ago||
I can't seem to find the laptop power usage bit in the TFA, is that just supposed to be presumed? Isn't that kind of high?
jrflo 4 minutes ago||
30W is on the low end, based off of web browsing and standard office usage. I didn't link my source so here it is: https://solartechonline.com/blog/how-much-electricity-does-l...
drcongo 40 minutes ago||
My urologist told me off for drinking 3L of water per day, said I should be aiming for 3 pints, maybe 4 at the most.
jakeydus 13 minutes ago|||
You sure they weren't just confused about imperial unit conversions?
jrflo 35 minutes ago|||
That would translate to 11mL of water per interaction. Plus the 5mL for running the laptop that I pointed out in my other comment. I think the comparison still holds up with that math.
jimmyjazz14 56 minutes ago||
This is a neat idea but some of the claims on that website seem extremely propagandistic. I'm not particularly gung ho about datacenters but if datacenters are causing water issues the solution is to shine a light on alternative technologies to solve the problem. Perhaps Chile could become a leader in building cleaner datacenters but thats not the goal I am taking from this initiative.
gisely 55 minutes ago|
This is an alternative technology.
biggestlou 41 minutes ago||
This canard about AI and water usage really just isn't going to go away, is it?
ghm2180 1 hour ago||
Whoa. This is amazing. I think What is interesting is whats driving this: the psychologically formed habit of asking questions to bots rather than search engines.

If the median query on the internet is now and forever answered by an AI bot, humans could just as easily become really important as an "authentic" source of answers.

toddmorey 53 minutes ago||
I agree with this, but I can’t help but reflect on how we poisoned our own well by destroying the human internet before AI.

The answers to almost every search are already out there, but we made the public internet so toxic and user hostile, you now need a whole new layer of AI to sift through the bullshit, ads, and clickbait.

I don’t think for a second that AI will not go the same hellish direction.

devmor 52 minutes ago||
Of course it will go the same direction - many of the leaders in the AI space are the very same entities either technologically or financially that are responsible for that destruction.
devmor 53 minutes ago||
Unironically this is a "return to tradition" opportunity in the making to me.

If this really is the case, then there's an engineering solution here to re-train people by answering questions with search results first, leaving AI reconciliation for those cases where someone would be clicking the "next page" button or scrolling further.

Of course, that may not align with the perverse incentives driving whoever is behind each bot.

neom 48 minutes ago||
This is cool. It's worth noting that there has been a much wider Chilean water crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_water_crisis + https://www.bnamericas.com/en/interviews/chile-has-no-time-t...
AnotherGoodName 1 hour ago||
Is there a way to read some of the responses that i’m missing? It sounds like a lot of fun to see a what i expect is a Pictionary style human drawn image in response to a prompt. I want to see it.
oneeyedpigeon 55 minutes ago|
As soon as I saw "Why are hot dog buns sold in packs of 8 and sausages in packs of 12?" I wanted to know the response! My immediate reaction was "because sausages tend to last longer than buns" but I'm curious to see how Quili.ai answered.
hridyaagrawal 34 minutes ago||
Isn't there a bigger water crisis in Chile? datacenters are easy to blame probably
tschellenbach 35 minutes ago||
Sounds like misinformation, let's compare: "The clothing and textile industry uses roughly 170 times more."

The difference is even larger if you look at the state of the art: "As of November 2026, the state of the art is direct-to-chip liquid cooling combined with closed-loop dry coolers. This allows a data center to operate with essentially zero water consumed for cooling, even for high-density AI infrastructure."

You might not want to put an older/less efficient data center in a very dry area, but other than it seems quite reasonable.

LelouBil 1 hour ago|
Really interesting. This makes me wonder if it would cost less to have human answers for like 90% of every-day AI requests.
djelu 53 minutes ago|
Excluding the Google AI summaries included with every search, most requests are likely going to be coming from enterprise users using it for code. So, probably no.
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