Quili AI
quili.aiVery 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.
My understanding is that water used in data centers is recirculated, much like all water is. What's the alternative? Does the data center somehow destroy water through a chemical reaction such that is ceases to be water? Or pollutes and releases the water and makes it unusable and incapable of evaporating and being recirculated? Am I missing something?
From the source:
> The water’s going back into the water cycle anyway, so is water usage a big deal? Yes. The phrase to research here is “freshwater scarcity” — cleaning water takes time and energy, the water cycle doesn’t reliably distribute water evenly, water usage can pull water out faster than the cycle can return it, and so on.
If this is true, then it's an engineering problem. Cleaning water takes time and energy, we should improve that and the energy required is already priced. There's more demand for infrastructure and it should be built out.
The people doing this are drinking water either way.
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.
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?
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...
Give them Stillsuits from Dune and we have solved everything.
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.
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.
You sure they weren't just confused about imperial unit conversions?
In a world where there are people that can weigh twice as much as another person and they both be considered "normal" in weight range, 3L a day of water is a gross generalization.
So perhaps in this instance the person is on the smaller end of the height/weight scale and needs less
Yeah, definitely. Your mileage may vary I guess, maybe that 3 to 4 pints was specific to my plumbing.
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.
This is an alternative technology.
The problem is ai is better. Thats the haunting part.
This is a "fun" art piece, I guess. But it doesn't make any sense to me. I think part of my confusion comes from this site itself. It really presents this information in a very convoluted and meandering way. Like, it reads like a sales pitch, but it also doesn't provide any of the most interesting information they have available (like the contents of actual chat sessions).
It's also not clear what this aims to prove or highlight. I'm willing to just accept it in the abstract (it's like AI, but with humans), but the whole site is focusing on "saving water" when I don't see how this... event(?) does that in any shape or form. I guess it's just a way to get visibility on the problem? But it does so by pretending like humans are an actual viable alternative to AI for these kinds of chats? Is this supposed to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek? Am I missing the joke?
I don't know. It kind of seems like there was some original intent that got lost along the way, and they tried their best to pull together what they had into some sort of message. But it's lost on me.
It doesn't seem like anyone else quite has the confusion you do, even if they do think its bad/flawed/silly, so you might wanna look inward here. Instead of spending your energy complaining in three paragraphs that you didn't understand, maybe just try to think about it a little more? Consider that it might be a reading comprehension issue, which is totally understandable for any number of reasons. Did you read the text on the page and truly parse from it that they are attempting to save water with the event itself? Or maybe that was just a skim? Perhaps its a kind of absurd conceit you wanted, unconsciously, to read into this, and so there it was?
This canard about AI and water usage really just isn't going to go away, is it?
Entirely dependent on the specific datacenter and location. If this datacenter is doing high-volume open loop evaporative cooling in a drought-stricken area, that is pretty bad on the Chilean authorities for allowing it.
The fact that the Panama Canal uses ~2 billion(!) gallons of water a day never gets mentioned.
> This canard about AI and water usage really just isn't going to go away, is it?
What does canard mean in this context?
I love the advocacy angle here - it's super well executed. However
> SINCE THE EARLY 2010s, QUILICURA HAS BECOME A MAJOR HUB FOR A.I. DATA CENTERS THAT USE LARGE AMOUNTS OF WATER TO COOL DOWN SERVERS. BECAUSE OF THAT, COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040.
I do not believe that data centers (Were there AI datacenters in 2010? No) are causing a severe drought in Quilicura that will extend until 2040. I believe climate change could be causing such a drought, and I believe a drought is a terrible thing.
Estimates of water used for cooling are about 0.3mL of water per chatbot query; the 25,000 prompts that this really awesome and fun project answered resulted in 7.2 liters of water "saved" from use as cooling. I would imagine these 40 people drank significantly more than that during the day.
I put "saved" in quotes because no water is destroyed during datacenter cooling. Some (the parts sent to open evaporative coolers) goes back in the atmosphere, and I imagine disperses over a pretty wide region. The rest of it is recycled locally, whether into the water table, or I would guess more likely back into cooling another round of queries.
Anyway, it's fun. But I guess I'd prefer something that is more honest about the actual uses and cycles here -- it doesn't do a local community (or a global one) any good to misinform them about the situation; to their point the situation locally sounds like it could be pretty dire. Ultimately I think it risks falling between performative and exploitative.
I wonder if the hot water could be used for good. I spend a significant amount of money heating water for our hot water and radiant ceiling heating. Seems like we might find ways to use the hot water generated by data centers for public good at some point, maybe in several years.
Data centers in northern climates (often so chosen for cold average temperatures) do sometimes pipe heat around. Basically datacenter spend = house warming. This works better with town / high density living or work setups than suburbs as you might imagine. So -- yes! Good idea.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> QUILICURA, CHILE SITS WITHIN THE MAIPO RIVER BASIN, ONE OF THE MAIN SOURCES OF WATER FOR PEOPLE AND FARMING. SINCE THE EARLY 2010s, QUILICURA HAS BECOME A MAJOR HUB FOR A.I. DATA CENTERS THAT USE LARGE AMOUNTS OF WATER TO COOL DOWN SERVERS. BECAUSE OF THAT, COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040.
> To make the impact visible, and to help draw visibility to the problem, the residents from Quilicura became “human A.I.,” for a day. Answering prompts, creating content with local artists, and completing other tasks manually.
Just read the content my dude. It took me 3 minutes.
> Each chat lasted an average of 11’ 4
What does this mean?
11 minutes 4 seconds
11 foot 4 inches
11 minutes, 4 seconds
11m4s
Isn't there a bigger water crisis in Chile? datacenters are easy to blame probably
Humans have neural networks, too!
The beginning of the video made me really thirsty!
a thirst trap you might say lolol
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.
"Clothing uses more!" ... yes. Because humans need clothes.
"Closed loop systems solve this problem!" ... most DCs are not using, or planning to use, a closed loop system.
People still don't understand that
a) datacenters don't use water for computation, they use it for cooling
b) the water isn't obliterated, it's still there
c) the water can be recycled and rereleased into the ecosystem, which it mostly is.
yeah, even in non closed loop systems, doesn't it just evaporate?
Did they track their water usage for that day?
Who the hell would think putting a datacentre in one of the most actively seismic countries on the planet is a good idea? I'm puzzled. Pretty good initiative other than that.
Well, usually its not a big problem, Chile in general has a good earthquake resistant infrastructure, because of its building code which has been built based on past experiences.
Chile is a good place, if you look at the submarine cable map (which allows connections over the internet between regions) you'll see that in the west part of South America, Chile is the only country with a submarine cable that goes to Asia, and is going to be working in 2028 and Chile in general over land also has a very good internet connection and is very advanced technologically.
People build datacenters in Japan all the time.
"BECAUSE OF THAT, COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040."
I like the initiative as a life-affirming activity, but spreading falsehoods about water usage is not a good thing. Lying and deceiving makes the world a worse place. This sentence could just as easily read:
""BECAUSE OF [Quili], COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040."
Without explaining what proportion of the drought comes from the climate crisis, or the mechanism by which data centers cause drought, you could substitute almost anything for [Quili] here.
The water hype needs to go. It's caught on with people who get their news off tiktok, but we need to have better epistemic models if we want to actually make the world a better place.
Why aren't you asking why they are trying to build a datacenter which requires an abundance of water in a place where water is scarce?
Why focus on epistemic models instead of ethical ones?
If you have the same rainfall today as you do tomorrow, but tomorrow someone steals all of the water and leaves you with none, is that a drought? Not technically...but who the fuck cares about the technicality?? You don't have any water!
Yes, in your example, the person who stole the water would have stolen the water.
In real life, in Chile, who "stole all the water" ? How did they "steal" the water?
On a related note, many famous famines went from stressful-but-survivable bad harvests to mass casualty events because of mismanagement: the Irish Potato Famine, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward...
It seems the villain here could be the Chilean government, for prioritizing the tech economy over the people at a time when it matters most.
Turns out the real villains were the unlikely friendships between capitalists and government neoliberalism created along the way.
Really interesting. This makes me wonder if it would cost less to have human answers for like 90% of every-day AI requests.
>This makes me wonder if it would cost less to have human answers for like 90% of every-day AI requests.
No, not even close lol
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.
This underscores how vastly underrated humans are by the people who are pushing this obnoxious, inhuman, alien technology onto... humans.
I don’t quite get the classification of alien considering they were grown with human data (and humans were the ones that invented the architecture to make it work in the first place)
I have a question: have you used one of these models for code, CAD, general 3d work? The vast chasm will take on a very different perspective.
Totally. This is way more exciting than any new frontier model. It is kind of crazy how good an idea it is...