Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two "technology branches" already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.

It's why humans will always remain de facto slaves to a few masters. Anything that could potentially be advantageous to all life on Earth? Only if the ones at the top get to profit first. No profit? Enjoy scorching to death on hell-planet for the next forty years!

I remember when scientists were more focused on making AI models smaller and more efficient, and research on generative models was focused on making GANs as robust as possible with very little compute and data.

Now that big companies and rich investors saw the potential for profit in AI the paradigm has shifted to "throw more compute at the wall until something sticks", so it's not surprising it's affecting carbon emissions.

Besides that it's also annoying that most of the time they keep their AIs behind closed doors, and even in the few cases where the weights are released publicly these models are so big that they aren't usable for the vast majority of people, as sometimes even Kaggle can't handle them.

Everyone thought AI was going to kill us via some Terminator-like Skynet.

Nope.

It’s just going to let us kill ourselves via greed and accelerate destroying the environment.

Which search engines give results without an AI generated response?

Every IT company now: we should increase our server costs by 100x to offer unwanted gimmicks that users don't want and aren't willing to pay

Look, i'm not saying that this isn't a problem. My only question is, is this one of those "global warming is because people don't recycle their soda bottles" things? In other words, How concerned should I be about this vs, taking attention away from the energy, beef, and transportation industry?

It's a nice gimmick and sometimes fun but probably not worth it given the state of the planet already.

Call me surprised.

This is exactly what using AI feels like:

https://youtu.be/lM0teS7PFMo?

"The only way to interpret statistics is with a healthy dose of skepticism and a thorough understanding of their context."

While people in this thread jump at the opportunity for this slice of statistics to affirm their confirmation biases, intelligent people will ask what the total carbon dioxide output looks like by comparison.

Lesson: only ask AI if you're still stuck after searching and have no colleague around.

Oh yea, this is happening too.