Comment by loeber
9 months ago
Virtually all of this is false. AI is neither burning the planet nor a ponzi scheme. If you're concerned about energy costs, consider for just a second that increased demand for computation directly incentivizes the construction of datacenters, co-located with renewable (read: free) energy sources at scale. ChatGPT isn't going to be powered by diesel.
The only thing standing in the way of nuclear/solar/hydroelectric data centers is local laws and regulations. All the big cloud providers are actively researching this. see Microsoft's interest in acquiring the three mile island nuclear reactor for an example[1]
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mi...
In reality: renewables are siphoned away from replacing dirty energy. Dirty energy is still the same %, but the more energy computation needs, it might be added as renewables.
I feel like the quadratic scaling laws are going to win in the end.
We need new techniques and algorithms, not new datacenters.