Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
AI leaders insist that they have humanity’s best interests in mind. If we are to believe what he says, we have to say: He has a very unfortunate habit of speaking as if he has nothing but contempt for mankind.
Latest Case: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s irreverent comments An event organized by Indian Express — fresh off his extremely awkward refusal to join hands with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei on stage with other industry giants — in which he attempted to downplay criticism of AI’s environmental impact.
For starters, he called it “inappropriate” to compare the energy cost of training an AI model to “how much it costs a human to do an inference query.” This is because, as Altman explains, “It takes a lot of energy to even train a human being.”
Altman continued, “It takes about 20 years for you to become smart and during that time the food you eat has everything to do with it.” “And not only that, it led to the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people who ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, so you could proliferate.”
Measured this way, “AI has probably already caught up to humans on energy efficiency,” Altman said.
Altman too Outraged against AI’s claims about water consumption.
“The water is completely fake,” he began, almost taunting the bidders. “It used to be true, we had evaporative cooling in data centers.”
“But we don’t do that anymore,” Altman said, adding that you still see claims like “Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query,’ or whatever.”
“This is a complete lie and complete madness,” he insisted. “No relation to reality.”
No one can deny that raising humans in our industrial age is expensive. We should realistically be doing everything we can to reduce our CO2 emissions and stop eating so much meat – but we’re not, for a number of frustrating systemic reasons we won’t delve into today.
Despite this, at least these costs are incurred to sustain human civilization. All the water from agriculture will feed someone, and all the fossil fuel we burn will keep someone warm.
Where is the power consumption of AI models headed? Creating incredible, hallucination-spouting oracles? Algorithms that produce poor mixes of existing writing and works of art? Widespread spread of fake images and misinformation? Manipulating partners who will push you into a suicidal spiral?
Maybe the usefulness of AI beyond the spurious justification for mass layoffs will become clear as the technology advances and the fog of hype clears. But right now, the technology isn’t even close to living up to Silicon Valley’s data-center-sized promises, while the industry remains frustratingly opaque about its environmental impact.
If AI is as energy efficient as Altman claims – indeed limited to humans – then how come people like OpenAI, Microsoft and Amazon do not disclose their energy bills, their CO2 emissions and their water consumption related to AI? These criticisms are often dismissed with vague and breathless claims that AI will help solve climate change and other challenges facing human civilization. Now, it looks like Altman’s new playbook is meant to make you feel bad about being alive.
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