I don't really care about other commenters saying that the article doesn't have a reliable enough source. I know that commercial LLMs are terrible resource consumers and since I don't support their development I think they should be legally banned for this very reason.
That is a very valid and reasonable opinion, sorry to see it downvoted.
There will be strong disagreement with you, however, on the case that LLMs are a big enough resource hog to require outright banning for just that reason.
If you are looking for Big Tech hit boxes, try for things like writing laws that require all energy consumption in datacenters to be monitered and reported using established cross-disciplinary methods.
Or getting people to stop buying phones every year. Or banning disposable vapes.
I knew it's going to be downvoted. People here mostly support AI. But I don't and what I meant is that I just would love the governments to ban it (obviously). The energy efficiency is the most simple reason to tell them so yea. Sorry everyone but I'm old schooled. Put your fancy AI bells and whistles away and embrace efficient, old and proven ways of computing such as using GUI, TTY and search engines (that still consume a lot but not as inefficiently). They at least don't consume 10 MW (or a few seconds of full load CPU time and 200Gb of space if it's a local LLM) to calculate 2+2*2 or give you a link to a Wikipedia article that explains what a helicopter is (coughcough Bing coughcough). And they hallucinate way less often too.
Well, if someone questioned the environmental consequences of combustion engines a hundred years ago, they would be laughed of, but decades later we came to the conclusion that they're terrible to tbe environment. Jumping on new things without pondering the consequences, like we mostly do as a society, isn't very different from fearing everything new. I think it's a good thing to have some caution and discuss the possible consequences of generative ai. I would prefer more data and less sentiment, though.
You can have an opinion that is grounded in basis of logic or fact.
In my opinion, the sunset appears pinky/purple. The basic foundation of this opinion (which others may disagree with due to slight variations in atmospheric conditions) is still rooted in fact. Someone else may think it looks red/purple. Both are basically correct, reasonably speaking.
You can't ban LLMs at this point, they're too useful, it's impossible to track their use, they could be run anywhere on the globe, and even open source models that you can run locally exist.
Local LLMs are not that bad. Of course they're 100x less efficient than a native calculator or search engine but very few % of people use them and tracking will probably use even more energy so it's not that big of a deal. I don't have much against research of AI so training is quite justified too (in terms of energy, not using data without permission). It's only large commercial cloud-based solutions with enormous infrastructures that should probably be banned