AI seems to be just more and more statistical probabilities hashed-out at record-breaking speeds and power-consumption of computing. Its like that adage, "sufficiently advanced that it is magic" we are doing that for AI. We are building more and more complex statistical analysis engines that spew out near-perfect answers from garbage inputs at the expense of actual analysis ,research and development.
You could do that training... and the "AI" can print out some lines that have the same writing styles as the articles. Because that's all LLMs can do. Don't buy the hype, they're just energy sucking predictive text bots. Nothing more. The whole thing is a dead end as far as finding the actual systems behind intelligence.
That requires intelligence to determine. "AI" ain't got none of that. It can tell you a recipe for muffins that definitely is probably edible, except for the obvious poisons.
This is focusing on the wrong thing. Electricity demands should be expected to drastically increase, with or without llms or other such programs. We need to be focusing on electrifying pretty much everything if we’re going to make a dent on carbon emissions, which will naturally lead to a significant increase in power demands. If that only leads to different and/or more carbon emissions, that’s a problem with the infrastructure of the grid, not what it’s powering.
And to be clear, I think these companies using stupid amounts of power to run these things is stupid as hell, but blaming them for problems that should have been addressed ages ago isn’t going to solve the problem. We need massive and sweeping infrastructure changes asap.
Don't blame the people wasting massive amounts of dirty energy for nothing. Blame the people who aren't enabling them to waste massive amount of energy. Progress means wasting as much energy as possible.
The problem is, there is no plan in the US to upgrade the power grid - either at privaty company level, state level or federal level. It's just not in the cards. And the grid is headed straight for a complete collapse with the double whammy of electric cars and AI.
The other problem is, if you keep using coal to meet electrical demands, this will certainly make zero dent on carbon emissions. The other thing that needs to happen besides upgrading the grid is a massive increase in combined renewables / battery storage solution, or of course viable fusion power (fat chance...)
Power utilities frequently complain about declining base load generation capacity. On this particular issue, they are actually correct. You have to have a consistent level of base load generation capacity that is capable of scaling to meet peak demand. Wind and solar power are great but are not available on demand.
So, you can either store excess power generated by renewable sources or generate with non-renewable sources. Utility scale storage just isn't there at this point. Many of the coal plants that have been retired over the past two decades have been replaced by natural gas plants, which isn't really an improvement.
One thing that probably exacerbates this problem is the fact that much of the power generated in the US has historically been fairly localized. Meaning, it's generated pretty close to where it's consumed. Moving away from a "local" generation model is not as easy as it sounds and makes utilities nervous, for legitimate reasons.
What we need in the interim is more small scale nuclear development. It's far from a perfect solution but it's way better than what we currently have.
A plant blew up one time due to being poorly mismanaged and an earthquake broke another one. Meanwhile nothing bad has ever happened in the history of non-nuclear power generation. /s
I never said that nothing bad has happened with nuclear power.
Nuclear disasters are local, the ongoibg climate change disaster powered by coal plants (which let our a hell of a lot more radiation than nuclear plants) is global.
I'll take a local disaster any day over a global disaster