The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast … as it gets better, we’ll become too dependent.

“all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,”

  • dust_accelerator@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    57·
    1 day ago

    Well, it’s a bit better than that, simply because you can train AI with solar power. Probably nobody does that currently, as it’s easier, faster-to-market and probably (for whatever corrupt reason) cheaper for business to let it run on burning fossils/nuclear. Currently there’s an insane amount of waste, often 1000s of models are trained and only the best performing one is deployed - and then it’s just a fancy autocomplete. The better use is for prediction of material failure, new medicine and protein folding, generally improved processes.

    With asbestos you get some convenience, but it’ll be for eternity a pain to find a waste management facility that will accept it.