The AI Investment Boom

I'm always surprised when articles and discussions similar to this lead to anything other than the realization of how absurd it is that we have found ourselves investing unimaginable resources into a LLMs while simultaneously claiming that we've ruined the planet and it could be as little as 5 or 6 years from fundamental damage.

Eventually we have to either give up on the hopes of what could come from LLMs with enough investment, or give up on very loud but apparently hollow arguments related to the damage we are causing to the planet.

Or maybe, just maybe, now that we have a need for more energy, we can finally come up with more sustainable ways of producing that energy?

I don't understand this comment. Who is "we"? There is one segment of society ringing alarm bells about irreversible damage to the environment, and another that seems determined to make number go up as fast as possible with no consideration (or considered disregard) of the effect on human life more broadly.

The people driving AI investment will simply not be significantly affected by climate change. They don't care that hundreds of millions in the tropics will die, and that much of organised human activity will collapse, because up until the last possible moment they'll be insulated from the consequences.

Why would needing more energy make it easier to satisfy the total demand for energy with renewable sources?

>give up on very loud but apparently hollow arguments related to the damage we are causing to the planet.

Which 'hollow arguments' are you referring to?

I was referring to climate arguments that we need to reduce our impact to at least mitigate the severity of issues being predicted for the very near future.

I call them apparently hollow in this context because we can't both chase the resource behemoth that is LLM tech and make any meaningful change to reduce our impact.

We don't have that tech though.

Its a reasonable hope that we could discover a new energy source that can produce orders of magnitude more energy with even less impact than today's sources, but that is just a hope. In the meantime we would be committing ourselves to a new, much higher baseline of energy needs whether we make that discovery or not.

"We" in this case would be the broader collective society, but also more specifically the very leaders pushing the LLM industry forward.

Big tech companies have a long list of promises made over the last 5-10 years promising huge cuts in their environmental impact. Those same companies and their leaders largely abandoned those goals.

I didn't really have political leadership in mind when writing that comment, though they could be part of that "we" as well.

> The people driving AI investment will simply not be significantly affected by climate change. They don't care that hundreds of millions in the tropics will die, and that much of organised human activity will collapse, because up until the last possible moment they'll be insulated from the consequences.

We've spent 80 years globalizing economies in an effort to avoid another world war. We'll all be impacted by it if some of the climate predictions are accurate.

Edit: to add that many of the same leaders developing LLMs make claims that LLMs and AI (if we get there) may be our only hope for finding ways of reversing our environmental impact. Either they are making that up as a sales pitch or they do in fact fall into the "we" here of people that care deeply about our impact while simultaneously burning massive amounts of resources on the hope that LLMs may fix it for us.

Nuclear exists.

Sure, nuclear may fit the bill. That avoids needing a new advancement if we're happy enough with the environmental impact of nuclear generation, but it doesn't avoid all the external costs beyond just the nuclear reaction.

Reactors themselves take a large amount of resources, some rare, to build. Infrastructure is another huge resource suck, all that copper has to come from somewhere. Nuclear has the nice benefit of being on-demand, so it does at least dodge resources needed for energy storage.

It does, but the general public does not seem to believe anyone can operate it safely enough to allow it in their communities. That position may or may not be supported by facts, but that only matters in countries where politicians don't answer to the electorate.

I think because settling for less is just not an option, progress at large would be hindered with a pressure for using less energy, even though it’s the right thing, arguably. Hence demand for more energy itself propels progress and innovation.

If we're meant to believe climate predictions coming out of the UN and similar, potential innovation spurred by an increase in energy production would slam face first into the wall of climate catastrophe even faster.

I'm not even saying I put much faith behind those predictions, but in the context of contradicting climate concerns with tech "innovation" requiring such massive amounts of energy it seems pertinent. We can't have it both ways, either most agree that the climate concerns are baseless or we accept that we collectively would be choosing to destroy the planet faster in the name of progress and innovation.

"Progress" itself is such an interesting term. There's no directionality to it, the only meaning is that we aren't standing still. There's nothing baked into progress that would stop us from progressing right off a cliff, I suppose unless we're already off the cliff and progress could change that.

Heard of the solar boom? It’s growing exponentially.

Also, it’s not like there is one person in charge of the whole world deciding what happens.

> Heard of the solar boom? It’s growing exponentially

Solar is a whole other can of worms. I wouldn't expect it to be too useful for LLMs demanding such high energy inputs. Solar is only produced for around 5 hours per day depending on latitude. For every megawatt of energy needed 24/7 for a GPU farm you would need around 5 megawatts of solar and 20 megawatts of storage (ignoring losses along the way due to transmission, heat, and conversions).

> Also, it’s not like there is one person in charge of the whole world deciding what happens.

Totally agree and I didn't mean to imply that. The list is surprisingly small though. More importantly, many of those in charge of the main LLM companies have themselves spoken about how important it is to reduce our environmental impact, going so far as setting very specific targets for their companies to reduce or eliminate their net impact. Those goals all but disappeared after they pivoted to LLM products.