The contribution of AI to greenhouse emissions is tiny compared to the actually significant contributors - like transportation and rearing animals.
And with that 90% of people have stopped reading and thing I’m an AI booster so congrats for still being here.
I also think the utility isn’t going to be for techbros primarily. Software developers can already do the things that LLMs are good at, and are better than LLMs in important areas. But think about writing a 500-line script to extract data from a database and do some simple data analysis on it, then displaying it. Software developers, again, can do that easily (it’d probably take a few hours - more if it’s more complex or if they polish it).
But most people cannot. Yet there are a lot of situations in business or in government which could benefit from being able to say, “show me the average of (X) over the last 10 years, stratified by variables A, B, C.” And AI will do write a script to do it (so the actual computation is not done with unreliable bullshit) with ease. The script will have way too many comments, may well be laid out in a nonsensical way, and may reinvent the wheel stupidly, but in my limited experience of asking the LLM we have at work to do things like this for giggles and because I’m not paying for tokens, it will do it correctly.
I’m not saying to buy the hype, but if you think it’s useless for everything but “making it easier for some techbros” you’re just as immune to evidence as the hypesters are.
I literally described a situation in which AI has a practical use. If you’re going to disagree, fine - but at least acknowledge where the disagreement is instead of replying without (apparently) having read my comment.
I believe I read somewhere that AI capacity and hence potential usage is going up about 12% per year. That could turn out to be a lot but it would have to go on for a long time to end up significant compared to the actually large polluters.
AI energy usage for a single person is (very roughly) comparable to having the TV on or playing a video game on a high spec PC. Even if the only benefit it gives anyone is the same mild pleasure you get from watching TV, we accept that using energy for these purposes is worthwhile. So, despite this topic recurring constantly, no-one has given a sensible reason why we should particularly call out AI for its energy usage.
Of course, there’s a readily available explanation for why people do it: people hate it with an irrational passion. So they criticise all aspects of it, whether reasonably or not.