Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools.
Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.
The factoid that “MS copilot was more successful than 84% of college students at intro level college course tests” isn’t an indication that an LLM is doing something impressive.
It’s an indication that we failed a whole generation of young people by feeding them mediocrity and industrialized info packages instead of meaningful human education.
If you approach your education as a means of turning people into cogs in a machine, of course the machine will be more successful than most of them.
I keep saying #AI is the latest scam from Big Tech. And too many SAAS, businesses, and tools are being conned into investing in it.
1)The expense to run AI LLMs is astronomical! And it has yet to turn a profit
That cost is going to significantly damage all but the largest businesses implementing AI tools
It’s being downplayed, but AI can LIE. The industry calls it “hallucinations,” but it’s a marketing label for LIES. You just can’t trust results generated by AI. That means the onus falls on the user to fact check and perform due diligence. That’s yet another layer of responsibility and labor.
And the environmental impact of the server requirements and power needed to run these models is alarming.
My prediction is the AI bubble is going to burst soon.
Meta is deploying chatbots powered by AI to impersonate humans in its discussion groups. The chatbots make stuff up—that is their nature. One invents a nonexistent child. Another pretends to have nonexistent merchandise. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain how vile and poisonous this is, but Casey Fiesler @cfiesler spells it out: