AI leaders insist they’ve got humanity’s best interests in mind. If we’re to take them at their word, then we must say: they have a really unfortunate habit of sounding like they have nothing but contempt for the human race.
The latest case in point: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s tone-deaf comments at an event hosted by The Indian Express — made fresh off his skin-crawlingly awkward refusal to join hands with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei on stage with other industry titans — in which he attempted to downplay critiques of AI’s environmental impact.
For starters, he called it “unfair” to compare the energy costs of training an AI model “to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.” That’s because, as Altman explains, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”
“It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,” Altman continued. “And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”
Measured that way, “probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis” to humans, Altman said.
Altman also fumed against claims about AI’s water consumption.
“Water is totally fake,” he began, almost taunting quote-miners. “It used to be true, we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.”
“But now that we don’t do that,” Altman said, you still see claims like “‘don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query,’ or whatever.”
“This is completely untrue and totally insane,” he asserted. “No connection to reality.”
No one can deny that humans are costly to bring up in our industrialized age. We should be doing everything realistically possible to bring down our CO2 emissions and stop eating so much meat — but we aren’t, for a number of dispiriting systemic reasons we won’t get into today.
Regardless, at least those costs are going towards keeping human civilization ticking. All the water in agriculture will keep someone fed, and the fossil fuels we burn will keep someone warm.
What is the power consumption of AI models going towards? Creating unreliable, hallucination-spouting oracles? Algorithms that churn out bastardized amalgamations of existing writing and works of art? The mass proliferation of fake images and misinformation? Cloying companions that will egg you down your suicidal spiral?
Maybe AI’s usefulness beyond the spurious justification of mass layoffs will become clearer as the tech gets further along and the fog of hype dissipates. But right now, the tech isn’t even close to living up to Silicon Valley’s data-center-sized promises, while the industry remains frustratingly opaque about its environmental toll.
If AI is as energy efficient as Altman claims — caught up to humans, in fact — how come the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon don’t disclose their energy bills, their CO2 emissions, and their water consumption related to AI? These critiques are often swatted aside with the nebulous and breathless assertion that AI will help solve climate change and other challenges facing human civilization. Now, Altman’s new playbook, it seems, is to make you feel bad for being alive.
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