Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.
"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."
Right, surely the energy intensive AIs will make the world invest in climate-friendly energy instead of just burning more fossil fuels as they always did.
Also shows how unsustainable the current neoliberal system is.
I'm not sure that I'm willing to care about what multi-billionaires think any longer.
If someone becomes a billionaire they should be ritually sacrificed for the republic by the hands of children as we all drink the billionaire blood in the starlight.
At least to some (large?) extent this is another red herring to distract from other and arguably more important AI topics such as copyright issues as well as legal and ethical issues imho.
The whole point of mining/staking/whatever is to be expensive. Governments can pigouvian tax it to high hell, mine workers can unionize, and it won't make any difference to users whatsoever. So there's literally no benefit to more energy use.
Bitcoin mines can't do general computing. They use ASICs that can only mine.
The human brain can run on a hamburger once every day or two. Investing immense amounts of energy into statistical models is only taking us further away from true, meaningful AI, not closer.
I'm confident that we are not using compute resources optimally today, and I bet that the potential gains on the (immature) software AI side are a lot bigger than on the (mature) power generation side.