AI’s Bizarro World, we’re marching towards AGI while carbon emissions soar
Happy Friday! I’ve been covering AI as a daily beat for two and a half years now, but recently I’ve been feeling like we are living in a kind of Bizarro World, the fictional planet in DC Comics (also made famous in Seinfeld) where everything is opposite—beauty is hated, ugliness is prized, goodbye is hello—leading to distorted societal norms, moral values, and logical reasoning.
In AI’s Bizarro World, a company like OpenAI can blithely tell employees about creating a five-point checklist to track progress toward building artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that is capable of outperforming humans, as Bloomberg reported yesterday—in a bid towards developing “AGI that benefits all of humanity.” At the same time, media headlines can blare about Google and Microsoft’s soaring carbon emissions due to computationally intensive and power-hungry generative AI models—to the detriment of all of humanity.
In AI’s Bizarro World, the public is encouraged—and increasingly mandated by their employers—to use tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to increase productivity and boost efficiency (or, let’s be honest, just save a little bit of mental energy). In the meantime, according to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query. So while millions of Americans are advised to turn down their air conditioning to conserve energy, millions are also asking ChatGPT for an energy-sucking synonym, recipe, or haiku.
In AI’s Bizarro World, AI ‘frontier’ model companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral can raise billions of dollars at massive valuations to develop their models, but it is the companies with the picks and shovels they rely on—hello, Nvidia GPUs—that rake in the most money and stock market value for their energy-intensive processes and physical parts.
In AI’s Bizarro World, Elon Musk can volunteer his sperm for those looking to procreate in a planned Martian city built by SpaceX, while a proposed supercomputer in Memphis, meant for his AI company X.ai, is expected to add about 150 megawatts to the electric grid’s peak demand—an amount that could power tens of thousands of homes.
Of course, there is always a certain amount of madness that goes along with developing new technologies. And the potential for advanced AI systems to help tackle climate change issues—to predict weather, identify pollution, or improve agriculture, for example—is real. In addition, the massive costs of developing and running sophisticated AI models will likely continue to put pressure on companies to make them more energy-efficient.
Still, as Silicon Valley and the rest of California suffer through ever-hotter summers and restricted water use, it seems like sheer lunacy to simply march towards the development of AGI without being equally concerned about data centers guzzling scarce water resources, AI computing power burning excess electricity, and Big Tech companies quietly stepping away from previously touted climate goals. I don’t want Bizarro Superman to guide us toward an AGI future on Bizarro World. I just want a sustainable future on earth—and hopefully, AI can be a part of it.
Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com