Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.
Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.
Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.
Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.
In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.
Gaming actually provides a real benefit for people, and resources spent on it mostly linearly provide that benefit (yes some people are addicted or etc, but people need enriching activities and gaming can be such an activity in moderation).
AI doesn't provide much benefit yet, outside of very narrow uses, and its usefulness is mostly predicated on its continued growth of ability. The problem is pretrained transformers have stopped seeing linear growth with injection of resources, so either the people in charge admit its all a sham, or they push non linear amounts of resources at it hoping to fake growing ability long enough to achieve a new actual breakthrough.
I'm going to assume that when you say "AI" you're referring to LLMs like chatGPT. Otherwise I can easily point to tons of benefits that AI models provide to a wide variety of industries (and that are already in use today).
Even then, if we restrict your statement to LLMs, who are you to say that I can't use an LLM as a dungeon master for a quick round of DnD? That has about as much purpose as gaming does, therefore it's providing a real benefit for people in that aspect.
Beyond gaming, LLMs can also be used for brainstorming ideas, summarizing documents, and even for help with generating code in every programming language. There are very real benefits here and they are already being used in this way.
And as far as resources are concerned, there are newer models being released all the time that are better and more efficient than the last. Most recently we had Llama 3 released (just last month), so I'm not sure how you're jumping to conclusions that we've hit some sort of limit in terms of efficiency with resources required to run these models (and that's also ignoring the advances being made at a hardware level).
Because of Llama 3, we're essentially able to have something like our own personal GLaDOS right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1csnexs/local_glados_now_running_on_windows_11_rtx_2060/
https://github.com/dnhkng/GlaDOS
It isn't resource efficient, simple as that. Machine learning isn't something new and it indeed was used for decades in one form or another. But here is the thing: when you train a model to do one task good, you can approximate learning time and the quality of it's data analyzis, say, automating the process of setting price you charge for your hotel appartments to maximize sales and profits. When you don't even know what it can do, and you don't even use a bit of it's potential, when your learning material is whatever you was dare to scrap and resources aren't a question, well, you dance and jump over the fire in the bank's vault. LLM of ChatGPT variety doesn't have a purpose or a problem to solve, we come with them after the fact, and although it's thrilling to explore what else it can do, it's a giant waste*. Remember blockchain and how everyone was trying to put it somewhere? LLMs are the same. There are niche uses that would evolve or stay as they are completely out of picture, while hyped up examples would grow old and die off unless they find their place to be. And, currently, there's no application in which I can bet my life on LLM's output. Cheers on you if you found where to put it to work as I haven't and grown irritated over seeing this buzzword everywhere.
* What I find the most annoying with them, is that they are natural monopolies coming from the resources you need to train them to the Bard\Bing level. If they'd get inserted into every field in a decade, it means the LLM providers would have power over everything. Russian Kandinsky AI stopped to show Putin and war in the bad light, for example, OpenAI's chatbot may soon stop to draw Sam Altman getting pegged by a shy time-traveler Mikuru Asahina, and what if there would be other inobvious cases where the provider of a service just decides to exclude X from the output, like flags or mentions of Palestine or Israel? If you aren't big enough to train a model for your needs yourself, you come under their reign.
The transformer technology did come built for a specific purpose, automated translation.