We can expect more misleading papers to be published by the big LLM providers. Don't fall in the trap, wait for actually peer reviewed papers from academia. Unsurprisingly the results aren't as good there.

ETH Zurich spearheading an effort for more ethical and cleaner open models. That's good research, looking forward to the results.

I recognize myself quite a bit in this opinion piece. It does a good job going through most of the ethical and practical reasons why you don't need LLMs to develop and why you likely don't want to.

I don't think I'm ready to give up just yet... Still, I recognise myself so much in this piece it feels like I could have written it (alas I don't write as well).

Not only the tools have ethical issues, but the producers just pretend "we'll solve it later". A bunch of empty promises.

That's a good overview of the energy demand, it doesn't account for all the resources needed of course. Now of course like most articles and studies on the topic, it's very inaccurate because of the opacity from the major providers in that space. The only thing we know is that the numbers here are likely conservative and the real impact higher. Mass use of those models inferences is already becoming a problem, and it's bound to get worse.

Even with conservative estimates some uses are very much energy hungry... Especially when they support a surveillance apparatus. Many reasons to not get there.

Don't confuse scenarios for predictions... Big climate improvements due to AI tomorrow after accepting lots of emissions today is just a belief. There's nothing to back up it would really happen.

I hope people using Grok enjoy their queries... Because they come with direct environmental and health consequences.

If it can be done at scale this would be very good news.

Good perspective on how the generative AI space evolved in 2024. There are good news and more concerning ones in there. We'll see what 2025 brings.

This is not all bad news, there are a few things to rejoice about.

The water problem is obviously hard to ignore. This piece does a good job illustrating how large the impact is.

We always think about the energy consumption, but large data centers gobble billion liters of water too. This would need to be improved.

This is definitely a good idea, I wish we had the same in France. This is too bad that they plan to raise the price, it's going to limit the impact of the measure.

If you run the number, we actually can't afford this kind of generative AI arm race. It's completely unsustainable both for training and during use...

Interesting analysis... I wonder if and how Jevons paradox will get in the way though.

Excellent piece, we're a civilisation whose culture is built on shifting sands and... toy plastics. Guess what will survive us?

Need to illustrate how much the current AI arm race is an ecological and social problem? Here is a very pathological case. This is what you get when you let the tycoons behind this completely unchecked.

Funny experiment at drawing parallels between engineering leadership and how you should behave when hiking in nature. This works surprisingly well.