AIs Bizarro World, were marching towards AGI while carbon emissions soar – Fortune

Happy Friday! Ive been covering AI as a daily beat for two and a half years now, but recently Ive 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 oppositebeauty is hated, ugliness is prized, goodbye is helloleading to distorted societal norms, moral values, and logical reasoning.

In AIs 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 yesterdayin a bid towards developing AGI that benefits all of humanity. At the same time, media headlines can blare about Google and Microsofts soaring carbon emissions due to computationally intensive and power-hungry generative AI modelsto the detriment of all of humanity.

In AIs Bizarro World, the public is encouragedand increasingly mandated by their employersto use tools like OpenAIs ChatGPT and Googles Gemini to increase productivity and boost efficiency (or, lets 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 AIs 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 onhello, Nvidia GPUsthat rake in the most money and stock market value for their energy-intensive processes and physical parts.

In AIs 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 grids peak demandan 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 issuesto predict weather, identify pollution, or improve agriculture, for exampleis 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 dont want Bizarro Superman to guide us toward an AGI future on Bizarro World. I just want a sustainable future on earthand hopefully, AI can be a part of it.

Sharon Goldman sharon.goldman@fortune.com

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AIs Bizarro World, were marching towards AGI while carbon emissions soar - Fortune