Yes, obviously AI is emitting way too much. It shouldn’t even be producing 0.2% of global emissions, let alone 2%. My main grievance is that no one ever talks about improving industrial and agricultural processes even though they produce around 29% of emissions and 20% of emissions respectively.
The kicker is we need agriculture and industry, like it or not. Whereas no one apart from some billionaires and tech bros want or even need AI.
%80 of agriculture is animal feed. Not saying everyone should become vegeterian or vegan but I think the culture that pushes over consumption of animal based products (especially America etc) should be suppressed gradually.
Those percentages don’t really add up to 100, though.
Something like 40% of American corn is used as a feedstock into ethanol fuel production. But that just strips out most of the starches and carbohydrates for fermentation into alcohol. The remaining proteins and fats are used mostly for animal feed. And somewhat surprisingly, the captured CO2 is sold as an industrial CO2 product, such as dry ice. So for that 40% of corn, we could say it’s used for ethanol production. Or we could say it’s used for animal feed. Or other processes. But it’s really all of the above.
Modern American corn and soybean farming is just basically efficiently producing a bunch of bio feedstock into whatever processes can make use of those products, whether for human food, animal feed, industrial processes, etc.
The problem is, the models are really good at some things. We’ve been using these things since before chat gpt hit the market. It’s identified tumors, cured a dog of cancer evidently, and with adversarial training beat the AI that beat the chess master in a matter of hours.
This is one of those disruptive technologies that isn’t going back in the bottle. We’re stuck with this crap.
(Note: I was convinced the dog cancer vaccine thing was bullshit but there’s quite a bit of actual data, a fucking tech bro actually did it.)