At this point, we’re all familiar with artificial intelligence and the potential issues with overreach, privacy, plagiarism, misinformation, and potential loss of work for actual humans. Not to mention just the general ick factor of it all.
But you may not be aware that AI could potentially cause energy consumption to skyrocket so much that existing power grids can’t keep up. For example, just one single training run for an AI engine like Bard or ChatGPT consumes as much power as 120 households consume in an entire year. One of these AI companies can require more power than an entire city like San Francisco just to train its engines. The current GPUs and CPUs are designed for gaming, not AI. For AI, you need hundreds of servers running in parallel, which is a big challenge.
