AI's energy impact is still small–but how we handle it is huge

1 Capstanlqc 2 5/26/2025, 12:23:45 PM technologyreview.com ↗

Comments (2)

hello_computer · 3d ago
Although huge/small is subjective, I wouldn’t consider 22% of new demand “small”—especially for LLMs, which seem to present more problems than solutions. Sounds like a public relations piece to me. Many interested corporations launder the money through various think-tanks and institutes, and people are none the wiser.
oulipo · 3d ago
It's absolutely not "still small", it's huge vs the benefits it "provides"... (mostly a glorified autocomplete to a few coders so far)

the problem is the rebound effect, even though we might improve its efficiency, then people will start using it in many more places, leading to a global energy usage increase, not decrease.

For instance, now websites are routinely implementing "assistant" features on regular pages, which let you hover on/select text, to immediately do an assistant query... which creates 10 new "useless" queries, where none would have existed before