Silicon Valley AI tycoons believe the current discussion of AI’s carbon footprint is beside the point, and underestimates its revolutionary potential.
“The naysayers believe it’s counterproductive,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters on a recent visit to his company’s headquarters in California.
He argued that large-scale deployment of AI and faster computing would eventually reduce the need for the world to move to data clouds.
The superpowers of AI will turn your laptop, car or the device in your pocket into an energy-efficient supercomputer without the need to “retrieve” data from the cloud.
βIn the future, there will be a little model that will sit on your phone and 90 percent of the pixels that are generated, 10 percent will be recovered instead of 100 percent being recovered β and so you’re going to save (energy),β he said. Said.
Meanwhile OpenAI’s Sam Altman believes that AI will soon be able to create an entirely new future for humanity.
“I think once we have a really powerful superintelligence, addressing climate change won’t be particularly difficult,” Altman said recently.
“It shows how big we need to dream… think about a system where you can say, ‘Tell me how to make lots of clean energy cheaply, tell me how to capture carbon efficiently , and tell me how to build a factory and do it on a planetary scale’.”
But some experts worry that AI’s blind race has overshadowed fears about the planet, at least for now.
“Big corporations are spending a lot of money deploying AI right now. I don’t think they’re thinking about the environmental impact yet,” said Iyengar of Untether AI. But, he added, “I think it’s going to happen.”