At last week’s India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, industry leaders convened to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and how best to squeeze it into parts of your life you haven’t even considered. Notably absent was Bill Gates, who dropped out hours before his scheduled keynote over the ongoing scrutiny about his presence in the Epstein Files (though he continues to deny any wrongdoing). While the convention was reportedly a bit chaotic, what with the protests and all, the luminaries from around the tech world present nonetheless kept things upbeat and optimistic, declaring “full steam ahead” on the technological hype train carrying our species and planet off a cliff.
Also in attendance was OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who earned numerous headlines over the course of the event for his words and antics. His buzz blitzkrieg started on Thursday at a seemingly easy photo-opp layup with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other AI executives all raising their joined hands in a celebratory display of industry-wide solidarity. Altman and the former colleague and present CEO of Anthropic to his left, Dario Amodei, notably refused to complete the chain and hold each other’s hands, making for an all-too-poignant moment. Altman would continue to make news throughout the summit for his comments on the industry’s “urgent” need for global regulation and his sneaking suspicion that companies might actually be using AI as a scapegoat to whitewash their layoffs.
Ever the yapper, Altman has bagged yet another round of earned media for an interview with The Indian Express’ Anant Goenka, during which he posited some controversial rebuttals to concerns about AI’s environmental impact.
Altman started off by saying the claims about ChatGPT consuming “‘17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever,” are “completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality,” before qualifying that, OK, maybe it was a valid concern when his company “used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.”
He went on to say that there is “fair” concern about the amount of energy data centers eat to crank out the most soulless slop you’ve ever seen, but suggested the onus of responsibility for dealing with AI’s ravenous appetite falls to the energy sector itself, which Altman feels needs to “move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.”
Altman then stunned the crowd and firmly re-entered the discourse with a mind-blowing truth bomb for those who still felt AI was consuming too much energy.
“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman rejoined euphorically. “It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart. And not only that, it took like the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever you took.”
It is true that every person and the sum total of human civilization have consumed a sizable amount of energy (and water) to get to where we are today. While the value comparison of a nascent tech industry and its models to the entirety of civilization and human beings may have elicited adulation at the summit, Altman got an icier reception from the internet. Social media quickly took to roasting the remarks as “dystopian” and “deeply antisocial and antihuman.”
Perhaps further illuminating the backlash, Altman’s energy comments butt up against the frustrating lack of transparency within the industry our collective futures now hinge upon. There are currently no regulations in place requiring data centers to disclose their water and energy consumption. Furthermore, center employees and business partners are typically muzzled by nondisclosure agreements. This has made reporting and research on the true expenditure levels a tricky figure to pin down.
At least we’ve got Sam to keep us informed while waiting for some clarity about what’s actually going on and being used in those centers.
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