AI’s Bizarro World, we’re marching towards AGI while carbon emissions soar

In AI’s Bizarro World, a company like OpenAI can blithely tell employees about creating a five-point checklist to track progress toward building artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that is capable of outperforming humans, as Bloomberg reported yesterday—in a bid towards developing “AGI that benefits all of humanity.” At the same time, media headlines can blare about Google and Microsoft’s soaring carbon emissions due to computationally intensive and power-hungry generative AI models—to the detriment of all of humanity. 

In AI’s Bizarro World, the public is encouraged—and increasingly mandated by their employers—to use tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to increase productivity and boost efficiency (or, let’s be honest, just save a little bit of mental energy). In the meantime, according to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query. So while millions of Americans are advised to turn down their air conditioning to conserve energy, millions are also asking ChatGPT for an energy-sucking synonym, recipe, or haiku. 

In AI’s Bizarro World, AI ‘frontier’ model companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral can raise billions of dollars at massive valuations to develop their models, but it is the companies with the picks and shovels they rely on—hello, Nvidia GPUs—that rake in the most money and stock market value for their energy-intensive processes and physical parts. 

In AI’s Bizarro World, Elon Musk can volunteer his sperm for those looking to procreate in a planned Martian city built by SpaceX, while a proposed supercomputer in Memphis, meant for his AI company X.ai, is expected to add about 150 megawatts to the electric grid’s peak demand—an amount that could power tens of thousands of homes. 

Of course, there is always a certain amount of madness that goes along with developing new technologies. And the potential for advanced AI systems to help tackle climate change issues—to predict weather, identify pollution, or improve agriculture, for example—is real. In addition, the massive costs of developing and running sophisticated AI models will likely continue to put pressure on companies to make them more energy-efficient. 

Still, as Silicon Valley and the rest of California suffer through ever-hotter summers and restricted water use, it seems like sheer lunacy to simply march towards the development of AGI without being equally concerned about data centers guzzling scarce water resources, AI computing power burning excess electricity, and Big Tech companies quietly stepping away from previously touted climate goals. I don’t want Bizarro Superman to guide us toward an AGI future on Bizarro World. I just want a sustainable future on earth—and hopefully, AI can be a part of it.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com

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Today’s edition of Data Sheet was curated by David Meyer.

NEWSWORTHY

X could face EU fine. The European Commission says Elon Musk’s X has broken the new Digital Services Act, which governs online content, in multiple ways. That includes “deceiving” users into thinking its paid-for blue checkmarks denote authenticity, not complying with rules about ad transparency, and stopping researchers from accessing its public data. X now gets to defend itself, but, if the Commission confirms its preliminary findings, it could issue a fine of up to 6% of global revenue and demand big changes to how X operates.

Apple antitrust. An investigation by India’s antitrust body found that Apple has been abusing its position as App Store proprietor by forcing developers to use its billing and payments systems, Reuters reports. Again, the regulator can hit Apple with a fine and tell it to change its ways.

SoftBank buys Graphcore. Japan’s SoftBank, which has been promising to go all in on AI, has bought the British AI chip company Graphcore. Graphcore, which counts Nvidia and Arm among its rivals, had been hemorrhaging money for a couple years and was desperately seeking a buyer. According to TechCrunch, Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon dismissed the reported $500 million figure for the acquisition as inaccurate, but the companies aren’t providing financial details about the deal.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

—The number of AT&T customers affected by someone’s illegal downloading of call and text records relating to several months in 2022. The FBI is involved and one person has been arrested, Reuters reports. AT&T reckons the data is not publicly available.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Tesla walks back Robotaxi reveal, sending its stock plummeting, by Bloomberg

65,000 mugs have gone missing at Tesla’s German factory, by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Amazon’s $20 billion NBA deal isn’t riskless. But it’s close, by Jason Del Rey

Amazon trails behind in latest U.K. compliance test and is threatened with investigation over poor supplier treatment, by Bloomberg

70,000 students are already using AI textbooks, by Sage Lazzaro

How we raised $100 million for my Silicon Valley startup in a down market, by Amir Khan (Commentary)

This 84-year-old quit an elite job and went $160K into debt to launch his career. Now he’s suing ChatGPT to protect writers like him from ‘highway robbery’, by the Associated Press

BEFORE YOU GO

COPIED Act. There’s a bipartisan push in the Senate to give artists and journalists more protection against voracious AI models. As The Verge reports, the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media (COPIED ) Act would see the creation of security measures that could be added to content to prove its origin and potentially block its use in training AI models. Removing or tampering with these watermarks would be illegal.