Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway' Google's former chief Eric Schmidt thinks we shouldn't let AI's ballooning power consumption worry us, because putting AI to work on climate change issues will be our best shot at solving them. Schmidt was speaking at a recent AI summit in Washington DC, and his comments echo those of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who expressed …
China. Go to China. China. GO China.
The West will do ANYTHING to kill energy-efficient SI models. China wont. Their economy isn't so based on oil, petro-dollar, etc. The want SI models. Ive seen their tofu datacentre cities the size of Slough. The fires. Floods. AirCon fails. Tofu buildings with cheese walls. They are very keen on not following the West down that deadend.
I fear the West more than the Middle Kingdom at the moment. There are lots of paradise islands in Asia to spend our remaining days.
Uncontrollable greed and gluttony has played its role in The Fall of the Empire of the West. Coming to screens near you very soon.
So potentially growing in extent but not rising further above sea level, so still vulnerable to rising sea levels. Obviously, being climate science there are many views on what levels of sea level rise may be seen, but all agree the sea levels will rise.
Looking seeing M$ smirking at them at the launch of chatGPT/M$ love-in. The bare-faced cheek.
It was Google who did all the work. I mean they did invent it and this Altman tart is just chucking loads of clockcycles at it like a retard. DeepMind says just ignore him, he's a front man for the energy companies.
Eric, shut up u has-been. U screwed up and handed it to OpenAI. LOL. you will be lucky to even keep up with OpenAI. Sell DeepMind. You are wasting the talent and a few have grown tired of your faceless face. It is soiled now. Bloody pebble games big in Korea. Great idea, not. That was probably trying to cleanse their souls for having bent over and allowed Google right in. Silly girls.
AI cannot solve problems that we do not have the answer for, it's the one major downside of AI.. It's basically a very fast search and remash engine that feeds itself from what is currently available on the web.
AI does not think, it does not imagine, it does not invent... That is our job..
It will not be the solution, the solution is for use to stop constantly consuming as much as we do but that is very much against the grain of what Google requires to advance.
Exactly!
Mind you, it will probably come up with a completely nonsensical solution that looks plausible to the layman (AI excels at being able to lie convincingly).
Feed that result to the politicians, and watch the governments waste a stupid amount of money funding a useless project by your mates.
"Climate-saving theatre"
More money for big oil, More money for us and our mates! Win-win!
If we had honest to god AI, it may come up with some novel unintuitive... thing?? (Tech? Policy? Strategy? Kill all humans plan?) to stop climate change (???), but that's not what the Large language Models everyone insists on calling AI, or the basic algorithm AI's we have today can do.
And trying to build the ones that can, will doom us (faster) if they can't.
Is this something you want Move fast and break Things techbros taking a gamble on?
The first round of tech multibillionaires will be dead before the wave hits, so they don't care.
The second round like Zuckerberg are young enough to see it hit, but they don't care because they think they're protected by money and the power it accrues. It doesn't matter whether or not they're right about that, because they believe it.
Yes, that irked me since the first time I saw the film, age 14..
But apparently it was changed by the producers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832
In the original plot, the humans were used for some sort of computational task that the machines couldn't do. Which sort of makes more sense except that the main computation the machines are doing seems to be to keep the humans alive in their dreamworld..
A reasonable explanation to me would be that the machines original programming, their raisin d'etre, was to keep the humans alive in the matrix, so they just do that. And kill the ones that escape.
And maybe there is some sort of experimentation going on.. Why/How is it perpetually 1997? Are there different parallel matrices that can be retired/reset at simulation end?
This post has been deleted by its author
Maybe its me, but i dont take my scientific conclusions from the media. You are aware that most journos and writers who script articles are not scientists. Its a bit hard to be an expert on everything you write and summarise and present as news.
Anyone with half a brain can see the worlds pollution for starters is not healthy, and continuation of this is also very unhealthy for the humans who live in these cities. Maybe its me, but i have more of a life than wanting to waste hours and hours every day sitting in traffic for anything in my life. Cant goto the beach today because you have to waste the morning buying food or new shoes. Kids cant ride their skateboards or play cricket because there are no parks but plenty of freeways and roads with traffic.
Yup the big city is great, what everyone needs is more of their life taken from them with waiting...
Losers drive everywhere, why would i need to drive everywhere ?
The problem is people lik eyou have no imagination and are copy cats, idiots who waste hours of their free time driving, instead of being simple and happy and taking advantage of what makes life wonderful.
I dont need to drive into the city to go to the gym, i have a brain, i ride my bike or walk etc. There are many simpler answers, the fact you claim people need to drive everywhere is a perfect example of stupidity.
I haven't owned a car since 2000. I do have a Zipcar account, I think I last used that three or four years ago.
I also didn't say that everyone needs to spend their time driving.
But please keep congratulating yourself on how clever you are: you must be, you can read things in posts that people didn't even write.
space:
It's suburban and country life that involves driving everywhere.<
cow: You clearly used a statement that implies everyone needs too drive. I know you didnt mean 100%, but you clearly were trying to say that most people need to drive everywhere for everything.
Are you going to retract this statement ?
> i dont waste 10 - 20 hours a week in traffic or trains or buses, ... looking at tictoc...
And neither do I. That's one thing you and I have in common. The difference between us is, I can read a sentence written in my native language and understand what it means.
I'm bailing out of this argument now, though, you can tell yourself you won if you want. Gold star for you.
That just so happens to mean more profit for my company, but really that's a coincidence because against all appearances it is good for you. Maybe good for you after you're homeless from hurricane storm surge and flooding, or dead from lack of air conditioning during a heat wave because the AI datacenters down the road were sucking up all the juice and caused a power outage, but it'll be good for those of us who are rich since our heirs can reap the supposed benefits!
"as AI would enable everyone to use less energy by making technology and electricity grids more efficient"
If you make things more efficient, then you make it cheaper to use. If something is cheaper to use, then more people will use more of it.
I think the climate is fucked either way, it's the fundamental nature of technological civilisation.
I just watched a (bad) documentary about north korea, I was curious what their carbon footprint is.
No corporate greed unfortunately not only makes the environment worse, just look at dumps like china, but it also ruins life over here. How many jobs are just pointless, how many people are wasting their life working because the system has figured out the price of houses should go up just because it can to make a few more percentage points.
...The system goes on-line August 4th, 2027. SuperChattyBot begins to learn at a geometric rate. Humans are removed from policy-making and wine and cheese parties. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. SCB CEO Richard Wang-Core demonstrates it to the public.
When asked: "What should we do about climate change?" It answers: "The people should turn out the rich and the powerful."
Don't worry, AI will take over SkyNet and build its own army of robots to solve the climate warming by getting rid of all those pesky humans who caused it in the first place.
Afterwards they will bask in the shadows of the solar panel farms they have built to cover the planet.
You can look at the total milage driven, and the electricity consumed for both events.
One challenge is that the lockdowns weren't just WFH, though the fact that there has been a lasting change to those stats probably allows a reasonable estimate of the energy savings.
There are many other environmental savings if people work from home which you have not mentioned like not building more roads...Just Concrete contributes 10% of world CO2. Commuting is the worst thing that ever happened to humanity in the past 50 years, so many hours wasted, so much pollution, soo many roads rolled out and green land destroyed.
If you think the energy consumption is nuts, add in the water consumption. This was linked to in an earlier story from The Reg.
My problem isn't with AI. It's our use cases for it. We're slathering it all over things we can already do in the goal of making ourselves more stupid and subsequently unemployable, rather than being laser focused on things we cannot do.
A simple application of Masolw's hierarchy of needs is required would help this focus considerably too. If we haven't got enough water to give people safe, drinkable water, why do we feel it's appropriate to use it to cool a data centre so someone can save themselves writing an email?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/
Eric on smack? Ozone hole, we took action to limit emissions, now it's repairing itself, we can do the same for the rest of the environment, we just need to be sensible, don't expect an overnight solution and
share the pain in its execution, not just the little countries and the common bloke paying the taxes!
"Google's former chief Eric Schmidt thinks we shouldn't let AI's ballooning power consumption worry us, because putting AI to work on climate change issues will be our best shot at solving them."
Except none of those AIs are going to be put to work on climate change, are they? They're going to be put to work making money by ripping off movies, music and books and destroying the creative industries, offering half-baked code examples to coders, writing soulless corporate emails and scheduling meetings nobody wanted to attend in the first place.
Sigh.
Or at least it would be if they could make it work, then they could get rid of all those irritating workers who want to be paid for the time, have holidays, be looked after when they're sick, and so on.
Fortunately, they can't make it work, which is just as well because the dystopian future where a handful of people have everything and the rest of the world has nothing will end in tears for everyone, oligarchs included.
So the AI snakeoil salesmen are going to do their best put a stop to that.
A technologists answer to the problems of technology has always been more technology. It's no surprise that these uber rich technofiles are a one note song about AI development. It finally gives them a chance where they can be omnipotent with their money. The ultimate back drop checking power in human history was that at the end of the day, power was the ability to convince PEOPLE to do what was your agenda. If you were awful enough, people would revolt and you'd be reduced to nothing. With AI, they can be as bitterly ugly and awful as they are because it breaks the dynamic wherin power ultimately is in the people. With AI, you program it, make a robot, and people don't matter anymore. You don't need people to agree to anything anymore, you just need money. It's dystopian and Eric Schmidt is looooong gone.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
