It’s a race to create an AI good enough to solve the e-waste problem before the e-waste problem becomes such a large problem that it prevents AI advancement.
So far, I haven't seen any sign that LLM/GenAI could be used to solve e-waste. It's definitely an impressive technology, but seems to be much suited at generating porn than at solving global issues.
It's a race to ignore all this, calling it "woke snowflake worries lol", and enjoying the short term economical benefits of AI making the shareholders happy. And I'm not even sarcastic.