[croes]

Building any power source has an environmental effect.

So if want to risk global scale damage your cause should have a proven benefit.

Otherwise it’s up to you to explain people who had to left their homes because of consequences of climate change why you needed those data centers to create power point presentation, mail text and funny cat pictures.

[Lerc]

I think you may find that any project has no proven benefit before that benefit is achieved. Your argument is an argument against doing anything at all.

If you wish to argue there is a risk of global scale damage, then you should demonstrate the risk. I'm not arguing against avoiding risk. I'm arguing against assuming risk and conflating high risk and low risk forms.

What energy production would you find satisfactory? What is unsatisfactory.

Attacking power-point presentations, mail text and funny cat pictures as the cause of people having to leave their homes is assuming undue impact of a small subset of behaviour. What is the actual impact of the behaviour you are criticizing? Is it insignificant in comparison to the resources predicting the path of a hurricane? I assume you would consider that a more worthy cause.

[croes]

> Your argument is an argument against doing anything at all. My argument is about the scale.

They didn’t build a giant railwork network after the first train was shown, they didn’t build Highways after the car’s invention.

It’s like the IT industry turned into a one trick pony and bets everything on a certain type of AI.

[ben_w]

We had data centres for a long time before this, and this isn't a bet on "a certain type of AI" as the GPUs can do a lot of other architectures besides Transformers.

Indeed, your own example of "funny cat pictures"… if you meant "from GenAI" that's a diffusion model while text is a transformer model, and if you meant "in general" all those things pre-date current interest in AI.