Posted by absqueued 6 days ago
The main concern isn't energy use from AI, it's how companies are getting that energy, and how much their emissions are increasing due to it. [Google says its total greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50% over five years, mostly due to electricity that powers AI data centers](https://www.npr.org/2024/07/10/nx-s1-5028558/artificial-inte...). [Chevron to build gas plants to power data centers amid AI boom](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chevron-partners-wit...). [Electric utility companies are building more power plants that will burn natural gas to meet demands of a data center construction boom](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/1...). Considering this, the argument this piece makes falls apart rather quickly.
Author is prof at EPFL
I find his other article on generative bio LLMs more interesting
https://substack.com/home/post/p-159626430
>Remarkably, Evo 2 wasn’t even trained on human variant data - only on the standard human reference genome. Yet it can still infer which mutations are harmful in humans, because it seems to have learned the evolutionary constraints on genomic sequences.