Notes 📍

The past few weeks I’ve been reading extensively about artificial intelligence, watching videos about it, trying to be as informed as I can be about the AI data centers and the AI-related stocks in the stock market. I am trying to pin down real facts about what it means for our society, how I can personally benefit and use it, and how it can mislead oneself and society more generally.

I think AI is a tool. A useful one. Not a perfect tool or a tool for all jobs, but it does provide a powerful tool for summarizing the wisdom of the internet, mixing and matching ideas, finding patterns, and even developing software. I am not going to run out and get an AI subscription, but while free tools are avaliable on the internet, I figure use them while they exist and are still free. If they disappear tomorrow behind a pay wall, and I can’t access them for free like through a free library subscription, then too bad, I’ll move on to life without them.

I don’t love the idea of APIs and distant servers and services that can disappear overnight. When you don’t control a tool, it an be quite quickly taken away from you when it’s no longer commercially viable or the government decides to censor or regulate it. I really dislike subscriptions or things not in one’s own control that force you to pay out monthly or play by other people’s rules. I’m a renter and I pay an electric bill, but for all other purposes, I tend to prepay everything else with cash. I’d much rather have a more limited AI models that could run locally, fit on my hard drive and memory, without talking to a distant service. Those days will come – computer power is only growing.

I don’t have the environmental fears a lot of people have about AI. Yes, there are AI big data centers out there that serve hundreds of millions of people, doing all kinds of complex tasks. AI processing uses a lot more power then traditional servers, though in grand scale of the power grid, not that much more power – especially as our transportation system becomes increasingly electrified and heat pumps become the standard way of heating and cooling buildings. All the evidence points to the grid needing to double in capacity in the coming decades, if not triple in capacity. That means higher voltages, and better control of electrons – and a lot more renewables. AI is part of that growth, but a small part of that growth, even if the numbers behind gigascale AI data centers are impressive.

AI is becoming dramatically more energy efficent but at the same time, we are finding new ways to consume more and more tokens. Javon’s Paradox. However, even at all you can eat buffet, there is a physical limit on how much food you can eat. I am less worried that AI will keep growing forever – at some point, all the useful work will be derived out of it. And I am also less worried about the hype. AI is not coming for our jobs, but it might make tasks easier. Still, I got question the centralization of power and knowledge AI represents – I much prefer local models, running locally. But there is a lot of power in being able to tap the collective wisdom of the internet using AI.