by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-09 15:42:11+00:00
I think the concerns about climate and CO2 emissions are valid but not a show stopper. The big picture here is that we are living through two amazing revolutions at the same time:

1) The emergence of LLMs and AIs that have turned the Turing test from science fiction into basically irrelevant. AI is improving at an absolutely mind boggling rate.

2) The transition from fossil fuel powered world to a world that will be net zero in few decades. The pace in the last five years has been amazing. China is basically rolling out amounts of solar and batteries that were unthinkable in even the most optimistic predictions a few years ago. The rest of the world is struggling to keep up and that's causing some issues with some countries running backward (mainly the US).

It's true that a lot of AI is powered by mix of old coal plants, cheap Texan gas and a few other things that aren't sustainable (or cheap if you consider the cleanup cost). However, I live in the EU and we just got cut off from cheap Russian gas, are now running on imported expensive gas (e.g. from Texas) and have some pet peeves about data sovereignty that are causing companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google to have to use local data centers for serving their European users. Which means that stuff is being powered with electricity that is locally supplied with a mix of old dirty legacy infrastructure and new more or less clean infrastructure. That mix is shifting rapidly towards renewables.

The thing is that old dirty infrastructure has been on a downward trajectory for years. There are not a lot of new gas plants being built (LNG is not cheap) and coal plants are going extinct in a hurry because they are dirty and expensive to operate. And the few gas plants that are still being built are in stand by mode much of the time and losing money. Because renewables are cheaper. Power is expensive here but relatively clean. The way to get prices down is not to import more LNG and burn it but to do the opposite.

What I like about things that increase demand for electricity is that they generate investments in providing solutions to clean energy and actually accelerate. The big picture here is that the transition to net zero is going to vastly increase demands on power grids. If you add up everything needed for industry, transport, domestic and industrial heating, aviation, etc. it's a lot. But the payoffs are also huge. People think of this as cost. That's short term thinking. The big picture here is long term. And the payoff is net zero and cheap power making energy intensive things both affordable and sustainable. We're not there yet but we're on a path towards that.

For AI that means, yes, we need a lot of TW of power and some of the uses of AI seem frivolous and not that useful. But the big picture is that this is changing a lot of things as well. I see power needs as a challenge rather than a problem or reason to sit on our hands. It would be nice if that power was cheap. It so happens that currently the cheapest way to generate power happens to be through renewables. I don't think dirty power is long term smart, profitable, or necessary. And we could definitely do more to speed up its demise. But at the same time, this increased pressure on our grids is driving the very changes we need to make that happen.