What negative externalities? Those prompts probably resulted in a tiny amount of CO2 emissions and a tiny amount of water usage. Evaporating a gram of water and emitting a milligram of CO2 seems like a good deal for making your class better for all your students.
In the US, on average, generating 1 kWh produces 364.5 g of CO2. 1 kW may be somewhat pessimistic, but I think it's in the right ballpark for power consumption of DC inference. If processing the prompt took a minute of continuous inference (and I'm going to guess it took a fair bit more), that's 6 grams of CO2.
>What negative externalities?
Off the top of my head,
* All the ways AIs can be misused, either by people who don't understand them (by asking them for advice, etc.) or by people who want to take advantage of others (spam, scams, etc.).
* The power and resource usage of the above, both for inference as well as to deal with them.
> If processing the prompt took a minute of continuous inference (and I'm going to guess it took a fair bit more), that's 6 grams of CO2.
Neither of us really knows, but I'm going to guess it took a fair bit less. You need to consider the marginal cost of one more prompt, not the cost of running the datacenter in the first place. And with batching, hundreds of requests are executed in parallel on the same hardware. I'll concede that a milligram was an exaggeration though.
For comparison, a typical car in the US emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile. And I know few people who beat themselves up over the externalities of unnecessarily driving one mile.
> * All the ways AIs can be misused, either by people who don't understand them (by asking them for advice, etc.) or by people who want to take advantage of others (spam, scams, etc.).
This is not an externality because it is not a consequence of using AI for good purposes. It's like saying an externality of using a hammer to build a shed is all the ways hammers can be misused.
Still, I respect you for considering the externalities of your actions. That's farther than most go. But I think they are outweighed by the benefits in this case
>This is not an externality because it is not a consequence of using AI for good purposes. It's like saying an externality of using a hammer to build a shed is all the ways hammers can be misused.
I guess we're talking about different questions. You're talking about the externalities of using a piece of technology, while I'm talking about the externalities of a piece of technology existing.
Being more specific in what you think the negative externalities are would be a good start - I see a lot of noise and upset over AI that I think is more or less overblown, nearly as much as the hype train on the other end. I'm seeing the potential for civilizational level payoffs in 5 years or less that absolutely dwarf any of the arguments and complaints I've seen so far.
Yeah, economics is weird like that, and we should probably push as hard as we can to make sure things are as fair as reasonably possible. I've got no problem with trillionaires or megacorps if the system in which they operate is fair. One thing AI is enabling is systematic uncovering of fraud and waste - we'll be able to scan omnibus bills and find corruption, track politicians, interact with the system and communicate at higher levels than before, and there's a shot at AI empowering and enfranchising people more than they've ever had a chance at before.
If AI coding alone reaches its potential, then a whole class of corporations lose their leverage in the market. In 10ish years, following moore's law, phones will have enough compute and storage to trivially run your own local search and curation of the internet. Sophisticated search engines that outclass anything currently on the market, working in tandem with a personal local privacy respecting agent. That decentralizes things in such a significant way that Google and Apple and all the gatekeepers lose their ability to manipulate and distort.
20 years from now, even if we're somehow just stuck at the current levels of AI, your personal compute will be totally sufficient to provide all the curation, moderation, proactive interaction, and search capabilities without ever having to deal with ads or bots or cloudflare.
There are lots of dangers, and ASI could wreck us, and militarized AI could be a doom scenario, or there could be overbroad stupid regulation that puts control of AI in the hands of a few corps or a government, but there are lots of bright future possibilities, and I don't see any indications that we're directly headed toward any particular doom.
