. That’s a staggering figure for just one of the many companies working on AI, and we are only in the very earliest stages of seeing what AI can do.The private market will solve the chip problem by itself.
That challenge will be made even more monumental by the fact that we would probably prefer to provide that power without further warming the planet. And while renewables can undoubtedly do some of that job, we also urgently need to revisit the barriers to nuclear, which can provide steady, emissions-free power at massive scale.
Of course, if you fear that our AI-driven future is a bad one, it might be tempting to ignore the power problem, hoping that the physical constraints will keep the virtual machines from taking over. But if AI models prove as useful as they currently look, benign neglect will quickly turn malevolent, as silicon processors compete for electricity with flesh-and-blood humans who would like to run the air conditioning and the fridge while they chat with their bots.