The environmental impact is a really interesting issue. As the models have gotten more efficient, the water usage has plummeted. From an environmental perspective, eating a single burger is probably worse than an individual's ChatGPT usage over their lifetime. But of course we're going to be using it an order of magnitude more.
I do think once you align all the environmental impacts, AI ends up dwarfed by most human activities. It's a conundrum really... if AI helps advance technology to the point we can solve an issue like factory farming, solar powered robots stroll the countryside and waterways picking up our trash, and we engineer proteins that break down plastics in the soil, then suddenly the environmental impact of AI tips the other way.
The "models to train models" thing is among the most interesting things to me. I think the finding that it actually seems to work was an important turning point in the debate where a lot of people who were pessimistic began to change their minds.
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