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AI could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

Plus, AI camera takes pictures of people and instantly makes them naked

Author

Steve Brown
April 11, 2024

Together with

This Week in AI

The energy consumed by AI is on an unsustainable path. Rene Haas, CEO of ARM (the company that provides the designs for about 85% of the processors on the planet—it’s inside every Apple product, Android phone, and most cars, for starters), shared his concern that AI could consume 20 to 25% of US energy output by the end of the decade. The main culprit is large language models. A single ChatGPT inquiry uses the same amount of energy as about 10 Google searches, and as models grow in size and generative AI is deployed across the enterprise in all major companies in the coming years, power consumption is due to skyrocket, despite continued improvements in energy efficiency. Will we need to choose between having EVs or AI?

“Make me a chill-out playlist of background music for when I’m working”, “I want a surfer rock playlist to cheer me up”, “Put together some upbeat dance music from the 70s, 80s and 90s for a retro party, and don’t include any glam rock.” Spotify has announced a new AI playlist feature that will enable you to explain what you want to hear in plain language, and have the perfect playlist created for you. Now in beta in the UK and Australia and coming to other markets later in the year.

For a while now, Sir Jony Ive (the designer who shaped the iPod, iPhone, iMac, and other iconic Apple devices) and Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, have been rumored to be collaborating on a future AI device. If the availability of low-power computing, miniaturization, MEMS and other sensors (GPS, accelerometers, cameras etc) led to the creation of the iPhone and sparked the smartphone revolution, what new device categories will generative AI unlock?

Oh, Elon. Whether you love him or hate him, Elon Musk is behind many of today’s big tech innovations and he has a finger on the pulse of technology innovation. While he likes to make predictions, many of them turn out to be somewhat dicey, so take this one with a pinch of salt. Currently the smart people in the industry are thinking 2028-2029 is a more likely timeframe for AGI, let alone artificial super intelligence.

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Video: UBTECH Robot Demo

Here come the Chinese robots. This is Walker S, a robot from UBTECH. Built using Baidu’s ERNIE LLM, the robot is shown folding a t-shirt, sorting objects on a table, and then explaining its actions and conversing in Chinese. (2m 30s)

AI Innovation

Intel is elbowing its way into the AI space with their new Gaudi 3 chip. Designed specifically to accelerate AI workloads for both training and inferencing, Intel claims the new Gaudi platform will outperform Nvidia’s H100, which was the darling of the AI world until they announced their new Blackwell platform last month. Intel announced Gaudi 3 at their Vision event in Arizona. First chips are already with customers. Alongside performance and power efficiency advantages over the H100, customers will likely be drawn to Intel by significantly lower total cost of ownership and most of all…..availability. Getting enough Nvidia chips has been challenging, even for tech titans, so there is likely plenty of room in the market for both Intel and Nvidia. More analysis here.

Meta’s Llama 3 and Open AI’s GPT-5 models are expected to launch this summer. One of the advances over previous models is expected to be improved reasoning abilities. Reasoning and planning skills are important steps on the journey towards building artificial general intelligence. These advances may bring another level of AI breakthrough and power a new generation of autonomous agents and AI assistants. Meta imagine putting Llama 3 into a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses so the wearer could look at a broken coffee machine and the AI would guide them on how to fix it, for example.

AI Insights

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“We are moving from a world of computation and calculation to one of cognition.”
Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Computer

The JP Morgan CEO, seen by many as a financial and business sage, made the remarks in his annual shareholder letter. While he said its impossible to predict the pace of AI development, he shared that “AI has the potential to augment virtually every job.” JP Morgan has over 2000 employees working on AI, machine learning, and data science and they already have over 400 AI use cases in production inside the company.

Excellent article from Fast Company on the impending transformation of education, particularly higher education. As AI pervades every part of business, universities will need to change both how they teach and what they teach to students. To prepare the workforce of the (very near) future, we need to do something different. And sooner rather than later to remain competitive.

A prime entry into the “what were they thinking” category of new products this year? Actually, no. This is a project by two German artists trying to bring attention to the potential privacy invasions made possible by deepfake technology and sending a warning that generative AI has the potential to erode the fabric of reality itself.

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