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Facebook is set to buy billions of dollars worth of AI chips. But Elizabeth Warren is worried about the climate impact. Will ChatGPT need an EPA permit?

Whole New Industry

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder says AI Is a ‘Whole New Industry’.

“This last year, we’ve seen generative AI really becoming a whole new application space, a whole new way of doing computing,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive, said Wednesday. “A whole new industry is being formed, and that’s driving our growth.”

“This is transforming everything about computing,” Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event Wednesday.

Fueling that growth, tech companies have plowed money into AI in recent months. Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg boasted in January that he was planning to buy billions of dollars worth of AI chips from Nvidia this year. Google recently rolled out a new, more powerful version of its Gemini AI system. Microsoft has its own AI assistant tools and has bought tens of thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced chips.

Huang said generative AI is kicking off a new wave of investment worth trillions of dollars, which he believed would double the amount of data centers in the world in the next five years and deliver big new market opportunities for Nvidia.

Nvidia’s boom is largely dependent on a handful of those companies. Nvidia disclosed that 19% of its sales in its last fiscal year came from one end customer. It didn’t disclose the identity of the customer, but cloud-computing companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft accounted for more than half of the revenue for its data-center division in its latest quarter, or over $9.2 billion.

OpenAI, which counts Microsoft as its biggest financial backer, is itself looking for ways to increase access to chips that power AI. Chief Executive Sam Altman has discussed with investors and government officials a build-out of AI-related infrastructure, including chip factories, that could cost as much as $7 trillion, The Wall Street Journal reported this month.

Nvidia’s early-mover advantage—the company began investing in AI more than a decade ago—has made it difficult to displace, though, in large part because of its head start in software. The company has developed a vast amount of software catered to healthcare and robotics, among other key applications of AI, and the tools it created to exploit the capabilities of its chips have become an industry standard.

Is AI a new industry or a way to enhance existing ones? Both?

I’s be lying if I said I looking forward to a new and improved Facebook given that I don’t use Facebook at all.

Perhaps AI will soon be embedded into everything. This does not have me concerned, but Senators Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham are leading the charge against it.

Strange Bedfellows

Please note Senators Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham propose a Licensing Agency For AI and Other Digital Things

I am quite certain that dynamic duo could ruin anything.

Climate Concerns

AI climate concerns are now in the spotlight according to the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Biden is lucky that the AI revolution accelerated under his watch, just as Barack Obama was fortunate with the shale fracking boom. But AI advances are happening despite government, not because of it. Mr. Biden’s executive order last autumn has created new uncertainty about whether and how regulators will permit AI.

Some Democrats are already threatening to suffocate AI with—what else?—climate regulation. Democratic Senators this month introduced a bill that would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to recommend administrative actions to mitigate AI’s environmental impact. Will ChatGPT soon need an Environmental Protection Agency permit?

Progressives fret that AI systems will generate as much CO2 emissions as entire countries. Possibly. An AI-driven web search consumes four to five times as much energy as a conventional one. Can the U.S. electric grid, already creaking under the force-fed green energy transition, handle the increasing demand? Is anyone in government thinking about this?

Note to Congress and President Biden: Industrial policy doesn’t make countries or businesses great.

How Good or Bad is Google’s Gemini Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tool?

Yesterday, Google pulled the plug on Gemini image generation for inserting diversity into historical images. What about simple math and logic questions?

For discussion of some glaring flaws, please consider How Good or Bad is Google’s Gemini Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tool?

I’m not ready to risk my life on it yet, but there is little doubt AI is coming big time.

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