Elon Musk Triumphs Over Protests, Lands an Air Permit for xAI – The Sky’s the Limit Now!

“Despite Protests, Elon Musk Secures Air Permit for xAI”

“In 2017, OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research group, co-founded by Elon Musk, stood up for the environment. It trained its first artificial intelligence program, an autonomous system called Dota 2, using an ounce of energy every two seconds. That was equivalent to running a standard US residential air conditioner for the same duration, according to the organization. In 2020, it trained GPT-3, a text-generation program, consuming an estimated 367 megawatt-hours of electricity. The organization admitted that the amount was larger than the total energy of some US homes in a year.”

Well, well, well! Not like playing Dota 2 in the long, summer afternoon wouldn’t hike up your electricity bills, but who could have anticipated it would have such implications, all in the name of AI development? Our dear Mother Earth must be squealing with unrestrained joy at the mere thought! And it just doesn’t stop there, does it? The ground-breaking, language-predicting, buzz-of-the-tech-world GPT-3 eats up a year’s worth of energy consumed by some homes in the States. Isn’t that burnished achievement worth a few melting ice caps?

Let’s not dismiss the fact that maintaining the physical infrastructure for these computational behemoths comes with its own share of carbon footprints. Why not consider the energy consumed to run the data centers, the cooling systems, and oh, let’s not forget the little endeavors of expanding these data centers too. An additional estimated 285,000 tons of greenhouse gases over the next 30 years to be exact. What’s a little more sacrifice for the transcendence of AI, right?

And out comes the fight for the permit over data center air pollution. When OpenAI aimed to construct a data center in south San Francisco, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District raised its brows over potential air pollution owing to the surge in electricity demand. That’s indeed a grave trade-off, so much so that even the air district refers to the data center’s permit as the most complex it has ever analyzed.

Now, the mentioned permit, which OpenAI needs to fly its latest, most powerful AI version, Codename: Gopher, could come with certain environmental consequences too. Gopher aims to operate 24/7, thus consume as much power with significant carbon emissions as the annual output of approximately 56,000 cars. Now, who could have seen that coming?

But relax, dear planet savers, OpenAI is addressing this with all the concern it merits. Postponing Codename: Gopher’s launch until the permit clarity, tapping renewable energy for power, planning a carbon offset purchasing program are just a few nuggets in the bucket. It warms the heart, doesn’t it? And exceeds the warmth of the globe a tad bit, ironically.

So, strap in tight as AI shoots for the stars, while simultaneously, incrementally fraying the ozone layer. The future of technology beckons, while the future of the planet waits with baited breath. But hey, progress, right?

Read the original article here: https://www.wired.com/story/xai-data-center-air-pollution-permit/