THERE IS NO doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over the globe, fueled primarily by tech giants aggressively pushing the technology while seeking valuations in the trillions of dollars.
However, there are voices that are opposing AI or calling it overrated, and questioning its impact on the environment.
So far, the loudest opposition to AI emanated from the “Leiden Declaration”, backed by over 150 professors from across the world that warned governments not to “believe the hype” about AI’s math abilities.
“The future of mathematical research must be guided by human judgment, fair and transparent practices, and the shared values of the global mathematical community,” said International Mathematical Union (IMU) vice-president Ulrike Tillmann in an endorsement to the declaration, as quoted by AFP.
The declaration also chastised the “strong commercial incentive… to overstate the capabilities of their products,” referring to AI companies pushing their products more for profit and growth.
There is some evidence to this as OpenAI and Anthropic, two US-based AI giants, are planning their own initial public offerings (IPOs) amounting to $60 billion each, which can push their respective valuations to the billions of dollars.
“There is a competition to the death on the part of the main labs… they are trying, using mathematics… to attract investment so that each of them will be left standing,” Columbia University professor Michael Harris, one of the declaration’s co-authors, said.
ADOPTING COSTLY AI
The cost of adopting AI is also coming under fire, and no less than an official of Meta raised this question.
“Nobody should be using AI tools just for the sake of using them,” Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth wrote in a memo to staff, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Also, Uber’s chief operating officer commented said that his company’s investing in AI showed no noticeable improvement in productivity.
There are also companies shifting to free or less costly open-source AI models that can perform many tasks that proprietary or closed systems can perform.
A new paper from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) titled “Benefits of AI openness” backs this up, saying that open AI systems can attain about 90 percent of the performance of proprietary models.
“While open models achieve approximately 90 percent of the performance of closed models at launch, they are often available at significantly lower cost, resulting in a higher quality-to-price ratio,” it added.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Meanwhile, a United Nations (UN) report urged AI companies to disclose their environmental footprint, as concerns over the current AI boom is pressuring power grids, water supplies, and land resources.
“What we are showing here is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), told AFP.
“We need to require more transparency. We need the providers to provide that information,” Madani said.
The UNU-INWEH report titled “Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints” said that the global AI market is expected to grow from $189 billion in 2023 to $4.8 trillion by 2033.This, in turn, will require data centers electricity enough to power a country. Currently, if data centers were a country, their total power consumption would have ranked at 11th, or just under
