The Risky Assumption Propping Up the A.I. Arms Race

There's a big reason why every company hoping to deal in some way with artificial intelligence is either spending or raising billions upon billions of dollars right now, and it's not just investor hype. These stacks of cash are necessary for meeting the costs of building, training, and maintaining resource-intensive (and resource-lacking) power-sucking content generators like ChatGPT, as well as the resource-intensive power-sucking data sets, neural networks, and large language models, or LLMs, they're trained on--such as OpenAI's GPT-4, whose API was recently made public to paying customers with coding expertise. Someone who understands the energy issue all too well is OpenAI's CEO himself, Sam Altman. Back in May, while testifying to Congress about the challenges wrought by the A.I. arms race his company ushered into the world, Altman admitted something curious: that he'd prefer for his wildly popular ChatGPT bot, at that time the fastest-growing app in history, to have fewer users. "We're not trying to get them to use it more," he stated. "Actually, we'd love it if they use it less, because we don't have enough GPUs."