There are many critiques that people have made about the AI industry: privacy, piracy, electricity and water usage, hallucinations, and more. Today's Podcast for Inquiry is a monologue in which I ask: Where does the money for AI firms come from? Each AI datacentre costs tens of billions to build, and hundreds of billions have been spent across the industry. Each time an LLM answers a question, or an AI model generates an image, audio file, or video, a lot of power and CPU cycles are used - in other words, AI is expensive to build and expensive to run. Hardly any consumers, and very few companies, are paying for AI services. If they’re not profitable, and there’s no clear path to become so, why are the market capitalizations of AI firms so high?
I asks these questions, and more, in latest diatribe.
Note: Opinions in this episode are mine alone, and are not shared by others on the Podcast for Inquiry team or the Centre for inquiry Canada.
