AI is consuming staggering amounts of energy—already over 10% of U.S. electricity—and the demand is only accelerating. Now, researchers have unveiled a radically more efficient approach that could slash AI energy use by up to 100× while actually improving accuracy. By combining neural networks with human-like symbolic reasoning, their system helps robots think more logically instead of relying on brute-force trial and error.
That’s just the Silicon Valley model though. Look at China for contrast. Companies there treat models as foundational infrastructure, and they’re not trying to monetize them directly. Hence why we see so much open source work coming out of there right now. It’s a similar situation we see with Linux incidentally. A lot of companies contribute to its development, but they monetize things like AWS that are built on top of it. However, even without company engagement, people will continue to work on open source as they always have. It doesn’t really matter if it goes mainstream or not.
What’s happening currently is a bubble that’s not in any way sustainable. And energy prices going through the roof thanks to the war could even be the catalyst that pops it. But as I noted earlier, we’ve gone through this cycle many times in tech world. New tech often requires a ton of resources to run which creates the mainframe era, then it gets optimized overtime, and moves to edge devices. I don’t see anything special about LLMs here. We’re just in very early stages of new technology.
That’s just the Silicon Valley model though. Look at China for contrast. Companies there treat models as foundational infrastructure, and they’re not trying to monetize them directly. Hence why we see so much open source work coming out of there right now. It’s a similar situation we see with Linux incidentally. A lot of companies contribute to its development, but they monetize things like AWS that are built on top of it. However, even without company engagement, people will continue to work on open source as they always have. It doesn’t really matter if it goes mainstream or not.
It does matter for it to be environmentally sustainable
What’s happening currently is a bubble that’s not in any way sustainable. And energy prices going through the roof thanks to the war could even be the catalyst that pops it. But as I noted earlier, we’ve gone through this cycle many times in tech world. New tech often requires a ton of resources to run which creates the mainframe era, then it gets optimized overtime, and moves to edge devices. I don’t see anything special about LLMs here. We’re just in very early stages of new technology.