I love this response. Even the feisty chatbot is telling journalists to cool it with the clickbait.
Such a thing was unimaginable a decade ago, and the technology is in its infancy. There is every reason to expect great advances over the current state in the coming months and years.
A great example is computer assisted humans are the best chess players. Humans continually prod and break ai, but also improve it.
Another example was the go ai that could be beaten with a trick but humans would never fall into the same trap. But once the flaw is know, a response or learning can be introduced to the computer to solve these issues.
Not really a great example. People used to say that 25-30 years ago, when the strongest human (Kasparov) and the strongest chess computer were of comparable strength. The article you linked to mentions "Advanced Chess", which seems to have been a thing in the late 90s, but dried up about 20 years ago, and no-one mentions it in the chess world these days. Except very occasionally as a historical curiosity, to contrast with the situation today and for a while now: the best engines, like Stockfish and Leela, are such strong players that even the strongest human chess players would have nothing to contribute in a human + computer team.
There's also a bunch of supporting equipment, so maybe they used around 500W * 1023 * (34*24=816)hrs = 417,384kWh?
I think that would be around $35k in fossil fuels, assuming none of the datacenter's energy came from renewable sources?
A more reasonable estimate might be 5 years * 500W * 1,000 systems = 76.7 GWh, ~29.3kWh * 55% = 16.1 kWh. Actual electricity generation isn’t 100% natural gas but this is additional demand on the grid which tends to be supplied by natural gas unless there’s a surplus of green or nuclear power. Also, data centers also use AC etc so it’s really quite arbitrary how you want to estimate things.
PS: A similar thing applies to EV’s people tend to use the existing mix of generation to estimate how green they are but it’s not like we are adding hydroelectric dams when people increase electricity consumption. It’s really a question of how marginal increases in demand are supplied.
Child, you say? That's a great achievement.