Despite the typical complaints about "X new thing harming the environment!!!", LLMs are as friendly as it gets, it

1. Consumes a minor amount of electricity (Data centers is only 2% of US electricity use, and currently AI is maybe only 5-10% of that). Its trivial compared to say metal smelting.

2. Consume water for cooling.

That's it, there is 0 direct pollution generated from AI, and even the water use is very minor compared to say farming, and can be improved via more water efficient cooling techs.

The main concern is the scaling speed. As LLMs scale up 10x, 100x, 1000x, those previously very minor electricity costs can quickly become grid impacting in a decade.