> If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.

I agree that in general, if the goal is to limit CO2 emissions and use renewable sources of energy, we ought not to focus on AI first, because it is dwarfed by many other things that we take for granted today. My canonical example I give folks is that the latte they order every day from Starbucks involves substantially more energy and water use than most uses of ChatGPT on a daily basis.

But as we move to digitize more and more of this world, and now create automated cognitive labor, we should start with the right foundations. I'd rather we not try to disentangle critical AI infrastructure from coal power plants, and I'd rather we try to limit the compute available to workloads in ways that encourage people to use the tech actually befitting of their use case rather than throw it all into the most expensive model every time.