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I do not have an answer to your original question but I do have a comment that I have realized it myself quite recently. May be the analogy is not good enough but here it goes: no one would go back to punch cards etc, we have come a long way. And GenAI is such a tool - there is no going back.

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Yea, it is easier to use an LLM for search than using a conventional search engine. No one is going back to that if a non-malicious LLM is available at reasonable costs.

The real costs are externalised to society and the environment. I assume you weren’t including that in your “reasonable costs”.

They really just need to mandate that new datacenter construction uses closed loop cooling, and must provide an upfront investment sufficient to add enough carbon free energy to the grid to power it. That would, of course, make it much more expensive, but maybe it'd be enough to make investors consider whether lighting trillions of dollars on fire is really the best use of their money.

Nobody really cares about externalized costs. If they did, then cars, electricity, lithium batteries, etc wouldn't be as popular as they are.

I think that's a poor analogy. I think the better comparison is it's 50% of the quality for 20% of the cost. Is that a win? I dunno.

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