Tech Bubble Fuels Infrastructure Scramble: LLM Mania Under Scrutiny for Greed and Unsustainability

My stance on #LLM : 1. There _might_ be some useful use cases with this technology that could be worth exploring. 2. However, it is glaringly obvious that, as of now, their main purpose is to power the mother of all investments bubbles. 3. Which leads us to the present trillion dollar business case for "we must build energy- and water-wasting data centers everywhere so that we can scrape every single website a thousand times a month for new training data!" 4. Thus, there is currently pretty much no ethical way of using LLMs. 5. Any ethical exploration of LLM use cases will thus have to wait until the bubble has burst, the investors have moved on to the next scam, and we can sort through the rubble to check what is left.

Looking for silver linings in the LLM/data centre bubble, I see only two (and they're kinda drab): 1. A lot of private equity investors will lose their shirts (and good riddance). 2. The monstrous demand for power will lead to over-provisioning and investment in grid and sustainable energy. The gas peakers will go away but any renewable build-out will remain. Anything else?

For a brief second, let us imagine a fantastical world where LLMs were trained and operated entirely ethically. Do these developers and organizations that are adopting LLMs not realize just how much these GenAI companies are operating at a loss? Do they legitimately not care that the prices are going to rise dramatically when the "other people's money" tap runs dry and returns are finally expected? What happens then? You've already deskilled your work force, have mountains of LLM-generated tech debt that no one understands because they used an LLM to review it, and folks are now hooked on the dopamine hit of having the "it'll work this time cha-ching!" machine finally output a working result. I guess you just absorb the astronomical new token prices?