AI's Hidden Environmental Costs & Alexa AI Upgrade.

AI Riddle:

I can be captured but never held; I can be killed but never die.
I am sometimes the cause of war, and sometimes the reason for peace.

What am I?

Today’s Motive:

• 🌎️ What is the cost of AI on our planet? The numbers might surprise you. 

• 👨‍💻 Alexa is getting a major AI overhaul. What are the changes?

• 🌲 AI agents create their own flourishing world in Minecraft?

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🛠️ Get the scoop on the latest AI tools at glance.

AI CONTROVERSY

🌎️ AI's Hidden Environmental Costs: Unveiling the True Impact of Artificial Intelligence. 🏭️ 

 🏭️ There is an environmental toll every time we use AI. Chatbots use an immense amount of energy to respond to user questions. Powering and cooling these AI systems incurs significant environmental costs, but what are the numbers when we dig deeper?

Summary:

• How much water is consumed to write the average 100-word email by AI? One weekly email for a year by 16 million people consumes over 435 million liters of water.

• Water is often used as a cooling medium for servers by carrying away the heat to cooling towers.

• Those utilizing electrical cooling systems contribute to elevated energy demands, potentially increasing residents’ power bills and straining the electrical grid.

• One weekly AI written email for a year by roughly 16 million Americans requires 121,517MWh of electricity, which equals the total power consumption by all DC homes over 20 days. Sources for above information, below.

• The electrical cost of training ChatGPT-3 was roughly 1300MWh of power. There is a substantial cost to train and to use these systems. Source Vox.

• Supporting ChatGPT-4 requires around 3,600 Nvidia HGX A100 GPUs consuming around an estimated 564MWh per day. Source TechSpot.

• Training ChatGPT-3 produced roughly 502 tons of carbon dioxide.

The Motive:

Sam Altman has been on record, signifying that AI holds the potential to solve climate change in several interviews. While AI may unlock new solutions, the current environmental costs are substantial and cannot be overlooked. Every time you query an AI model, there is a cost.

Such figures have prompted legal actions urging technology companies to disclose their energy and water consumption related to AI operations, including cloud services and data storage centers.

While there are promises that AI will create new technology to help us lower emissions, we are currently paying the cost now.
For more information, check out the article written by Pranshu Verma and Shelly Tan at the washingtonpost.com. Link here.

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AI TECH

🔄 Amazon's Alexa Gets a AI Major Makeover: Meet Claude, the Hidden Assistant! 💡.

 🚚 Amazon is poised to release an upgraded version of Alexa in October, ahead of the U.S. holiday season, which will utilize Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence models instead of its own proprietary AI.
Facing challenges in implementing its own AI models into Alexa—because of latency issues and less comprehensive responses compared to Claude — Amazon is handing over the LLM reigns.
Link to full article, written by Greg Bensinger.

Summary:

• The Alexa upgrade aims to offer a more conversational, assistant-style speech interface, providing shopping recommendations, cooking instructions, weather updates, and various other voice-activated commands.

• The voice will be the same, but this new AI version might come with a monthly subscription between $5 to $10.

• The new Alexa leveraging Anthropic’s Claude AI will have the possibilities of handling household smart home tasks and daily activities based on voice commands.

• Amazon has emphasized that 2025 will be a critical year for Alexa to turn out profits, but will people pay for this service compared to similar products that are free?

The Motive:

Has Amazon thrown in the towel in their own AI efforts? It is a nuanced situation. Amazon has already invested heavily into Anthropic. The company concluded a 4 billion investment back in March, so the partnership is not a huge surprise, unlike Microsoft and Apple partnering with OpenAI. More information on the money between Amazon and Anthropic here.

Yesterday Amazon announced Jamba 1.5 large and mini LLM models within Amazon Bedrock. Amazon Bedrock is a vast service of high-performing foundation models from various AI companies through a single API, allowing AI capabilities in your applications using AWS.

The web of AI integrations is increasingly intricate as major tech companies diversify their AI assets. 2025 will be a big year for Alexa and Amazon. If Anthropic’s Claude integration does not pan out, it could signal the gradual demise of Alexa.

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AI TECH

🌳 Autonomous AI Agents Create Their own World Inside of Minecraft and thrive.

 🌎️ Project Sid, by Altera, marks the first simulation involving over 1,000 truly autonomous agents collaborating within a virtual environment, exhibiting emergent economies, cultures, religions, and governmental systems.

Summary:

• A thousand autonomous AI agents were deployed inside of Minecraft. The agents started with nothing to see how they would perform inside of a simulated Minecraft world.

• Independently, they agreed to use gems as a common currency for trading supplies, building, and establishing an economy. They instantly began mining for resources in a communicated effort and branched out from there.

• Agents performed their own tasks, such as farming, religion, and policing. There were even incidences where some agents went missing and the village rallied to find them. This is significant because agents left their tasks to collaborate and strategize to save the missing villagers.

• These experiments highlight initial instances of multi-agent collaboration and environmental adaptation in a simulated setting.

• Altera’s model is powered by Systems Neuroscience Composite Architecture. A system inspired by the brain, with models mirroring prefrontal cortex, memory systems, social, and emotional states.

The Motive:

AI integrating into everyday use cases is all the rage at the moment. It has become ubiquitous every time we turn on a screen, and people are growing more comfortable with its use—sometimes without even realizing it. AI agents are another giant leap forward.

AI agents are tools capable of automating and completing complex tasks without human intervention.

This is a big deal. The better autonomous agents become, the more they will be used, significantly impacting the workforce. Recently, Salesforce Inc. stated they will implement their own AI agents, insinuating the ominous impact of AI on corporations, further reading here. AI agents have the potential to replace jobs rather than enhance them.