AI's race for the planet

• The electricity-hungry technology is tempting us to ramp up energy use at the very moment when experts say we need to aggressively curtail carbon emissions.
• But AI optimists pin their hopes on the technology's capacity to supercharge climate mitigation and alternative energy research and deployment.

Driving the news: Hurricane Milton's threat to Florida is only the latest in a decades-long crescendo of extreme weather events intensified by the impact of a warming climate.

• No individual catastrophe can be specifically blamed on the impact of planetary warming. But today's disaster intensification loop is exactly what climate scientists have long told us our greenhouse gas buildup would cause.

Zoom out: For years, experts have pressed the world to cut carbon emissions by both shifting to non-fossil fuel sources and boosting efficiency — but governments and industry have moved much more slowly, setting and then missing one target after another.

• Now the rise of AI is spiking demand for the sort of predictable "baseload" power that data centers require — and that renewable energy sources like solar and wind aren't always well suited to supply.

Zoom in: AI's energy hunger kicks in during the expensive initial work of training models and continues with the everyday load of operating them.

• Each time you ask ChatGPT a question, you're using many times the energy it would have taken to make a simple Google query. (And since Google will now automatically append an AI-generated summary to many search queries, you don't even have the "low-energy" option most of the time, anyway.)

The intrigue: Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt caused a stir last week with comments suggesting that efforts to limit carbon emissions were hopeless, and AI was the only solution.

• "My own opinion is that we're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it," he said at a conference in Washington.

• Schmidt admitted that even the most optimistic improvements in energy efficiency "will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology."
• "The needs in this area will be a problem," he said. "But I'd rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it."

Schmidt is a longtime climate hawk and contributor to environmental causes, but here he was speaking for many in Silicon Valley in saying the quiet part out loud.

• In this view, cumbersome U.N. processes and slow-moving global negotiations won't save us, and we'd better pray that technology will.
• Schmidt is betting that we can build AI smart enough to solve the climate crisis, so we shouldn't let fear of worsening that crisis slow us down — even if the AI itself busts our energy budget along the way.

The other side: The danger, of course, is that natural disasters and geopolitical stresses could pile up tragic costs faster than AI can deliver remediating benefits.

• Schmidt's skepticism about emissions targets is understandable, but his wager is a sort of species-wide Hail Mary pass: If it fails, there's no time for a do-over.