AI progress feels much less magical when you include the physical infrastructure and energy costs behind every model call.

Because all this fancy tech requires concrete and iron (smelted by burning fossil fuels), we're still in the Iron Age: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from...

Yeah trillions of investment into development and paying millions to researchers to say they solved a bunch of math problems and it can write mediocre code

It also feels much less magical when you see what people actually waste it on.

Unfortunately, this report doesn’t tell us about resource usage per model call. It only tells us the numerator and we also need the denominator.

This is a senseless comment. Worlds progress also stands behind the emissions it produces. In fact there are almost no examples of high gdp low energy use countries at all.

High energy use is exactly how prosperity happens. If anything, you should see physical infrastructure and go “yeah that’s great for economy and people”.