But… Isn’t that kind of the point? Slashing computational cost so that we can deploy that stuff wherever it’s needed without a tenfold increase in the world’s energy bill?
Whether we should do that at all is a very different question.
“Wherever it’s needed” is the operative term here, isn’t it? Looking at how it’s already being implemented, nobody seems to bother asking whether “AI” is really needed.
Personally, I find myself in a bizarre situation.
I have some open source ““Ai”” solutions that I find really really nice and helpful e.g. the image search in Immich, or LanguageTool which bills itself as an AI spellchecker.
At the same time I am horrified at the stupidity underlying 99% of big tech AI stuff that gets wall street hot.