[LINK] AI advances limited by electricity supply

[Roger Clarke]

On 27/7/2025 12:21, Philip N Argy wrote:
> Aussie ingenuity to the rescue:
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02871

Another potential mitigating factor is that the maturity-stage of the 
LLM game is 'Very Early'.  So the assumption that vast reanalyses of 
vast corpora will be required forever, or even for a materially long 
period, may shortly be overrun.

Less-short version below.


Principles for the Responsible Application of Generative AI
Computer Law & Security Review 57 (2025) 106131
https://rogerclarke.com//EC/RGAI-C.html#GAI2
 > GenAI technology is still new, and maturation continues. Small 
Language Models (SLM) are emergent (Schick & Schütze 2021, Javaheripi 
2023). A natural development is for a foundation LLM to provide lingual 
structure, but to be combined with a specialised and perhaps curated SLM 
containing semantic content relevant to, for example, melanoma diagnosis 
or environmental regulation. A further refinement might then be the 
abstraction of generic lingual models from LLMs, and their expression in 
a compressed form, enabling combination with curated collections in 
particular domains in a manner that is more convenient, and less 
profligate of processing-power and energy.

[ Ergo pick your time to sell your Nvidia shares? ]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Link <link-bounces at anu.edu.au> On Behalf Of Tom Worthington
> Sent: Sunday, 27 July 2025 09:48
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] AI advances limited by electricity supply
> 
> On 7/25/25 16:01, Antony Barry wrote:
>> https://qz.com/eric-schmidt-ai-limit-chips-electricity?lctg=1980929&utm_source=digitaltrends&utm_medium=email&utm_content=subscriber_id:1980929&utm_campaign=DTDaily20250721
> 
> Start clearing Crete. ;-)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
> 
> More seriously, data centers could use off peak power, moving the power
> consumption around the world to wherever the wind is blowing or sun shining.
> 
> The large estimates for data center water consumption assume the use of
> coal fired power cooled by water evaporation. If renewable energy, or
> event thermal using river or sea water for cooling, then there is not
> much water use. Also a data center can use closed cycle cooling, or
> water harvested from sewers.
> 
> 

-- 
Roger Clarke                            mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916   http://www.xamax.com.au  http://www.rogerclarke.com

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Visiting Professorial Fellow                          UNSW Law & Justice
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University