I think we’ll soon be able to spend more on AI than we do on Netflix and Spotify.

Today, almost every tech company is talking about one thing: artificial intelligence. They firmly believe it will change every industry and have a profound economic impact – for the better, they say – although for now its mass use is limited to creating absurd images on the Internet or removing unwanted objects or people from photos. But artificial intelligence has a serious problem: It uses absurd amounts of electrical energy.

Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are considering all sorts of solutions, from building data centers in places where renewable energy is cheap, like in northern Europe, to investing in small nuclear power plants. But there’s another problem: these investments require costs that the world’s richest companies can currently afford, but sooner or later there will be a bill for users to foot.

Let me explain. You could say that artificial intelligence is relatively free. You can use any of the previous GPT models to generate a script or a school paper for almost nothing. The same goes for image generators. However, these actions, perhaps extremely trivial, entail costs similar to using an air conditioner for 10 hours at the maximum price. according to estimates by Swedish radio station. Yes, this may not be a more visual calculation, but even if we put this cost at $1, we can say that this is a huge cost that would be unsustainable only from a financial point of view, because from an environmental point of view, emitting more CO2 in exchange for a task that we humans usually perform is better not to mention.

But then, if AI is so expensive to use, why is it mostly free? I think it’s down to two factors: first, I think we are beta testers services, and no one paid a Netflix subscription for movies with bad subtitles, bad dubbing, or that were constantly paused. OpenAI and other companies continue to search killer app artificial intelligence. The second factor is that there are multiple companies competing for our attention. Going back to the streaming platform comparison, all of the platforms had costs below the $10 per month threshold until the “need to use them” became so significant that it didn’t matter to shell out $10 or $15 just because we would pay it.

Well, I guess the time will come sooner or later. I really don’t know what killer app AI, but I think the first industry where it will be useful will be social media content creation. Automatic captioning models are a miracle, and soon we will see models that can create videos from a script. The social media content industry is generating a ton of money, and AI will drive it.