That’s nailing it really well: “willfully ignoring” is precisely what’s happening all around me. Me talking about small focused AI models, there you have everyone raving about AGI. Energy use and privacy issues of cloud vs local inference discussions end on how awesome the power of GPUs are and the jobs too. GPU backed finance with depreciation schedules past useful life seems OK for anyone chasing some short term gain. Even the job market is troubled, you can hardly tell a relevant candidate from an irrelevant one because everyone is an AI expert these days - hallucinations seem to make lying more casual.

It’s pretty clear to me there is a collective desire to ignore the problems to sell more GPU, close the next round, get that high paying AI job.

Part of me wishes humans would show the same dedication to fight climate change…