AI agents are transforming how we interact with technology, but how sustainable are they? 🌍
Design choices — like model size and structure — can massively impact energy use and cost. ⚡💰 The key takeaway: smaller, task-specific models can be far more efficient than large, general-purpose ones.
🔑 Open-source models offer greater transparency, allowing us to track energy consumption and make more informed decisions on deployment. 🌱 Open-source = more efficient, eco-friendly, and accountable AI.
I read the 456-page AI Index report so you don't have to (kidding). The wild part? While AI gets ridiculously more accessible, the power gap is actually widening:
1️⃣ The democratization of AI capabilities is accelerating rapidly: - The gap between open and closed models is basically closed: difference in benchmarks like MMLU and HumanEval shrunk to just 1.7% in 2024 - The cost to run GPT-3.5-level performance dropped 280x in 2 years - Model size is shrinking while maintaining performance - Phi-3-mini hitting 60%+ MMLU at fraction of parameters of early models like PaLM
2️⃣ But we're seeing concerning divides deepening: - Geographic: US private investment ($109B) dwarfs everyone else - 12x China's $9.3B - Research concentration: US and China dominate highly-cited papers (50 and 34 respectively in 2023), while next closest is only 7 - Gender: Major gaps in AI skill penetration rates - US shows 2.39 vs 1.71 male/female ratio
The tech is getting more accessible but the benefits aren't being distributed evenly. Worth thinking about as these tools become more central to the economy.