This article is a great example of a really frustrating thing people are doing, which is pretending that all this AI business started two years ago I get it, G

This article is a great example of a really frustrating thing people are doing, which is pretending that all this AI business started two years ago I get it, GenAI became popular as a consumer-facing product and tech industry PR blitz in that year. But people in the tech world should know better. AI as massive industry-wide GPGPU workload took off in the 2010s, including widespread usage of smaller models like CNNs throughout both FAANG's stack and in scattered startups, as well as supermodels used as recommendation engines by everyone and their grandma. Arguably the entire business models of every irresponsibly large tech company ran on this shit. All the telemetry. Ad targeting. Social Media feeds. Hell, GPT-3 came out before 2020. It was a scandal in this world when OpenAI exclusively licensed it to Microsoft, who was already probably using it in search at that point. None of this was actually that long ago, this is way too soon to have cultural amnesia. I get that I'm in somewhat of a bubble as an AI researcher but surely tech publications should at least know these basic facts, right? Is this yet another reason to be annoyed at the 2010s lingo for calling all these pervasive neural networks "the algorithms"? From the perspective of energy expenditure from AI workloads, the statement that it's a major driving force of the rising energy demands of datacenters is a perfectly reasonable conclusion given a graph where the TWH more than triples between 2012 and 2024. The article sometimes specifies "generative AI" (which did exist in 2012, but was in a way less interesting state for most people and businesses until 2022), but often just says "AI", which is a big umbrella term people have at least consistently been using for most neural networks for that entire span of time (and longer, and for lots of other things, and it's hopelessly overloaded to the point of being nonsensical sometimes, but regardless this is an incredibly uncontroversial usage). So someone at a data center with a graph that basically tracks the rise of GPGPU neural networks and shows a big jump in energy expenditure over that period attributing this to "AI" is very reasonable!