How Local Activists are Interrupting Big Tech AI Investments

• Sam Altman’s “AI empire” alone is using as much power as New York City and San Diego, combined
• Google’s AI data centers are consuming massive amounts of power, with electricity use hitting 30.8 million megawatt-hours in 2024, nearly doubling since 2020 — while inking deals with the Israeli military
• Elon Musk’s xAI has constructed the world’s largest AI supercenter, Colossus, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the country’s most impoverished cities

A must-red Tumblr post: “Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper [On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots], and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.”