Dear Readers,Artificial intelligence is penetrating more and more areas of our everyday lives. And at breakneck speed: ChatGPT, for example, is considered the fastest-growing consumer application in history – only five days after its launch in November 2022, the AI chatbot had hit one million users. To put this in perspective, it took Instagram around two and a half months to reach this mark. By now, the AI chatbot has an estimated 200 million users and its website is visited about as often as that of online giant Amazon. The social and environmental impact of this rapid development is the topic of our latest Zukunftswissen.fm podcast episode: Catherine Miller, Director of the European AI & Society Fund, and Dr. Holger Berg, Vice-Director of the Circular Economy Research Division and Co-Head of the Digital Transformation Research Unit at the Wuppertal Institute, discuss the resource and energy consumption of AI models, the working conditions involved in their training, all the way to critical areas of application such as calculating the length of prison sentences or credit allocation. Given the tremendous pace in the field of AI tools, the discussion between the two experts can of course only be a momentary snapshot. But, dear readers, you can rest assured: Whether it's about the power consumption of AI models, their social impact or the deployment of AI tools for climate protection purposes: We'll stay on the topic!
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