The Biggest Energy Miscalculation of 2024 by Global Leaders – Artificial Intelligence

It’s generally accepted that the launch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) occurred at Dartmouth College in a 1956 AI workshop that brought together leading thinkers in computer science, and information theory to map out future paths for investigation. Workshop participants John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined the term “artificial intelligence” in a proposal that they wrote for that conference. It started AI as a field of study with John McCarthy generally considered as the father of AI.

AI was developed through the 1960s but in the 1970s-1980s, a period generally referred to as “the AI Winter”, development was stalled by a focus on the limitations of neural networks. In the late 1980s, advancements resumed with the emergence of connectionism and neural networks. The 1990s-2000s are considered to be the beginning of the AI/ Machine Learning Renaissance. In the 2010s, further growth was spurred by the expansion of Big Data and deep learning, computer power and large-scale data sets. In 2022 an AI venture capital frenzy took off (the “AI frenzy”), and AI plunged into the mainstream in 2023 according to Forbes which was already tracking applications of AI across various industries.

By early 2024, the implementation of AI across industries was well underway- in healthcare, finance, creative fields and business. In the energy industry, digitalization conferences were addressing digital transformation in the North American oil & gas industry with speakers and attendees from E&P majors, midstream, pipeline, LNG companies and more as well as multiple AI application providers and the companies speaking and attending already had AI implementations well underway.

So how did global leaders not perceive the sudden and rapid rise of AI and the power commitments it requires?

How has the 2022 “AI frenzy” of investment and subsequent industrial adoption been off the radar of global policymakers until just recently? Venture capital is widely recognized as a driver of innovation and new company formation and leaders should have foreseen the surge of AI improvement and implementation by “following the money” so to speak. Perhaps the incessant focus of “blaming and shaming” industry for climate change blinded leaders to the rapid escalation of AI development that was signaled by the 2022 AI frenzy

Just as an example of lack of foresight, in Canada, the grossly delayed 2024 Fall Economic Statement had a last-minute insertion of “up to $15 billion in aggregate loan and equity investments for AI data center projects”. This policy afterthought is 2 years behind the onset of the AI frenzy and 12+ months behind the industrial adoption of AI. In addition, the Trudeau/Guilbeault partnership is still miscalculating the enormous AI power requirements.

As an example of the size of the power requirements of AI, one can look at the Wonder Valley project- the world’s largest AI data center industrial park in the Greenview industrial gateway near Grande Prairie Alberta. It is planned to “generate and offer 7.5 GW of low-cost power to hyperscalers over the next 5-10 years.” The cost of just this one project is well beyond the funding offered in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement.

“We will engineer and build a redundant power solution that meets the modern AI compute reliability standard,” said Kevin O’Leary, Chairman of O’Leary Ventures. “The first phase of 1.4 GW will be approximately US$ 2 billion with subsequent annual rollout of redundant power in 1 GW increments. The total investment over the lifetime of the project will be over $70 billion.”

To further explore the huge power requirements of AI, one can look at the comparison of individual AI queries/searches vs traditional non-AI queries. As reported by Bloomberg, “Researchers have estimated that a single ChatGPT query requires almost 10 times as much electricity to process as a traditional Google search.” Multiply this electricity demand by the millions of industrial users as industrial AI implementation continues to expand worldwide. As in the same Bloomberg article- “By 2034, annual global energy consumption by data centers is expected to top 1,580 terawatt-hours—about as much as is used by all of India—from about 500 today.”

This is the exponential demand for electricity that North American & global leaders did not see coming – a 24/7 demand that cannot be satisfied by unreliable and costly green energy projects – it requires an “all energies” approach. Exponential AI demand threatens to gobble up supply and dramatically increase electricity prices for consumers. Likewise, leadership does not perceive that North American grids are vulnerable and outdated and would be unable to deliver reliable supply for AI data centers that cannot be exposed to even a few seconds of power outage. Grid interconnections are unreliable as mentioned in the following excerpt from a September 2024 article in cleanenergygrid.org.

“Our grid, for all of its faults, is now a single interconnected “machine” over a few very large regions of the country. Equipment failures in Arizona can shut the lights out in California, just as overloaded lines in Ohio blacked out 55 million people in eight states from Michigan to Boston – and the Canadian province of Ontario – in 2003.”

AI’s power demands are motivating tech companies to develop more efficient means of developing AI. Along with pressure to keep fossil fuels in the mix, billions are being invested in alternative energy solutions like nuclear power produced by Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs).

Despite SMR optimism, the reality is that no European or North American SMRs are in operation yet. Only Russia & China have SMRs in operation and most data centers are focusing on affordable natural gas power as the reality sets in that nuclear energy cannot scale quickly enough to meet urgent electricity needs. New SMR plants could be built and operational possibly by 2034, but for 2025 Canada’s power grid is already strained, with electricity demand to grow significantly, driven by electric vehicles and data centers for AI applications.

AI has a huge appetite for other resources as well. For example, the most energy and cost-efficient ways to chill the air in data centers rely on huge quantities of potable water and the exponential amount of data AI produces will require dramatic increases in internet networks as well as demand for computer chips and the metals that they require. There is also an intense talent shortage creating AI recruitment competitions for the talent pool of individuals trained by companies like Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI.

AI development is now challenging the public focus on climate change. In Canada as well as in the U.S. and globally, left-leaning elected officials who focused keenly on policies to advance the elimination of fossil fuels were oblivious to the tsunami of AI energy demand about to swamp their boats. Canadian Member of Parliament Greg McLean, who has served on the House of Commons Standing Committees of Environment, Natural Resources, and Finance, and as the Natural Resources critic for His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, has insight into the reason for the change in focus.

“Education about the role of all forms of energy in technology development and use has led to the logical erosion of the ‘rapid energy transition’ mantra and a practical questioning of the intents of some of its acolytes. The virtuous circle of technological development demanding more energy, and then delivering solutions for society that require less energy for defined tasks, could not be accomplished without the most critical input – more energy. This has been a five-year journey, swimming against the current — and sometimes people need to see the harm we are doing in order to objectively ask themselves ‘What are we accomplishing?’ … ‘What choices are being made, and why?’…. and ‘Am I getting the full picture presentation or just the part someone wants me to focus on?’”

With the election of Donald Trump, the “Trump Transition” now competes with the “Energy Transition” focus, changing the narrative in the U.S. to energy dominance. For example, as reported by Reuters, the U.S. solar industry is now downplaying climate change messaging.

“The U.S. solar industry unveiled its lobbying strategy for the incoming Trump administration, promoting itself as a domestic jobs engine that can help meet soaring power demand, without referencing its role in combating climate change.”

It’s important to note here that the future of AI is increasingly subject to societal considerations as well as technological advancements. Political, ethical, legal, and social frameworks will increasingly impact AI’s development, enabling or limiting its implementations. Since AI applications involve “human teaming” to curate and train AI tools, perceptions of the intent of AI implementations are key. In the rush to implementation, employees at many companies are experiencing changing roles with increased demand for workers to train AI tools and curate results. Will tech optimism be blunted by the weight of extra tasks placed on workers and by suspicions that those workers may ultimately be replaced? Will resistance develop as humans and AI are required to work together more closely?

Business analyst Professor Henrik von Scheel of the Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business describes the importance of the human factor in AI adoption.

“It’s people who have to manage the evolving environment through these new tools,” von Scheel explains. “It’s been this way ever since the first caveperson shaped a flint, only now the tools are emerging from the fusion of the digital, physical and virtual worlds into cyber-physical systems.”

A conversation with a recent graduate who questioned the implementation of AI including the design of guardrails and regulations by members of an older generation in management made me wonder…Is there a generational conflict brewing from the lack of trust between the large proportion of baby boomers in the workforce- predominantly in management- and the younger generation in the workforce that may not have confidence in the ability of mature management to fully understand and embrace AI tech and influence informed decisions to regulate it?

It’s something to watch in 2025.

Maureen McCall is an energy professional who writes on issues affecting the energy industry.

Related Topics:#EnergyNow.CA ArtificialIntelligenceEnergy EnergyMiscalculation feature MaureenMcCall

Up Next

Top 10 good news stories about Canadian energy in 2024

Don't Miss

International Energy Agency should go on Trump’s Chopping Block

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Mexican drug cartels order suicide drone strikes against U.S. Border Patrol: report

International / 19 mins ago

Trump shuts down USAID HQ as Elon Musk calls it a “criminal organization”

Alberta / 4 hours ago

Trudeau “Played Doctor” With Children

Artificial Intelligence

Everyone is freaking out over DeepSeek. Here’s why

Published on January 28, 2025

Todayville

From The Deep View

$600 billion collapse

Volatility is kind of a given when it comes to Wall Street’s tech sector. It doesn’t take much to send things soaring; it likewise doesn’t take much to set off a downward spiral.

After months of soaring, Monday marked the possible beginning of a spiral, and a Chinese company seems to be at the center of it.

Alright, what’s going on: A week ago, Chinese tech firm DeepSeek launched R1, a so-called reasoning model, that, according to DeepSeek, has reached technical parity with OpenAI’s o1 across a few benchmarks. But, unlike its American competition, DeepSeek open-sourced R1 under an MIT license, making it significantly cheaper and more accessible than any of the closed models coming from U.S. tech giants.

But the real punchline here doesn’t have to do with R1 at all, but with a previous language model — called V3 — that DeepSeek released in December. DeepSeek was reportedly able to train V3 using a small collection of older Nvidia chips (about 2,000 H800s) at a cost of about $5.6 million.
Still, training is only one cost of many tied to AI development/deployment; while the costs associated with researching, developing, training and operating both R1 and V3 remain either unknown or unconfirmed, DeepSeek’s apparent ability to reach technical parity at a far reduced cost, without state-of-the-art GPU chips or massive GPU clusters, has a lot of implications for America’s now tenuous position in AI leadership. (Though DeepSeek says it is open-sourced, the company did not release its training data).

Since the release of R1, DeepSeek has become the top free app in Apple’s App Store, bumping ChatGPT to the number two slot. In the midst of its spiking popularity, DeepSeek restricted new sign-ups due to large-scale cyberattacks against its servers. And, as Salesforce Chief Marc Benioff noted, “no Nvidia supercomputers or $100M needed,” a point that the market heard loud and clear.

What happened: Led by Nvidia, a series of tech and chip stocks, in addition to the three major stock indices, fell hard in pre-market trading early Monday morning. All told, $1.1 trillion of U.S. market cap was erased within a half hour of the opening bell.

Performance didn’t get better throughout the day. Nvidia closed Monday down 17%, erasing some $600 billion in market capitalization, a Wall Street record. TSMC was down 14%, Arm was down 11%, Broadcom was down 17%, Google was down 4% and Microsoft was down 2%. The S&P fell 1.4% and the Nasdaq fell 3.3%. An Nvidia spokesperson called R1 an “excellent AI advancement.”
This is all going into a week of Big Tech earnings, where Microsoft and Meta will be held to account for the billions of dollars ($80 billion and $65 billion, respectively) they plan to spend on AI infrastructure in 2025, a cost that Wall Street no longer seems to feel quite so good about.

It’s hard to miss the political tensions underlying all of this. The tail end of former President Joe Biden’s time in office was marked in part by an increasingly tense trade war with China, wherein both countries issued bans on the export of materials needed to build advanced AI chips. And with President Trump hell-bent on maintaining American leadership in AI, and despite the chip restrictions that are in place, Chinese companies seem to be turning hardware challenges into a motivation for innovation that challenges the American lead, something they seem keen to drive home.

R1, for instance, was announced at around the same time as OpenAI’s $500 billion Project Stargate, two impactfully divergent approaches.

What’s happening here is that the market has finally come around to the idea that maybe the cost of AI development (hundreds of billions of dollars annually) is too high, a recognition “that the winners in AI will be the most innovative companies, not just those with the most GPUs,” according to Writer CTA Waseem Alshikh. “Brute-forcing AI with GPUs is no longer a viable strategy.”

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, however, thinks this is just a good time to buy into Nvidia — Nvidia and the rest are building infrastructure that, he argues, China will not be able to compete with in the long run. “Launching a competitive LLM model for consumer use cases is one thing,” Ives wrote. “Launching broader AI infrastructure is a whole other ballgame.”

“I view cost reduction as a good thing. I’m of the belief that if you’re freeing up compute capacity, it likely gets absorbed — we’re going to need innovations like this,” Bernstein semiconductor analyst Stacy Rasgon told Yahoo Finance. “I understand why all the panic is going on. I don’t think DeepSeek is doomsday for AI infrastructure.”

Somewhat relatedly, Perplexity has already added DeepSeek’s R1 model to its AI search engine. And DeepSeek on Monday launched another model, one capable of competitive image generation.

Last week, I said that R1 should be enough to make OpenAI a little nervous. This anxiety spread way quicker than I anticipated; DeepSeek spent Monday dominating headlines at every publication I came across, setting off a debate and panic that has spread far beyond the tech and AI community.

Some are concerned about the national security implications of China’s AI capabilities. Some are concerned about the AI trade. Granted, there are more unknowns here than knowns; we do not know the details of DeepSeek’s costs or technical setup (and the costs are likely way higher than they seem). But this does read like a turning point in the AI race.

In January, we talked about reversion to the mean. Right now, it’s too early to tell how long-term the market impacts of DeepSeek will be. But, if Nvidia and the rest fall hard and stay down — or drop lower — through earnings season, one might argue that the bubble has begun to burst. As a part of this, watch model pricing closely; OpenAI may well be forced to bring down the costs of its models to remain competitive.

At the very least, DeepSeek appears to be evidence that scaling is one, not a law, and two, not the only (or best) way to develop more advanced AI models, something that rains heavily on OpenAI and co.’s parade since it runs contrary to everything OpenAI’s been saying for months. Funnily, it actually seems like good news for the science of AI, possibly lighting a path toward systems that are less resource-intensive (which is much needed!)

It’s yet another example of the science and the business of AI not being on the same page.

Artificial Intelligence

World Economic Forum pushes digital globalism that would merge the ‘online and offline’

Published on January 27, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

If we do not limit the freedom of reach of AI now, we will have neither liberty nor security. The digital world is already here. Who will watch whom, and according to whose rules? With the World Economic Forum, you get policed by liberal extremists.

The real-world influence of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is certainly waning – which may explain a fresh report of its push towards digital globalism.

A white paper published by the WEF last November is a roadmap for a transition from the real to the virtual world. This transition is not only about methods of governing, of course.

It means the mass migration of humanity into a virtual world.

As the document says, the World Economic Forum is calling for “global collaboration” to “redefine the norms” of a future digital state, which it calls “the metaverse.”

Merging online and offline

Titled “Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet,” this agenda presumes a borderless reality for humans in which “online and offline” are merged.

As usual, there is a disturbing method in the diabolical madness of the WEF. Saying that the required technology has already arrived, it urges “aligning global standards and policies of internet governance” to moderate our increasingly digital lives.

Yet this is not about policing online speech. It is about ruling the new “blended reality.”

Mentioning mobile phones, virtual reality and the refinement of artificial intelligence in predicting and reproducing human activity, the WEF report states: “These technologies are blurring the line between online and offline lives, creating new challenges and opportunities … that require a coordinated approach from stakeholders for effective governance.”

Stakes and their holders

Yet the people holding the stakes in this online and offline game of life are not only globalists like Schwab and Soros. The vampire hunters of populism are all strong critics of globalism – the replacement of all nation states with a single world government.

It would seem that the WEF’s dream of digital globalism may be terminally interrupted by the new software running through the machinery of power.

Yet digital globalism is not the only game in town.

Amidst the welcome relief and tremendous hope sparked in the West by Trump’s “Common Sense Revolution,” there is a devil in the details of the death of the liberal order.

The algorithm of power is not going anywhere. It is here, now, and it is simply a question of how far it goes.

Digital globalism, or national digitalism?

Digital globalism may simply be swapped for national digitalism – government by algorithm in one country. Its values are not liberal, which is a change. Yet neither are the values of China, where a form of digitalism has been long established.

It is worthwhile taking a look at the community whose guidelines may rule your “online and offline” life in the absence of those of the globalists.

Here is an announcement from one globalist “datagarch,” Oracle’s Larry Ellison, one of the billionaires whose monopoly of your data enriched their lives at the expense of the capture of yours. Ellison says “citizens will be on their best behavior” with an all-pervasive AI surveillance system.

Oracle’s founder CEO has said a government powered by AI could make everyone safer – because everyone would be under permanent surveillance. Comforting, isn’t it?

Ellison was named after his place of arrival in the U.S. – Ellis Island. In 2017 he donated $16 million to the Israeli army, calling Israel “our home.”

Wikipedia states, “As of January 20, 2025, he is the fourth-wealthiest person in the world, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated net worth of US$188 billion, and the second wealthiest in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated net worth of $237 billion.”

In 2021, he offered Benjamin Netanyahu a “lucrative position on the board of Oracle.” That seems to partly help understand why Netanyahu, with such friends in very high places, has such an extraordinary influence on almost every single member of the U.S. Congress and Senate.

Ellison’s Oracle was named after a database he created for the CIA, in his first major programming project. In fact, “the CIA made Larry Ellison a billionaire,” as Business Insider reported.

What kind of values inspire his vision of digital governance? His biography supplies one answer:

“Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.”

Israel has a massive, lucrative, military-industrial complex and related software industry as revealed in “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exported its occupation to the world“ by Antony Loewenstein, one of many Israeli Jews who have become highly critical of the surveillance industry.

Israel’s “innovation” includes the use of predictive AI to identify, target and kill people, and systems like Pegasus – which can enter literally any phone or computer undetected and read everything. It is an astonishingly powerful program that sells for a high price and earns Israel a lot of income.

The company which makes the “no click spyware” Pegasus is called NSO. This Israeli company was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2021 to prevent its undetectable intrusion into phones and computers being used on Americans by any company, or agency, which buys it.

On January 10, an Israeli report said that Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal could see these sanctions lifted.

Do you buy the idea that this will make you safe? Do you think AI will be effective? Ellison thinks so. He says AI can produce “new mRNA vaccines in 48 hours to cure cancer.”

Do you want to live in his world?

Buyer beware

Buyer – beware. The algorithm of digital power is here, and it is powered by data mined from your life.

People like Oracle’s Ellison, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin are all data miners. So is X’s Elon Musk – who is the only one of the data oligarchs warning you that AI needs to be controlled by humans – and not the other way around.

Two forms of digital tyranny

So what are the dangers? Under the “metaverse” proposed by the WEF, your life can be partnered with a “digital twin.”

This is the symbiotic merger of human with machine presented as the vision of our future by Klaus Schwab and the digital globalists.

Of course, your online life can be suspended or even ended if you violate the community guidelines. These rules are not written by people who agree with you.

Some people you may agree with are proposing quite the reverse. Under the algorithm of the “national digigarchy” – you will be watched, recorded, filed, and assessed for the potential commission of future crimes. You will be free to say what you like online, but depending on what you say, maybe only the algorithm will see you.

And what it sees it will never forget.

Limiting the reach of AI

If we do not limit the freedom of reach of artificial intelligence now, we will have neither liberty nor security.

The digital world is already here. Who will watch whom, and according to whose rules? With the World Economic Forum, you get policed by liberal extremists. You will be free to agree with Net Zero, degeneracy, denationalization, and a diet of meat-like treats supplied to the wipe-clean mausoleum in which you will cleanly and efficiently live.

Yet the alternative emerging also says that the rule of machines will make everything safe and effective.

Safe and effective AI?

Alex Karp sells his all-seeing Palantir as the only guarantee of public safety. He also says your secrets are safe with him – because he is “a deviant” who might like to take drugs or have an affair.

After years of crisis manufactured by policy, and with the West sick of liberal insanity, this moment of tremendous relief contains a serious threat. More people than ever have the number of the globalists, and it is not a number most faithful Christians would want to call.

People generally have seen what the WEF is selling, and they are not buying it. The danger presented by the likes of Schwab is now out in the open, shouting the quiet part out loud.

As liberal-globalist bureaucracies like these become more isolated in the Trump Revolution, they will fight for their lives. In doing so, they are displaying their true intentions. This is the only thing they can do to survive.

Everyone will see what is really on offer, few will want this devil’s bargain, and so the business model will go bust.

Yet this is not the only dangerous game being played with your life.

Beware the specter at the feast

The data miners whose programs refine the algorithm of power are selling you a new digital reality. They are telling you that it will make you safe – because everyone will be watched, forever, by machines which have no values and no heart at all, whether liberal or otherwise.

If we are not watching out, no one will notice that the new algorithm of digital power has simply been limited to the West.

In Shakespeare’s play it was the guilty man, Macbeth, who saw the specter at the feast he held for his coronation.

The ghost in the machine is not dead. The danger is that the innocent may not see it or may foolishly not want to see it. Yet it sees you. This is the algorithm of power, and for now – but not for long – we still have the power to say who it watches – and where.