Why I’m for AI
I build things with AI, and I’ve announced that I’ll be organising applied AI meetups in the North East, so I wanted to explain why I’m for it. These are my opinions as of now. I don’t know everything, and I’m sure some of it will change.
A lot of people worry about AI: the water and energy data centres use, the social side, AGI, and jobs being replaced. Some of that concern is fair, but I think the problems come from how people build and use the technology (including how data centres are built), rather than the creation of AI technology itself.
A single AI request uses little energy. You don’t need large models for everything - you can design architectures where systems of small classifiers or micro models handle many tasks and only the hard tasks reach the energy-inefficient ones. What you build matters too, because developers make many choices: which model to use, what they will and won’t build, and which servers they run on and where, since some places have cleaner power and aren’t short of water. Streaming video uses a lot of energy too, and we watch it for hours without thinking twice.
To me, AI is a tool, a bit like a car. It gets you places, but it can do real harm, and we deal with that through rules and regulations, more efficient engines and electric cars, without banning cars. AI used carefully, ethically and sustainably will be useful. You can build AI that replaces people or AI that empowers them, and the question is which kind we build.
I also think people misjudge how good LLMs are. I work with them every day, and the technology is still pretty raw. It breaks often, and once the context window fills up it stops being smart.
I don’t think LLMs will lead to superintelligence or AGI any time soon. They’re probabilistic: they predict what’s likely, not what’s guaranteed to be right. Real work needs results you can trust, and with LLMs that’s hard without a human in the loop. Other approaches, like world models, may get further. Most AGI talk is hype and marketing, because everyone wants to profit from it. Like smartphones, it’s a big change, but not everything.
For me it’s also personal. My dad was paralysed for many years, and I always used AI to double-check what the doctors told us (or didn’t), because doctors in Kazakhstan are tired, have too many patients and make mistakes. Without AI I don’t know what we’d have done. I come from a developing country, where good education and specialists aren’t available to everyone, and I think that’s where AI matters most, because it can help people become self-reliant.
We need more good people on the inside, because you don’t change things by wanting to tear everything down. If people who care about ethics and the environment walk away, the technology doesn’t stop. It just gets built by people who only care about profit. I’d rather there were more people in the room with good values, practical ones too, who are realistic about what it can and can’t do.