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Huge Minute-by-Minute Impact of Never-Sleeping AI: 'Nothing Is Free'

• By David Ramel
• 07/23/2024

AI never sleeps. In the time it takes you to read the opening few sentences of this article, some $293,000 will have been spent on AI work worldwide.

That's just one of the data points rounded up by cloud-based data/BI specialist Domo in a new report that shows the massive impact of AI on the world on a minute-by-minute basis.

The company, known for its series of Data Never Sleeps (DNS) infographics, focused on the proliferation of AI in its latest effort.

Company exec Ben Schein said this special AI edition provides a glimpse into just how much volume the world is seeing in the current AI boom. "When ChatGPT brought LLMs into the spotlight, it opened everyone's eyes to just how impactful AI can be," he said in a July 23 news release. "We've seen a flood of AI applications emerge as a result. Domo has reported on data volumes for over a decade and the way AI has impacted data creation rivals that of the early days of social media platforms."

Here are all those data volumes wrapped up in a minute-by-minute snapshot:

'The Price We Pay'
One of the highlights of the report reflects the price of all the AI computation and other associated work.

"Nothing is free, especially when it comes to technology, where $293K is spent on AI every minute," Domo said. "In addition to the monetary expenses, up to 185 gallons of water are used to cool down the heat generated from ChatGPT supercomputer's computational power."

Other highlights of the report as presented by the company include:

• Automation Domination: Moving beyond conversational use cases, users are increasingly using LLMs to design, drive and more. Every minute, Dall-E 2 generates 1,389 images and 19,028 are created by other text-to-image platforms, while 7,431 minutes of AI-generated video are created. Worldwide today, 35 new cars with hands-free automation are sold each minute.
• Pros and Cons of AI: While AI is incredibly beneficial for many scenarios, other applications are not so noble. Every minute, employees save 467,882 hours of work using ChatGPT. However, some are taking advantage of its writing capabilities for schoolwork, with 52 college papers flagged for AI plagiarism on Turnitin every minute.

The company didn't indicate how or when the data was collected.