How AI will remake the rules of international trade
When it comes to international trade and investment, AI will create some obvious winners and losers. It's the second-order effects that may prove more interesting.
To understand those, start with two premises: First, AI services will consume a lot of energy, not all of which will be green. Second, many nations will regulate either the use of AI, or the implementation of AI-derived goods and services, for instance the creation of new pharmaceuticals or new educational techniques.
Posting a query to ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy, by one estimate 10 times more than a Google search. Currently large language models are sufficiently limited that this is not a major factor in aggregate energy consumption. But as use of AI services increases, the energy burden will rise. Countries with expensive energy, or which will not allow energy consumption to rise much for climate or regulatory reasons, will look to import their AI services from energy-rich countries.
In the future, energy-rich regions may include Spain and Morocco with solar power, South Korea with affordable nuclear power, and whichever nations are pioneers in nuclear fusion. Those nations may end up as major exporters of AI-generated data. They might draw their AI inputs from the US, but specialize in cheap calculation and information transmission. And some regions of America may join this list as well, especially if they are well-suited for solar and hydroelectric power.
To be clear, the US will export a lot of AI services, through such companies as OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic. But the US is not as good at building affordable infrastructure, and that will put it at a disadvantage in the AI revolution and distribute many of the gains abroad.
It remains to be seen
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
