AI's Power Surge

The machines are hungry. Latin America's power grid isn't ready.

LatAm Prompt tracks what Latin America is doing in AI — and what AI is doing in Latin America.

AI’s Power Surge: When Intelligence Demands Energy

• Artificial Intelligence will consume 5% of electricity in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2035, according to a report by Latin American Energy Organization (OLADE).

• That’s over 120 terawatt-hours annually, more than the total electricity Chile produces in a year.

• The region’s 455 AI data centers already account for 1.6% of the region’s energy use.

• Globally, the IEA forecasts that data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, reaching 945 TWh — slightly more than Japan’s total energy use today.

Why it matters:

• Latin America is already struggling with fragile grids, frequent outages, and deep energy inequality. Power-hungry AI systems to threatens to widen the gap between those plugged in to the future and those left in the dark.

• How can Latin America expand its digital future without overloading its physical one?

What they’re saying

• “The advancement of AI could exacerbate inequalities in access to resources and contribute to environmental degradation,” AI and automation expert Belén Ortega told Argentina’s La Nación (La otra cara de la IA: el impacto ambiental que crece mientras la tecnología avanza)

• Brazil’s Folha held this discussion of AI’s use of natural resources (Como a IA impacta os usos de água e energia?)

Can AI Clean Up After Itself?

• But AI can also have a positive environmental impact on Latin America

  • Uruguay’s Universidad Tecnológica is using AI to prevent disasters and improve disaster response management (Incendios forestales: UTEC desarrolla sistema basado en IA para prevenir desastres y acelerar respuesta)

  • Two Chilean universities are developing a tool to predict floods and their risks to communities and infrastructure. (Realizan innovador proyecto que predice crecidas de caudales con inteligencia artificial)

  • Mexican farmers are using AI tools to reduce water consumption (Mexico IA combate la escasez de agua en la agricultura mexicana)

• AI’s potential to conserve energy, boost food production, and improve disaster response strengthens the case that it could be an environmental net positive for the region.

Macro Prompt

AI’s Other Scarcity Problem: Meaning

• AI is getting bigger without getting smarter. Despite ever-larger models, researchers are confronting a ceiling: large language models like GPT-4 still struggle with logic, abstraction, and common sense.

  • The brute-force approach to intelligence - feeding more and more data to LLMs so that they can create more sophisticated statistical combinations of words - is not a proxy for teaching the machines to reason.

  • But OpenAI’s new “reasoning models” hallucinate more often than prior models - and OpenAI doesn’t really know why, according to TechCrunch.

Being Nothingness: This non-existent philosopher is no AI hallucination

• Hong Kong philosopher Jianwie Xun's books Hypnocracy - Trump, Musk and the new Architecture of Reality describes how social media and AI create a system of social control that manipulates perception and induces of collective trance states.

  • Jianwie however, does not exist. The book was written by Italian scholar Andrea Colamedici - listed as the translator - who invented Jianwie whole cloth to highlight the risks of AI creating its own reality and to release a text "explains a theory and embodies it at the same time."

  • Existential innovation? Performative philosophy? Publicity stunt? What’s your take?

LOL Prompt - AI memes in LatAm

• Pope Francis watching Jesus turn water into wine in heaven got lots of eyeballs (and some complaints) https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8jcgFkt/

• “When the genie confuses your wish” - AI images of a genie confusing the request

  • “Yo con un gran físico” I want to have a great body —> I want to be with a greater physicist (this one gets pretty low brow)