While California burns, a scientist from the world’s biggest artificial intelligence chipmaker is suggesting that AI could help fight the wildfires — even though the technology has already begun degrading the environment, and is slated to do much more. In a post on X-formerly-Twitter featuring a video of a humanoid robot walking down a street in China, Nvidia “embodied AI” researcher Jim Fan suggested, after complimenting the bot’s “swag,” that such machines need “to go fire-fighting asap!” I've verified from reliable sources. New visual Turing Test: this is a real robot demo! The controller is a neural net trained in Isaac simulator using reinforcement learning and then sim2real. Reward engineering is all you need. Walking gait's got swag but we need these robots… https://t.co/fwAjLPd51g pic.twitter.com/w3CxFKoRNy — Jim Fan (@DrJimFan) January 9, 2025 Unfortunately, that tone-deaf suggestion isn’t the only Nvidia blunder that occurred during this week’s fires in Los Angeles. As the gaming site Aftermath notes, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show took place in Las Vegas, a five-hour drive away from the wildfire-stricken city of angels. At the convention, the chipmaker showcased some really stupid generative AI gambits like its “Neural Faces” tech, which purports to “cross the uncanny valley” by changing video game characters’ faces — all while eating up a ton of carbon-emission-causing electricity and water, both intrinsically linked to the devastation in LA. It’d be one thing if LA weren’t literally on fire. But for the company to boast about energy-intensive crap that nobody wants while people…While AI Causes Climate Change, Nvidia Scientist Proposes AI-Powered Firefighting Robots