Now that big companies and rich investors saw the potential for profit in AI the paradigm has shifted to “throw more compute at the wall until something sticks”, so it’s not surprising it’s affecting carbon emissions.
Besides that it’s also annoying that most of the time they keep their AIs behind closed doors, and even in the few cases where the weights are released publicly these models are so big that they aren’t usable for the vast majority of people, as sometimes even Kaggle can’t handle them.