While artificial intelligence may seem to exist in a weightless digital cloud, it is actually deeply bound by the physical limits of our planet. Every time we ask an LLM a question, it consumes real-world resources like electricity, water, and copper, meaning humanity ultimately faces a finite “question budget”. New research from Qstar Capital’s Founder Alec Litowitz, Chicago Booth’s Nicholas Polson, and George Mason University’s Vadim Sokolov explores this fascinating concept. As frontier labs race toward improvement in their leading models, they confront two looming roadblocks—the hard physical constraints of global energy supplies and the digital threat of “model collapse,” where an AI’s understanding degrades over time. By looking ahead to the future, this research forces us to weigh the true cost of our curiosity and consider: in a world with limited resources, which questions are actually worth asking? Learn more about this fascinating problem in the link above: