'Terrible' AI has given tech an existential headache: Sage Lenier

She has said students like her were sick of the kind of climate education that offered no hope—she wanted to focus on the solutions not just the problems.

Hundreds joined the course at Berkeley over the years and eventually hundreds more online, and Lenier has since built a nonprofit around it and now hopes to launch a documentary series.

The California native, who now lives in New York, said she was largely positive about tech.

But her climate focus makes her an outsider at the Web Summit—"I'll keep coming if they want me to shout at them," she said.

Last year, she told the crowd: "Some of you could be considered directly responsible for architecting the ecological crisis."

She implored tech bosses to embrace the circular economy, which relies on reusing and recycling rather than creating products that end up being junked.

But one year on, Microsoft, Google and others have unleashed an endless stream of energy-gobbling AI products.

They have rushed to reopen nuclear plants, pledged to build many more data centres—and crashed through their climate targets.

Also read: The dos and don'ts of regulating AI

'Waste of emissions'

"It is terrible for the planet. It's terrible for every community that you're running data centres in. And it's useless. I think it's just a waste of emissions," she said.

She points out that it was not always this way in the tech sector.

"It was the only industry, at least in America, where for years and years they tried to portray themselves as clean, green and pro-future," she said.

"Bill Gates has written multiple books on climate change."