I'm worried about that in particular because when I started using AI I often felt I wanted to say something nice to it, like just "thanks" after I got someting working with its help. But then I started thinking I'm crazy, that's a waste of typing, what does it matter if I tell AI "thanks" or not.

So I don't thank AI any more, do you?

But that means we get used to this style of conversation and soon enough we don't tell humans thanks either. We dont' put in the energy to lubricate our social interactions. I'm worried that interacting with AI will make us all rude.

Check out the OLMo family from the Allen Institute for AI: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3

Also worth looking at EleutherAI, LLM360, SmolLM, Apertus. Apterus even respects opt-out notices in their collection of the dataset they distribute. KL3M from Kelvin Legal is even trained on a 100% copyright-free legal/governmental corpus.

>23% of Ireland's power is going to data centers

This isn't even a rounding error in terms of global energy usage. Besides, renewable energy is cheaper than non-renewable energy now. Energy demand itself directly drives the deployment of renewable energy. Needing more electricity in a capitalist country literally causes the energy mix to become more green over time.

>And I'm also not aware of anyone working on these models trying to reduce the social damage they are going to do.

Is it fair to account for the social damage without accounting for the social good, like the unprecedented democratization not just of mere information, but knowledge and understanding itself, around the world? Think about how many deaths will be avoided, how many billions or trillions of years of human life will be gained over time, all of the people that gain access to a personalized, individually tailored tutor for any subject on earth, all of the medical and legal advances, etc.