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Using electricity is not inherently damaging to the environment. Very low cost and high power zero-carbon generation sources exist (hydro and nuclear). For scal
by saddlerustle 6y ago
Using electricity is not inherently damaging to the environment. Very low cost and high power zero-carbon generation sources exist (hydro and nuclear). For scale also keep in mind that all the datacenters in the world still use much less power than is used for smelting aluminium.
- jdietrich 6y agoAlso, processors turn electricity into heat - if you can find a useful way of harnessing that heat, the computation is practically free. Deep learning is fairly latency-insensitive and is almost never mission-critical, so it's not inconceivable to imagine that the boiler rooms of apartment buildings and office blocks could become mini-DCs.
- p1esk 6y agoAlso, once there are billions of value to be extracted, specialized chips will appear just to train those models (e.g. wafer scale analog processors, could easily be 3 orders of magnitude more efficient than GPUs/TPUs).
- fock 6y agooh wait, decentralized, publicly controlled infra. What was the cloud about exactly?