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How to feed all the power-hungry AI data centers
- pmcf 3y agoTBH I was expecting something about plugging humans into a huge bioenergy farm and letting them live out their lives in a simulation.
- ponorin 3y agoi have a crazy idea... how about... not focusing on ever increasing the size of ai models, so that we don't need to build all those power-hungry ai training datacenters? just a thought
- CuriouslyC 3y agoEven if the models aren't gargantuan, millions of people using AI applications is going to burn a lot of power.
- amelius 3y agoThis only makes their argument stronger.
- flextheruler 3y agoI still haven’t seen a use case that will make AI adopted by the masses I think it’s still mostly hot air. It’s good for what it is for office jobs and higher education, but only for specific tasks and it has to be triple checked. Just yesterday at work I asked it for a Powershell script to upload a local file to S3 and it hallucinated a method. The whole script is like 10 lines. How could it mess that up, but meanwhile it’s about to change the world and be mass adopted? This is Claude 3 the best model for coding… After using these models for awhile I think they’re really helpful to get off the ground in terms of coding and writing and to help review coding and writing, but that’s about all I’ve seen so far. It feels like we’re also getting diminishing returns with the current paradigm so we’ll see if I’ll be eating my hat next year, but I really don’t see mass adoption like a search engine.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI've had GPT4 produce quite a bit of useful code, and it's indispensable when working with new libraries or in new domains.
- parpfish 3y agoEven if every dev in the world adopted an LLM copilot, that’s a teeny tiny sliver of “the masses”.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoExcept that LLMs are going to eat into everything white collar. Law, medicine, writing, common office tasks, etc. Beyond that, a function calling chat interface enables a class of application that couldn't exist without it.
- bongodongobob 3y agoI use ChatGPT4 daily for powershell scripts. The only time it seems to hallucinate is when I'm forcing it to use 4.0 rather than 5.1 or 7.
- GaggiX 3y agoHas AI not already been adopted by the masses?
- parpfish 3y agoAbsolutely not. I’d wager that a slim majority of Americans have heard of chatGPT, much less have used it, and even fewer have done something useful/productive with it. Here are stats from 6 months ago, I doubt it’s changed significantly since then: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-americans-havent-used-chatgpt-few-think-it-will-have-a-major-impact-on-their-job/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-amer...
- GaggiX 3y ago
- infecto 3y agoIt’s always interesting to see these ideas on a tech forum. Should we as humanity stop right here? Draw a line in the sand and not do anything new? Maybe we should move backwards, skipping the Industrial Revolution and go back to each individual growing their own food? This is a serious question. What do you propose? Because you are not able to pick and choose what humanity tries out, so shall we stop entirely?
- amelius 3y ago> Should we as humanity stop right here? Draw a line in the sand and not do anything new? There will be a point when the answer is "yes". For example, when we can produce hobby 3d printers for biological viruses. Or DIY kits for nuclear weapons. Or cameras that are the size of a grain of sand and cost only 1 cent. Stuff that some individuals might want, but society will never be ready for.
- makerdiety 3y agoWhat people want is limited by their ability level. And there's no reason to ever be bullish on liberal (classical) society's capacity for intentional change. Human agency doesn't mean shit.
- korijn 3y agoWe should invent solutions for problems that we have, instead of wildly trying to apply this tech to everything we can think of. We are skipping the benefit/cost considerations.
- okr 3y agoIs AI not a solution for our problems? I can imagine a declining population, a younger generation, that does not want to reproduce, neither working off the available work. We need a solution for that. So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work. And for programmers: is sitting not the new cig smoking and drinking alcohol for early death?
- 3y ago
- smoldesu 3y agoBut then who would pay OpenAI to keep building bigg- I mean, smarter models?
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoThe problem is that massive amounts of PV is needed to replace existing fossil fuels, so these would be extending the carbon output of coal/natural gas. If AI training is being that power hungry, maybe we shouldn't be doing it ... right now. It's all fueled by speculative VC funding. This isn't a slam dunk economics calculation, certainly no more than regulation to shut this nonsense down would be.
- philipkglass 3y agoThat makes sense if PV deployment is limited by supply. But the solar industry is currently limited by demand. You can see it in market news for solar components: "Wafer prices stable-to-soft on market oversupply" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/15/wafer-prices-stable-to-soft-on-market-oversupply/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/15/wafer-prices-stable-t... "Wacker Chemie’s sales, earnings fall in tough market" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/30/wacker-chemies-sales-earnings-fall-in-tough-market/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/30/wacker-chemies-sales-... "China polysilicon prices fall 51.8% year-on-year amid supply glut" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/19/china-polysilicon-prices-fall-51-8-year-on-year-amid-supply-glut/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/19/china-polysilicon-pri... "China solar cell prices decline on sluggish downstream demand" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/05/china-solar-cell-prices-decline-on-sluggish-downstream-demand/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/05/china-solar-cell-pric...
- wffurr 3y agoI thought building new solar plants was cheaper than operating existing gas and coal plants. What’s hold up on building solar capacity as fast as we can, saturating demand? Permitting? Capital deployment in utility markets?
- PeterisP 3y agoIt's not a replacement for the cost of operating existing gas and coal plants; building up new solar capacity enables you to burn less gas or coal at the times when the sun is shining and thus cut its fuel costs, but it does not enable you to shut down the plant and cut any its other operating costs, because you still need the same capacity for e.g. winter evenings when at peak daily consumption there is zero sunlight.
- bitwize 3y agoThis might be why Bill Gates is invested so heavily into TerraPower.
- grecy 3y agoBill Gates has a $1B short position on Tesla. I wouldn't use what Bill Gates is investing in as any indicator of what we should be doing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoTesla has been on a steady [and IMHO rightful] decline since Jan 3, 2024.
- hnbad 3y agoI thought it's widely accepted that the Tesla stock price is heavily inflated relative to the company's actual performance and that Elon Musk is increasingly considered a liability as his vaporware marketing (e.g. the various blatantly misleading claims about the trajectory of FSD capabilities) was a major factor to the stock's growth in the past.
- grecy 3y agoI meant in terms of doing the right thing for the planet
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoThey're not doing that, either... the only reason you would drive a Tesla is performance. The environmental impact of making a full-EV is much more damaging than using a gas engine.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
- richrichie 3y agoSolar is no way close to being reliable, all weather and cheap source of energy that nuclear and fossil fuel can be, which are critical for the tech industry in general.
- bee_rider 3y agoThe actual workload in ML model training is totally deferrable. It ought to be very compatible with intermittent power, and actually great for the renewable grid. The two solutions for intermittence are: buy batteries or buy so many solar panels that you still get enough power even when they are operating at like 30% efficiency. A workload that will pay big bucks for any excess power you’ve got will provide the needed ROI for the latter solution. Unfortunately the chips are all to expensive so everybody wants to run them full-out all the time.
- dsr_ 3y agoIf your business model depends on a continuous growth curve where your profitability point is more than two years away... you may be planning for an exit in 18 months. The only reliable long term growth curves so far are world population and global average temperature.
- x86x87 3y agoCheck notes.... World population? We're in for a rude awakening.
- caminante 3y agoThis article is keyword stuffed nonsense. Take the first sentence. > As recently discussed on The Carbon Copy with Brian Janous, utilities are seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades, and almost entirely from data centers. Utilities aren't seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades. It isn't entirely from DCs. The author appears to have a startup, pitching a Power to NatGas plus direct air capture system because "Why not?™" [0]. I'm offended on behalf of chemical engineers everywhere. [0]https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-ter...
- Nonoyesnoyes 3y agoEasy: utility of AI is huge, load is understandable and controllable. DC are run by companies with a shitload of money. Not a hard problem. And we can use the heat to heat houses too!