I work as a sysadmin at an academic HPC center, and some projects we support use AI for real causes like marine life and water health, and other ecosystem relat

I work as a sysadmin at an academic HPC center, and some projects we support use AI for real causes like marine life and water health, and other ecosystem related work. These are production systems which provide real benefits and returns to humanity, and tries to secure our and other species future and on this planet. When compared to these projects, an LLM is just a shiny toy which can do many tasks with worse quality, with no guarantee of correctness and with much higher energy usage. Other numbers I gave is fresh from our data center, about the systems I work with directly. You can dismiss all my comment just because I call a big, energy wasting NN a toy, but nothing I say on this comment is wrong, and I’m reporting them from the trenches directly. > DC colocating near new and existing plants along with large inflows of investment into generators. You can get tons of servers in six weeks, install them in two days, and get them running in a day, tops (for us it’s shorter). If you can get your generators manufactured and delivered to your location in a year, you’re lucky.