9 ms·
Stargate Norway
- atleastoptimal 1y agoI assume many who work at OpenAI have seen Pantheon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
- chrisfosterelli 1y agoThat was my first thought as well. Sounds like a cool name for a black site.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoHuh. I guess I'm old now, but my first thought was obviously the interstellar transportation device with a big honkin' rotary dial to select your destination. ᐰ
- ge96 1y agoGot my chevron locked
- Incipient 1y agoIndeed
- 0points 1y agoIn Norway, we call them Å.
- 290tra 1y agoStar riddle. (Stargåte)
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoA serpent guard, a Horus guard and a Setesh guard meet on a neutral planet. It is a tense moment. The serpent guard's eyes glow. The Horus guard's beak glistens. The Setesh guard's nose drips.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoI miss those Jaffa jokes.
- ge96 1y agoThis show had an interesting concept for copying a brain (lasering a brain off layer by layer like reverse 3D printing)
- agnishom 1y agoI assume people at OpenAI take inspiration from dystopian SciFi (like 'Her')
- derektank 1y agoI wouldn't characterize "Her" as dystopian at all. The future shown in the film is, quite frankly, probably in the top quintile of outcomes we can hope for when it comes to AI. The only truly horrifying thing it depicts is the return of high waisted pants in men's fashion
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI wouldn't call Her dystopian per se, as it's more an individual story instead of applying to a society as a whole. Dunno what a sequel would look like though. And also, it's no longer science fiction; there's people having relationships with chatbots which can easily be made to do voice transcription / synthesis, and r/characterai melts down whenever they have an outage.
- littlestymaar 1y agoThis isn't limited to OpenAI, Silicon Valley as a whole behaves like that (see Zuck wanting to make the metaverse a reality)
- milesrout 1y ago[dead]
- speedgoose 1y agoNorth Norwegians will finally experience higher electricity prices like us in the south experience since a few years.
- scotty79 1y agoIncreasing demand is the only reason anyone every developed more supply. And the future will obviously need more energy production. Development costs money so consumers will pay for it with higher prices but Norway just got new, large consumer to help foot the bill.
- antupis 1y agoI would not hold my breath, Norway is kinda holding back new supply (wind + solar + nuclear) if you compare it to Finland or Sweden.
- lelanthran 1y agoOn the plus side, a ton of electricity generation capacity is being built for AI datacenters. If this is a bubble and it pops, electricity prices are going to fall faster than you've ever seen before.
- marcyb5st 1y agoEven if it pops, I think the cat is already out of the bag. About LLMs: Maybe there won't be much training going around as model we might starting to hit diminishing returns with the current model architectures/approaches, but I believe inference is here to stay. Scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually. About Image/Video generations: Here I believe there is even more to explore and I consider this separate from LLMs in the context of AI winters/bubbles. Especially regarding the video generation part. I am not in the field, but I believe the appeal of being able to create movies without needing xM$ for actors' salaries is huge. And if you can even replace the VFX also with Video Generation then it is a 3 birds with one stone scenario (You pay for AI compute and you replace actors, VFX specialists, and compute costs for render farms). So, I believe that there is not a scenario in which electricity prices plummet as you describe. Maybe locally around datacenters that were primarily built for LLMs training, but not globally.
- Y-bar 1y agoSo another major bidder for electricity in my area comes online. Not looking forward to the invoices next winter…
- benrutter 1y agoAnyone needing context on this: Norway's electrical infrastructure is almost too good since citizen's prices are set in competition with exporting to the UK, and mainland Europe. Probably will reap the rewards in about 10 years time once the UK is producing huge amounts of wind and Europe solar, but that's not nuch of a consolation for the minute.
- 01100011 1y agoSame issue happening in the US right now too. Datacenters are gobbling up electricity and pushing prices ever higher. Tariffs will make it even worse, with prices the utilities have to pay for infrastructure shooting higher. I've heard the limiting factor right now for some DCs is the lack of electrical equipment(transformers, cabling, etc).
- amelius 1y agoThe AI winter will be extra cold this year.
- westpfelia 1y agoI just got up here and love that my electricity costs 1/10th what it did in the states.
- vintermann 1y agoNorwegian news seem to think this is a semiconductor manufacturing plant.
- bloqs 1y agolloooool
- bjornorn 1y agoThey probably did a direct translation of this: «Stargate Norway is planned to deliver 230MW of capacity, with ambitions to expand by an additional 290MW. The facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with the intention to expand significantly in the years ahead.» Makes it sound both like a power plant and a semiconductor factory..
- skrebbel 1y agoWow by “deliver” they mean “slurp up”, no? That’s some enthusiastic greenwashing right there!
- jtrn 1y agoNorway's public and largest news network, "NRK," made a straight-up mistake and wrote that it would produce AI chips. They later corrected it. But obviously, the journalist had no idea how big news that would be if Norway were able to host a TSMC-style factory. They have since corrected it tho: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/aker-har-signert-milliardavtale-om-bygging-av-ki-fabrikk-i-narvik-1.17511122 https://www.nrk.no/nordland/aker-har-signert-milliardavtale-...
- astahlx 1y agoI do not understand why they chose Norway. I would choose a country where it is easy to build up a new power plant quickly with solar and wind, close to the site of the data center. Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?
- kingofmen 1y ago> Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry? Yes, this is basically the case. It's quite expensive to transfer power across several degrees of latitude, and as a result, the price of power in the south of Norway is sometimes orders of magnitude higher than in the north.
- rednafi 1y agoI understand why they didn’t choose Germany: they didn’t want to buy the GPUs in cash and send the receipts via Fax.
- bloqs 1y agothis is so hilariously true
- BlindEyeHalo 1y agoAnd as a reward you pay one of the highest electricity costs in Europe.
- blackqueeriroh 1y agoGeothermal is a big deal in Norway as well.
- tyfon 1y agoWe have about 99% hydro power, Iceland is the geothermal county.
- 1y ago
- sexeriy237 1y agoIf this doesn't require chevrons to lock and connect to remote gate through a wormhole, they can't call it Stargate. That's just lying otherwise
- lelanthran 1y agoSome skepticism about the viability of the project here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/#butwhat-about-stargate https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/#butwhat-about-stargat...
- blackqueeriroh 1y agoI mean, when multiple countries are signing on, I think it’s gonna be fine
- lelanthran 1y ago> I mean, when multiple countries are signing on, I think it’s gonna be fine So? They're not paying for it, are they? From what I can tell in the link I posted (and this could be wrong, so corrections welcome): 1. The project needs ~$100b (although a fraction of that will be sufficient to get the first deployment online) 2. OpenAI and Softbank have each committed ~$18b 3. OpenAI is trying to raise ~$40b to stay in business 4. The majority of that ~$40b is coming from Softbank 5. Softbank has ~$30b cash on hand and is syndicating at least ~$10b in investment for the OpenAI raise. 6. OpenAI has projected a burn rate of ~$40b/year by 2028. To me it looks like Software is committing $30b to OpenAI + $18b to Stargate. OpenAI, if the raise is successful, will receive $40b over a period of time of which $22b will be available to OpenAI if they make good on their commitment of $18b for Stargate. Which means that OpenAI needs, in the next few years, $40b/year to run, but will only have $22b after they meet the Stargate commitment in the coming year, leaving them short of operational cash and requiring a further round of investments.
- bboygravity 1y agoI thought it was pretty universally known that the project doesn't have and won't have sufficient funding? And also that the vast majority of things Sam says are a lie?
- countfeng 1y agoThe name is very powerful
- mutkach 1y ago>230MW rather small compared to what was advertised previously >joint venture between Nscale and Aker which seems to imply it is not The Stargate (Oracle, Softbank, MGX?)
- danielscrubs 1y ago”While in Norway, OpenAI will also engage with government officials to explore opportunities for collaboration, including boosting AI adoption and helping to deliver on Norway’s sovereign AI goals for the benefit of its people.” Aka, Snowden thought us nothing. Norwegians beware of ChatGPT used as a weapon to move oil money from the people to the ”future of business ”.
- veunes 1y agoYep, AI sovereignty shouldn't mean handing over control to foreign entities with better PR teams
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIsn't Norway a key NATO member and huge buyer of F35 jets and other key US tech? What should Norway do? Buy Chinese and Russian instead?
- yard2010 1y agoWhat happened to Europe?
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoWhat's the European alternative to the things OpenAI puts in their datacenters? What's the European alternative to Nvidia H100s and Quantum InfiniBand, AMD Epycs and Instincs, and Intel Xeons? In the past you had European companies like ST, Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens who could design cutting edge compute and networking chips of the time, but those days are long gone, with European companies have missed out on the hyperscale race being relucted to making commodity low margin products, so they either have to buy American or Chinese if they want cutting edge.
- ffsm8 1y ago[deleted]
- roschdal 1y agoNorway doesn't want Stargate. Go away
- distances 1y agoJust bend the knee to your new Goa'uld overlords.
- londons_explore 1y agoIn the past few decades, data centers have been placed with latency in mind - ie. Typically you don't want to be more than 1000 miles from users. However, in the world of AI, latency is already 1 second plus, so the economics change - you do better to build where there is cheap electricity and free cooling. I forsee Iceland as a good place to invest.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoIceland is a small country, so it'll depend on what power infrastructure is already there, too much power consumption will overload the grid - unless they build new power plants and other infra.
- netsharc 1y agoHistorically they had so much "cheap" energy that they built aluminium smelting plants.
- einarfd 1y agoPower is why you would build in Iceland. There is a lot of geothermic potential there. It's after all, the land of hot springs and volcanoes. So if you need more power, build a new geothermic power plant.
- londons_explore 1y agoAlmost all countries have taxes and regulations on electricity (grid maintenance isn't free!), however at AI datacenter scale it makes sense to build the power plant on the same site as the datacenter, therefore avoiding those electricity taxes. So wherever you build, you'll most likely be building the same wattage of power station as you do datacenter. Lots of other resources can be shared too - for example shared cooling systems
- veunes 1y agoThat's why places like Norway, Iceland, and even parts of Canada are starting to look like prime real estate
- saubeidl 1y agoHave we as a species considered that the very last thing we need given our climate crisis and already near-apocalyptic state (fires, floods, storms - it's biblical!), is some risky tech bro vanity project gamble eating up the rest of our resources and accelerating the death of our species? That maybe the attempt of capital to finally replace pesky labor with cheap machines isn't worth risking it all? No? Guess it's time to scream into the void some more.
- 0points 1y ago> That maybe the attempt of capital to finally replace pesky labor with cheap machines isn't worth risking it all? Who's gonna purchase the goods if noone gets a salary? That will work out like the french revolution.
- saubeidl 1y agoYou don't need to tell me, I agree, though I think the Bolshevik revolution is a more likely model. Capital was never known for its foresight. The planning horizon is quarterly results
- veunes 1y agoInteresting mix of geopolitics, green energy, and AI arms race vibes here
- crinkly 1y agoThink they stole this one from the anime series Pantheon.
- perlgeek 1y ago"Stargate" in the name really sounds like OpenAI has lost touch with reality. (Didn't they at some point also say they wanted to build their own semiconductor fabs? That went in the same direction).
- martin_a 1y agoI think they wanted others to build semiconductor labs for them for free, because... I don't know, "we're OpenAI" or so...
- pu_pe 1y ago> The facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with the intention to expand significantly in the years ahead. This is massive. As a point of comparison: Denmark just unveiled a new supercomputer recently which has only ~1,500 GPUs [1] [1] https://novonordiskfonden.dk/en/news/denmarks-first-ai-supercomputer-is-now-operational/ https://novonordiskfonden.dk/en/news/denmarks-first-ai-super...
- ranguna 1y agoIf those are a100 GPUs, then we are looking at 21.6GWh of electricity in a month at full power at 300W. At 0.16 cents per kW that 3.456M euros per month for the GPUs alone. According to Wikipedia, in 2021 Norway produced 157.1TWh of electricity, that's 13.1TWh per month. The GPUs will consume less than 1% of the total electricity production capacity Norway has (or had in 2021). Norway currently uses fully or close to 100% renewables, according to electricitymap. Hopefully this investment won't turn that around.
- jtrn 1y agoPersonally, as a Norwegian, I am really hopeful for this. I hope the "Not in my backyard" sentiment won't block this project, as it has so many times here. Narvik will be a great place. Lots of renewable energy, a history of industry, and a cool North Atlantic climate for cooling it all. Though I am starting to recognize in myself that I think AI is so cool, that I might be a bit naive. But I just love it so much, use it so much, and have a childish pleasure in it, that I'm starting to think that I need to curb my enthusiasm. I do note that the other side of the spectrum has no problem with representation, though. With just as unnuanced attitudes like: AI is evil, useless, capitalistic exploitation, and so on. So the pessistic view is more than enough represented in the public discourse. So maybe I can just let myself be in love with this tech.
- latchkey 1y agoThis is being done in partnership with a company called NScale. They once sued a friend of mine over software he wrote, and lost. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but if you’re going to play those kinds of games and still lose, that’s not the kind of partner I’d trust.
- ninalanyon 1y agoGreat, my electricity bill will be going up. :-(
- more_corn 1y agoI would like to remind everyone that the Stargate Norway project does not, in fact, possess a Stargate.