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There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible. For example, if a data center is illegally runni
by mdasen 2mo ago
There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible.
For example, if a data center is illegally running gas turbines, the penalty could be that the data center must be shut down for 3 years and no equipment can be removed from the data center during that time.
With financial penalties, there's always calculus on whether the penalty is high enough to deter the action. But the only reason they'd want to, for example, use illegal power generators at a data center is to run the data center. Losing access to 100% of the value of that data center for 3 years would make the calculus easy: it wouldn't be worth it for the companies. They'd lose the entire reason for doing it and so much of the capital investment in equipment as it depreciated during those 3 years.
With AI companies believing the market is worth trillions, it's hard to imagine a financial penalty high enough to deter illegal actions. It might need to be in the hundreds of billions - a level which they probably can't pay given their current resources and which governments wouldn't levy. Not that they'll essentially confiscate a data center and its hardware for multiple years as a penalty either.
- mft_ 2mo agoI agree with almost everything you wrote, but... confiscation and inability to operate at a location (as you suggest as a penalty) still ultimately boils down to a financial penalty for an organisation. It feels especially severe in this case (law breaking by a data center operator) because of the high cost and high depreciation rate of GPUs and supporting hardware. If you take a different field of business, you can still imagine an organisation making the calculation that operation for a period of time --before their illegality was discovered and then acted upon by the authorities-- would still be worthwhile even if confiscation was the end result. (In some odd cases, this is close to the actual business model.) If you want to deter hyper-rich companies, you could shift to fining them a meaningful percentage of their annual turnover or even their market capitalisation.