…using gigawatts of power that aren’t available on the grid
And megaliters of fresh water.
Immortan Joe sees an opportunity.
The water-thing is mostly bullshit, see https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
see that’s crap because they need muni clean water; it’s gotta come from SOMEWHERE, and your muni water system wasn’t setup to feed a city AND a bunch of datacenters. so it’s gonna have to expand - and who’s gonna pay for that? NOT THE AI. The people will pay for it, every fucking time.
Agriculture uses so much more water. Just so we can grow corn so it can be turned into ethanol. “AI” uses so much more energy though. and it’ll only get worse, the more “advanced” the llms become, the more energy they’re going to require.
And creating energy is also using large amounts of water.
it typically uses non-potable water though, and that water is then typically evaporated as steam which then in precipitated back down, or it’s directly routed back into the stream it came from, which is the case in hydroelectric systems
The water that’s returned is significantly warmer though, which can have some pretty large effects on the local environment.
that is true
Energy use is a more real concern, yes.
there are entire cities facing water crisis already. water is going to be a huge concern going forward.
https://wetravelwebond.com/13-u-s-cities-on-the-brink-of-a-water-crisis/
don’t believe the ‘it’s only a tiny bit of water’ bullshit
Most of the water used by “AI” is in energy generation though, so you’re both right.
to me it’s simply not an either:or it’s an yes:and
the utility customers of these municipalities aren’t being told about the construction of AI data centers, because so many come with NDA strings.
we don’t have infinite potable water. it’s going to come from municipal supplies. they’re going to stick the cost to these communities, and probably stress cities that are already water-fucked even more:
https://wetravelwebond.com/13-u-s-cities-on-the-brink-of-a-water-crisis/
I suggest you read the article I posted, or if you don’t feel like reading, maybe listening to what’s being said in the YouTube video.
There are some very real concerns with everything happening around AI. Water is quite simply not one of them. Focus your energy on criticisms based in reality.
I’d already seen Green’s video. I agree it’s a small thing compared to the power, but in a world obviously running out of easily accessible potable water, it’s only going to exacerbate problems for the communities that are already being hit by the relentless power costs due to AI as well.
This isn’t a one or the other thing. They’ll need water for cooling. It’s not recycled. it’s got to be clean, potable water.
we do not live in an infinite muni-water supply.
Yeah, thanks, this random substack and YouTube video definitely are credible and trustworthy sources.
As opposed to your vibes?
As opposed to the many reputable news sources and scientific publications that run contrary?
I mean, I’m certain that if you consider there to be many reputable scientific publications having studies to the contrary, you should at least be able to post a single one, right?
Sure. Here is a decent one:
Environment and sustainability development: A ChatGPT perspective
Priyanka Bhaskar, Neha Seth
Applied Data Science and Smart Systems, 54-62, 2024
Point is finding it or the dozens like it take like 2 seconds on Google scholar.
if you can refute it please do.
don’t talk about it, do it.
Fuck man, read one of the myriad of studies. Not some blog blog post. XD
When it comes to ludicrous and bullshit “evidence” you don’t get to challenge the world to refute something.
The grid is always balancing supply and demand. Any mismatch builds up and would cause a black out if the power was really not available.
Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures—in pork that doesn’t exist yet—led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does.
Terry Pratchett, Thud!
That’s so freaking funny. Pratchett was just so good.
If I recall correctly that’s the same warehouse that later supercools a golem, making him very smart for a bit.
Sargent Detritus the troll… he ends up making a cooling system in his helmet in later books
Ah right that makes sense, thanks! Something was nagging at me earlier, about the Golems being hollow and following the paper in their head, so it didn’t make perfect sense. I forgot the trolls were made of rock!
Pratchett was just so good.
Man left this plane of existence before the techbros enshittified it.
GNU Terry Pratchett
This is peak bubble type shit.
I’m going to be that guy and point out that LLM’s are not really “AI”, that’s just the corporate buzzword but “AI” is a loosely defined thing.
I think we should all get better at calling them LLM’s publicly to take some of the magic woo-woo away.
I think we should call it with the more appropriate acronym: Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI)
Then they can fight over who has the biggest SALAMI
The term “AI” today is almost like the term “computer” decades ago.
As in, “this new vehicle is more efficient than ever thanks to a new aerodynamic shape created not on the drawing board, but on the computer.”
Ha! Yes so true.
I agreed years ago, but it’s too late now.
“Big Data”, “Neural Net”, etc etc, they keep changing the buzzword for this crap for the past decade.
AI just resonates with the public because everyone has seen Terminator movies. Your dipshit CEO of Buttplugs Inc has no clue what an LLM, or neural net is. But he knows what AI is and he delusionally believes it’s going make Buttplug inc. more profitable in the future.
It’s effective marketing.
They call it a machine learning algorithm i call it lossy text compression.
When you give it a prompt it uncompresses a small portion of the petabytes of zipped information based on the relevance of the keywords you choose. The “generation” comes from approximations of keywords and the underlying prompt. It isn’t “generating” information as much as big tech wants you to believe, its taking information from multiple sources and combining it into one contiguously flowing statement. For people who didn’t understand what I said, generative AI operates similarly by taking 2 paint colors and making a new kind of color from it. It isn’t critical thinking, it’s more of experimenting with no basis, reason, or hypothesis.
To conclude, the underlying mechanism is a lossy compression algorithm: there is no way to reduce the size from petabytes of information to a sheer 40gb downloadable size besides through lossy compression. The “generative AI” component is analogisly equivalent to making a new color of paint by combining two or more other colored paints. It’s entire existence is through experimentation with no preamtive basis that adding two or more colors would give you a new color. It will never figure that it even after having done the experiment.
Yeah, for all the undeserved hype about AI that we and I’m sure plenty of C-suites know about, there is still the issue of fiduciary duty to their bosses (shareholders).
If you’re a tech CEO that knows it’s all crap, but the market conditions are such that going all-in on AI is going to triple your share price for no good reason, you’ll probably be in a “get that money or we’ll find somebody who will” situation.
But that’s also why executives get so much of their compensation in the form of stock. There’s no need for shareholders to get off their asses to demand short term gains they can cash in on when the decision makers are one of them and playing the game game.
Right, but in the same spirit, we’re not just talking about LLMs. If we’re being accurate, the common interface we’re used to with ChatGPT or Gemini, they are a system of different models including LLMs and other models for images, or sound.
If we’re talking AI in movies and music, besides LLMs for writing, we’re mainly concerned with diffusion models
If we’re talking AI for wearables… That’s usually more on the sensor/classification side of ML, so it’s not even generative.
i saw my first hover board in back to the future, the pink one. now it’s that overpriced exploding segway.
at least the name segway was almost creative
if hover boards were legit real you’d have so many injuries the company would be sued into insolvency.
already starting to see this with ebikes… massive increases in head trauma numbers since they became popular. mostly from old people buying a $5000 e bike and then riding it w/o a helmet at 15-20mph.
if hover boards were legit real you’d have so many injuries the company would be sued into insolvency.
I’m so sad we’re not seeing this with AI. The injuries we get, the insolvency not so much. Fuck.
that didn’t stop RAZOR scooters
Remember when the segway was a mysterious to-be-revealed “it” that we were going to design our cities around in the future?
I 'member.
yes, I’ll call them AI when they are sentient D:
I was spoiled by Iain Banks’s Culture <3
Iain M. Banks, don’t ya know!?!?
I’m still saving a culture book or two to enjoy, but the entire setting has been amazing.
Eh, afaik he only added the letter to differentiate his scifi books from his non-scifi books :P
Yes, exactly!
Yeah, it’s M for the Culture stuff
Remember folks, since the end of COVID another greedy cork sucker is crowned next billionaire every 30 hours.
The number of billionaires in the USA has nearly and will shortly eclipse double the number there were before 2020. How did they do that, you fucking know. By pretending they would die and their children would get AIDS if they didn’t raise the price of every single product on the planet exorbitantly and without need to increase already skyrocketing year to year profitability. These greedy bastards not only did this, they want to kill all of us who they fleeced before we wake up to the facts.
TOO LATE
They never learn, can’t self regulate and won’t give a flying fuck until presented with a French solution
This actually explains a few things for me.
I never considered that RAM and GPUs could be traded as futures, but obviously they can…
This also reminds me of the trader at a trading company in London who had to take delivery of 28000 tonnes of coal due to forgetting to sell a future he owned.
He only found out as the receptionist asked him to come down and sign for it and he saw barges of coal coming down the river:
Futures and unrealized capital gains are more addictive than nicotine
profits that won’t happen
I have yet to see speculation as to how the bubble survivors make a profit. At this point I think AI is being pushed to keep propping up the US economy.
That’s a great question Shalafi! The answer is government mandated pillow talks to your AI companions. Would you like me to provide todays’ topics in advance?
You’re not alone in thinking that. The US economy is growing but all of that is allocated to 5 companies, and in any case the owners of that equity aren’t a majority median income earners. We’ve essentially decoupled the economic health of the common person, who would actually spend on the bubble survivors, from the overall “strength” of the US economy.
An interesting discussion on that thought about halfway through this - https://www.ft.com/content/bd6545dc-41b7-42db-af77-b2f32a1c9ae1
If we have to play this bubble game, can we at least force them to build some renewable energy sources with their unlimited funds so when the bubble pops, we have some extra renewable energy available to the grid?
Pretty sure Trump banned woke energy
Wind and sun are for SISSIES, even if it’s CHEAPER! Nuclear plants are not antifa-woke, but my pal A.Jones says it makes everyone GAY. Drill baby, drill!
Bastard obviously wants to colonize Venezuela.
pretty sure they dont have the funds to build a power plant that is renewable, or a nuclear plant. thats why the cost of water/electricity is passed onto customers of electric and water companies.
The frustration is valid, but it’s less ‘AI is dumb’ and more ‘markets chasing hype create weird shortages.
Imagine how cheap it will be once over supply inevitably occurs.
I am salivating over A100/H100 rigs getting dumped en masse. I’ll take one, thanks.
I hope they don’t just toss them in the garbage, like jerks. Last time this happened with crypto, I think Nvidia bought many back to throw away.
Did GPUs become cheap after the previous hype/bubble simmered down? No, they made even bigger bubble requiring even more resources. They will make it even bigger until it requires toilet paper to sustain, then people will riot.
Did GPUs become cheap after the previous hype/bubble simmered down? No
I my current GPU in my gaming PC I got on a big discount, around when folks couldn’t really do bitcoin mining on consumer hardware anymore, so… yes?
In my time I’ve certainly seen RAM prices rise and fall depending on supply constraints, same with HDD and SSD. Fair point on GPU’s, I just can’t see this data center demand remaining as so much of it seems speculative.
That haven’t yet happened
People are going to eat this shit up for sure. At least the corporate companies will. They don’t know better.
So they can replace all workers. and won’t be able to make profit because they layed off all of the workers. Why do we need a government if they are investing all our resources in phasing us out? If you don’t work in our system you die so why are we allowing this again?
Because idiots think that if we let the super rich become ultra rich then they will somehow in turn become regular rich.
Because people are stupid, the difference in intelligence between the stupidest and smartest people is increasing, and democracy puts the decision making process in the hands of the masses which are intrinsically stupid
It’s a whole system designed for “intelligent” (read: manipulative, immoral, rich) people to take advantage of stupid people, and it works wonderfully in their favor.
And there’s fuck all an average person can do about it besides attempt to deal with the stupid people and convince them to do more intelligent things.
I hate it here. I want to be surrounded by people capable of reason already…
If only capitalist democracy put the decision making power in the hands of the masses. We would have universal healthcare by now and like none of the wars of the past 30 years.
No, really it’s the capitalists who make decisions, and they’ve designed it so that the people who own capital can take advantage of the people who don’t own capital. It’s got very little to do with smart vs stupid, and very much to do with “has” vs “has not.”
This is exactly it. It’s also why education has been under attack since the 80’s. It’s also why we fund schools based on the property tax
yea, the fact that Trump won the elections kinda supports my argument
people act as they vote
I, too, have a fundamental hatred of the bell curve humanity finds itself on. I have better things I want to do than convince a bunch of dumb fucks to make better decisions. The psychopaths on the other hand delight in manipulating idiots. This is why I believe we should genetically study psychopathy and CRISPR that shit away.
The rich have it going both ways. They have convinced a subset of the lower classes to fight amongst and blame each other. Meanwhile they very shortdightedly are maximizing profits (not from the lower classes anymore because they have essentially bled us dry) but from other rich people who want to invest to maximize profits.
They have forgotten that the only way capitalism remains sustainable over time is if they continue to both provide products and services lower class individuals will spend money on, and if they continue to pay those lower class individuals money so they have money to spend. Right now they’re busy grifting each other and our government is too stupid to look to the future, realize that the bubble has to pop sometime, and realize what that will mean for the market, the tax system, the tax payers, and the populace at large.
This is class warfare for profits over literally everything and it is going to crash the economy probably sooner rather than later.
There are two kinds of parasites:
- A smart parasite keeps its host alive. It limits the substance it leeches, prioritizing long term survival over short term satisfaction.
- A dumb parasite takes as much as it can. Even if it causes the host to die, and the parasite to die with it.
Of course - “smart” and “dumb” are used liberally here. The organism itself is not intelligent, and neither is the process who designed it. At least - that’s how it works in nature.
So basically neoliberals are smart parasites and republicans are dumb parasites
It’s more of an informed host and an uninformed host.
The parasites are the corps. Some of us know that we’re the product and we do what we can to mitigate that. But there’s not a real feasible way to opt out of society. People gotta eat. People gotta sleep. They gotta provide for their families. They gotta have shelter. They gotta figure out ways not to freeze to death. Ways to stay healthy.
We have the power to cut out the corporations and oligarchs from the means of production. We really don’t need them. They are parasites. We simply (the majority) stop allowing worker exploitation and the ownership class to exist. They need the workers to enforce their social contract but the social contract has been broken for a long time. We simply stop recognizing their corrupt laws, property rights and money and start trading. They don’t have the manpower to stop us from continuing to produce food and necessities en masse while ignoring their broken system of extravagance, gambling and exploitation.
They win if the bubble pops too because then they just buy everything for pennies on the dollar
Unfortunately true. But the only reason they can do that is because they’ll get tax payer money for a bailout.
and then try to salvage thier industry, by hiring"cheaply" SENIOR tech/engineers,etc and maybe outsource to AI=ALWAYS indians and still face bankruptcy.
what would lenin do?
We should ask Lenin ai
What is to be done??
bangs table
