Browse Comments — Clean (de-noised)

my favorite comment in this piece: “Why should we be paying for this infrastructure? Why should we be paying for their power bills?” That's a great question. The benefits of AI to the general populace must be commensurate with the cost for it to survive. Spell-checking an email or asking a question to which you receive an unsteady, hallucinogenic response is not worth it for the majority of people.

it's a year old...

Kristina Tanasichuk do you find it obsolete in any way? What do you believe has changed in the meantime?

Please see latest Marex note:

Colm Devine David Rae

These "revelations" always make me chuckle. We saw it with corn ethanol, concentrated solar power and Solyndra's Cylindrical CIGS Solar Panels. Or how about Grain Belt Express and the host of other wind projects that people clamored for one day only turn around the next and protest construction of the HVDC infrastructure necessary to get the thousands of megawatts from the middle of nowhere to the load centers that needed it. We love progress...until, suddenly, the tradeoffs reveal themselves and we realize that Economics wasn't joking when it told us that we can't have our cake and eat it too.

In addition, energy consumption of making the chips that are used in energy intensive semiconductor fabs?

This has to be managed but there is always a missing part to this dicusssion - the potential net positive. If the obligations or reven rules are right, AI can be applied to generate exponential carbon savings across industry, serices and user activities.

I guess the question to ask is - how useable and useful AI? Reports say that around 70-80% of AI projects fail are we merely creating cartoons of perfect people in some fantasy island? Be nice to see threat prediction models esp outbreaks through to auditing to catch the white collar criminals early and perhaps to avoid rogue politicians from stealing the pot creating a wake of debt. To catch ponzi and pyramid schemes too so much money dumped into the economy now Will citizens put up with the mess?

An odd comment: “Meanwhile, data centers are expected to continue trending toward using dirtier, more carbon-intensive forms of energy (like gas) to fill immediate needs, leaving clouds of emissions in their wake. “ Gas, as in natural gas? If so, that energy source is the least carbon-intensive form of energy which leads to far less emissions of any of the hydrocarbon-based energy forms. Nuclear has no carbon footprint per se during generation, but has its own type of extremely toxic form of emission. (Wind and solar are nowhere near being able to meet energy needs and again have their own forms of problematic “emissions.”) Fusion has no carbon footprint during generation, and if/when superconductor technology becomes industrialized then I expect that to solve many energy need problems by reducing energy transmission and use losses. I don’t see the use of gas powered electricity generation as needing to lead the list of downside energy usage possibilities.

Totally agree. There would have to be strict obligations / rules. But it can be done -

Cassie Schoon, M.A. literally a 'pipe dream' 😅

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

moving towards small is good simple is smart instead of giant data centers which is risky, vulnerable and adds load (electricity demand goes up as they seek cheap energy areas). Want to take down a society hit the data centers and Perhaps a better approach is specialized AI based on the business (medical, research, infrastructure, government etc..) One size fits all is costly and the whole intent of the internet was to decentralize here we are again admiring giants trillions gets dumped into the economy perhaps federated learning models

surveillance of citizens, and central hubs of data and conciseness - we have lost the concept of distributed nodes. Thank god the aircraft carriers weren't at Pearl Harbor 12/7/1941 (all in one place). Don't forget the water usage, but the idea of using flared natural gas (horizontal fracking, Eagleford, Wordford, and the Bakken) for electrical production was genius.

Morten Vester Haldrup

Dax Lovegrove You're asking us to weigh material reality against theoretical possibilities. Gee. I wonder which one people will consider more important.

Hopefully people will understand AI better after reading this. LLMs will never be the core of an AI system. We have to pivot.

Dont forget the water

Rolands Sadauskis Owen White Daniel Stunell