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mikestorrent 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> How is it useful to you that these companies are so valuation hungry that they are moving money into this technology in such a way that people are fearful it could cripple the entire global economy?

The creation of entire new classes of profession has always been the result of technological breakthroughs. The automobile did not cripple the economy, even as it ended the buggy-whip barons.

> How is it useful to you that this tech is so power hungry that environmental externalities are being further accelerated while regular people's utility costs are raising to cover the increased demand(whether they use the tech to "code" or "manifest art")?

There will be advantages to lower-power computing, and lower-cost electricity. Implement carbon taxes and AI companies will follow the market incentive to install their datacentres in places where sustainable power is available for cheap. We'll see China soaring to new heights with their massive solar investment, and America will eventually figure out they have to catch up and cannot do so with coal and gas.

> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?

Temporary problem, the demand for personal computing is not going to die in five years, and meanwhile the lucrative markets for producing this equipment will result in many new factories, increasing capacity and eventually lowering prices again. In the meantime, many pundits are suggesting that this may thankfully begin the end of the Electron App Era where a fuckin' chat client thinks it deserves 1GB of RAM.

Consider this: why are we using Electron and needing 32GB of RAM on a desktop? Because web developers only knew how to use Javascript and couldn't write a proper desktop app. With AI, desktop frameworks can have a resurgence; why shouldn't I use Go or Rust and write a native app on all platforms now that the cost of doing so is decreasing and the number of people empowered to work with it is increasing? I wrote a nice multithreaded fractal renderer in Rust the other day; I don't know how to multithread, write Rust, and probably can't iterate complex numbers correctly on paper anymore....

> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?

This is only a problem in places that have poor water policy, e.g. California (who can all thank the gods that their reservoirs are all now very full from the recent rain). This problem predates datacenters and needs to be solved - for instance, by federalizing and closing down the so-called Wonderful Company and anyone else who uses underhanded tactics to buy up water rights to grow crops that shouldn't be grown there.

Come and run your datacenters up in the cold North, you won't even need evaporative cooling for them, just blow a ton of fresh air in....

> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?

Now you've actually got an argument, and I am on your side on this one.

	▲	biammer 3 days ago \| parent [-]
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ben_w 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If at any point any of these releases were "genuine inflection points" it would be unnecessary to proselytize such. It would be self evident. Much like rain.

Agreed.

Now, I suggest reading through all of this to note that I am not a fan of tech bros, that I do want this to be a bubble. Then also note what else I'm saying despite all that.

To me, it is self-evident. The various projects I have created by simply asking for them, are so. I have looked at the source code they produce, and how this has changed over time: Last year I was describing them as "junior" coders, by which I meant "fresh hire"; now, even with the same title, I would say "someone who is just about to stop being a junior".

> "The oppressed need to acknowledge that their oppression is useful to their oppressors."

The capacity for AI to oppress you is in direct relation to its economic value.

The power hunger is in direct proportion to the demand. Someone burning USD 20 to get Claude Code tokens has consumed approximately USD 10 of electricity in that period, with the other USD 10 having been spread between repaying the model training cost and the server construction cost.

The reason they're willing to spend USD 20 is to save at least US 20 worth of dev time. This was already the case with the initial version of ChatGPT pro back in the day, when it could justify that by saving 23 dev minutes per month. There's around a million developers in the USA, just that group increasing electricity spending by USD 10/month will put a massive dent on the USA's power grid.

Gets worse though. Based on my experience, using Claude Code optimally, when you spend USD 20 you get at least 10 junior sprints' worth of output. Hiring a junior for 10 sprints is, what, USD 30,000? The bound here is "are you able to get value from having hired 1,500 juniors for the price of one?"

One can of course also waste those tokens. Both because nobody needs slop, and because most people can't manage one junior never mind 1500 of them.

However, if the economy collectively answers "yes", then the environmental externalities expand until you can't afford to keep your fridge cold or your lights on.

This is one of the failure modes of the technological singularity that people like me have been forewarning about for years, even when there's no alignment issues within the models themselves. Which there are, because Musk's one went and called itself Mecha Hitler, while being so sycophantic about Musk himself that it called him the best at everything even when the thing was "drinking piss", which would be extremely funny if he wasn't selling this to the US military.

> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?

This will pass. Either this is a bubble, it pops, the manufacturers return to their roots; or it isn't because it works as advertised, which means it leads to much higher growth rates, and we (us, personally, you and me) get personal McKendree cylinders each with more compute than currently exists… or we get turned into the raw materials for those cylinders.

I assume the former. But I say that as one who wants it to be the former.

> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?

Is it what's emptying drinking water acquifers?

The combined water usage of all data centers in Arizona. All of them. Together. Which is over 100 DCs. All of them combined use about double what Tesla was expecting from just the Brandenburg Gigafactory to use before Musk decided to burn his reputation with EV consumers and Europeans for political point scoring.

> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?

This is one of the objectively bad things, though it's hard to say if this is more or less competent at this than all the other stuff we had three years ago, given the observed issues with the algorithmic feeds.

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biammer 3 days ago | parent [-]

I appreciate you taking the time to write up your thoughts on something other than exclusively these tools 'usefulness' at writing code.

> The capacity for AI to oppress you is in direct relation to its economic value.

I think this assumes a level of rationality in these systems, corporate interests and global markets, that I would push back on as being largely absent.

> The power hunger is in direct proportion to the demand.

Do you think this is entirely the case? I mean, I understand what you are saying, but I would draw stark lines between "company" demand versus "user" demand. I have found many times the 'AI' tools are being thrust into nearly everything regardless of user demand. Spinning its wheels to only ultimately cause frustration. [0]

> Is it what's emptying drinking water aquifers?

It appears this is a problem, and will only continue to be such. [1]

> The combined water usage of all data centers in Arizona. All of them. Together. Which is over 100 DCs. All of them combined use about double what Tesla was expecting from just the Brandenburg Gigafactory to use before Musk decided to burn his reputation with EV consumers and Europeans for political point scoring.

I am unsure if I am getting what your statements here are trying to say. Would you be able to restate this to be more explicit in what you are trying to communicate.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493506

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-ac...

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ben_w 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I think this assumes a level of rationality in these systems, corporate interests and global markets, that I would push back on as being largely absent.

Could be. What I hope and suspect is happening is that these companies are taking a real observation (the economic value that I also observe in software) and falsely expanding this to other domains.

Even to the extent that these work, AI has clearly been over-sold in humanoid robotics and self-driving systems, for example.

> Do you think this is entirely the case? I mean, I understand what you are saying, but I would draw stark lines between "company" demand versus "user" demand. I have found many times the 'AI' tools are being thrust into nearly everything regardless of user demand. Spinning its wheels to only ultimately cause frustration. [0]

I think it is. Companies setting silly goals like everyone must use LLMs once a day or whatever, that won't burn a lot of tokens. Claude Code is available in both subscription mode and PAYG mode, and the cost of subscriptions suggests it is burning millions of tokens a month for the basic subscription.

Other heavy users who we would both agree are bad, are slop content farms. I cannot even guesstimate those, so would be willing to accept the possibility they're huge.

> It appears this is a problem, and will only continue to be such. [1]

I find no reference to "aquifers" in that.

Where it says e.g. "up to 9 liters of water to evaporate per kWh of energy used", the average is 1.9 l/kWh. Also, evaporated water tends to fall nearby (on this scale) as rain, so unless there's now too much water on the surface, this isn't a net change even if it all comes form an aquifer (and I have yet to see any evidence of DCs going for that water source).

It says "The U.S. relies on water-intensive thermoelectric plants for electricity, indirectly increasing data centers' water footprint, with an average of 43.8L/kWh withdrawn for power generation." - most water withdrawn is returned, not consumed.

It says "Already AI's projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027, signaling a need to tackle its water footprint.", this is less than the famously-a-desert that is Arizona.

> I am unsure if I am getting what your statements here are trying to say. Would you be able to restate this to be more explicit in what you are trying to communicate.

That the water consumption of data centres is much much smaller than the media would have you believe. It's more of a convenient scare story than a reality. If water is your principal concern, give up beef, dairy, cotton, rice, almonds, soy, biofuels, mining, paper, steel, cement, residential lawns, soft drinks, car washing, and hospitals, in approximately that order (assuming the lists I'm reading those from are not invented whole cloth), before you get to data centres.

And again, I don't disagree that they're a problem, it's just that the "water" part of the problem is so low down the list of things to worry about as to be a rounding error.

	▲	biammer 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I find no reference to "aquifers" in that. Ahh, I see your objection now. That is my bad. I was using my language too loosely. Here I was using 'aquifer' to mean 'any source of drinking water', but that is certainly different from the intended meaning. > And again, I don't disagree that they're a problem, it's just that the "water" part of the problem is so low down the list of things to worry about as to be a rounding error. I'm skeptical of the rounding error argument, and weary of relying on the logical framework of 'low down the list' when list items' effects stack interdependently. > give up beef, dairy, cotton, rice, almonds, soy, biofuels, mining, paper, steel, cement, residential lawns, soft drinks, car washing, and hospitals In part due to this reason, as well as others, I have stopped directly supporting the industries for: beef, dairy, rice, almonds, soy, biofuels, residential lawns, soft drinks, car washing

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QuantumGood 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The hype curve is a problem, but it's difficult to prevent. I myself have never made such a prediction. Though it now seems that the money and effort to create working coding tools is near an inflection point.

"It would be self evident." History shows the opposite at inflection points. The "self evident" stage typically comes much later.