The media seems hellbent on torching AI. My news feeds are nothing but stories about the evils of data centers, how useless AI is, and how much everyone hates it.

The media is hellbent on torching it, and on propping it up against all reason too, both things can be true. HN is no exception. It's another noisy room problem where the distortion in dialogue is rapidly leading us into a distorted reality. https://thenoisyroom.com/

For people who are actually interested in reality, participation in the mainstream discourse either way is a strategic error. The best thing to do is to check out from all of it, actually read the literature and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge, and stop reading the pro/anti marketing noise from the media or corporate PR

From AI companies’ perspective, it’s free press… why would they even think about stopping people talking about it!

This about it like this - if you were a CEO of a company that ONLY made garden gnomes, would you rather a) nobody ever talk about garden gnomes, or b) garden gnomes be in the news every day, people protesting because they’re losing their jobs because of garden gnomes, companies making billions and collectively investing trillions to making garden gnomes, people starting startups to support the garden gnomes pipeline, consumer electronics prices having huge variance because of the demand to support garden gnomes etc.

When you’re one of the largest garden gnomes companies in the world, you want garden gnomes to saturate the zeitgeist

well datacenters should go near power plants or cool mountain areas

for ML training loads, it just doesn't make sense to build them near residential areas for few millisecs