| ▲ | AmazingEveryDay 6 hours ago |
| All the compute being built out is very impressive and it's nice to think it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good. But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads. |
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| ▲ | tengbretson 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why? |
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| ▲ | halestock 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that. | | |
| ▲ | youre-wrong3 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is the low quality type of comment I’ve come to expect from HN. | | | |
| ▲ | tengbretson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Everyone on this site has been cashing checks building the job eating machine for years. The concern is only pouring out now that it may not need us anymore. | |
| ▲ | baq an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If they also solve fusion, famine, climate disaster, cancer, dementia and child development disorders it isn’t as clear cut | | |
| ▲ | hibikir an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick. This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works. So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has. | |
| ▲ | msy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground. | |
| ▲ | themafia an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The word happiness, fulfillment or even freedom didn't come to mind? Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them. |
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| ▲ | fooster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild. | | |
| ▲ | jkwn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You have no frame of reference, Donny. I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals. Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it. Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design. What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler. | | |
| ▲ | tengbretson 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like. | | |
| ▲ | Jare 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's speculative fiction after all. | |
| ▲ | jkwn an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's easy to understand once you understand the power structures at play. The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality. And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized. Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects. What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources. Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home. |
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| ▲ | budududuroiu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not an AI booster, nor an AI detractor. I like tech and progress. I'm mortified at the possibility of a data centre being built next to me at some point in the future [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | King-Aaron an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Luddites were not against the advent of new technology. They were against capitalists using new technology as an excuse to cut skilled labour and not offer any avenue for reskilling etc. Which is what's happening again. |
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| ▲ | mukmuk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The number of realists on this site is encouraging. |
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| ▲ | mulmen 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [delayed] | |
| ▲ | ozgrakkurt 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > that's literally solving unsolved math problems, It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results. Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do | |
| ▲ | doctorwho42 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them. Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ... And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not! | | |
| ▲ | xp84 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 100% of the water that is 'used up' in a datacenter, or even in electrical generation, is evaporated into the atmosphere. The same one where the rain comes from. Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts, so that seems like a lot of area where we can use a lot of water with basically no impact because it's all just coming back into the water cycle directly as opposed to ending up in a water treatment plant and flowing into the sea. We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there. I'm much less pessimistic about this. | | |
| ▲ | ianbutler 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower. | | |
| ▲ | dqv an hour ago | parent [-] | | What percentage of new builds are using closed loop cooling? I've seen this pop data center "fact" thrown around, but with no data to back it up. |
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| ▲ | leptons an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The datacenter is still heating the atmosphere and consuming enormous amounts of electricity, which also heats the atmosphere. And it still won't solve our global climate disaster and is far more likely to contribute to a lot of bad things happening for humans. |
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| ▲ | youre-wrong3 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s clear you don’t know what you’re talking about. Data centers don’t use water. | |
| ▲ | chneu an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Beef consumption dwarfs data centers in terms of environmental damage for no good reason and does much worse things to water, but nobody cares cuz beef is a status symbol for people. AI is easy to hate and requires no sacrifice. But giving up red meat is kind of tough so nobody does it. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | dlev_pika 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How much of the total pie of resources consumed is ‘solving math models’, really? | |
| ▲ | viccis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because we can learn? |
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| ▲ | protocolture 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazons business is just cloud services tbh. I dont know what Amazons customer base looks like in aggregate but I bet its more interesting than just ads. |
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| ▲ | jmalicki an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Five years ago it would be to serve ads. Today it will be used to power AI girlfriends. |
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| ▲ | tdb7893 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders! |
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| ▲ | winrid 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which does technically distribute wealth to thousands of people |
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| ▲ | laughing_man 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's what pays the bills. You wouldn't expect someone to spend this kind of money without a way to make it back (and then some). |
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| ▲ | Arainach 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most of the tech startup ecosystem for the last 20 years has been spending crazy money without a clear plan for how to make it back. | | |
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| ▲ | kylehotchkiss 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or generate political slops to rile up older people |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| common now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads. |
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| ▲ | ares623 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ads are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite. |
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| ▲ | user3939382 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Tell that to São Paulo. | |
| ▲ | leptons an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They're going to need quite a lot more ads to try to sell stuff to people who don't have jobs anymore because of all the datacenters built for AI. | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Look everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder! | |
| ▲ | kibwen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Frankly, it should be a crime, a felony even, to purchase something if you haven't seen an ad for it beforehand. Think of the poor middlemen! |
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| ▲ | ddxv 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Unpopular take I know. But ads are a source of revenue for much of the free and open internet. The alternatives are paid features that are a regressive tax on poorer people who can't afford them or fork up larger amounts of their discretionary budget. While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls. |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all. We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting. | | |
| ▲ | tzs 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The free option with libraries was somewhat limited because libraries rarely had more than a small number of copies of a given book or newspaper. Saying people with higher income bought for convenience is understating the situation. If you needed timely access to books or newspapers that were in high demand you often had to buy out of necessity. I'm not sure how a similar thing would work the internet. How do you limit the number of people that can use the free version? If you don't the people who could pay largely won't. The only idea I've heard that might work is to just make it free for everyone, but put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with use, and divvy up that tax to the sites based on their traffic. That then raises questions like what to tax and how to divvy it up since simply dividing it proportionally to traffic probably would not work well (Richard Stallman has suggesed such a system, with the split based on the cube root of popularity). | |
| ▲ | throwway120385 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders. |
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| ▲ | graphime 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good Perhaps voice your concern with your elected government representative? Unless of course, you think your effort is useless. |
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| ▲ | brunoborges 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads. If only... I do believe that access to commercial AI should be regulated, heavily taxed, and controlled just as much as access to dangerous chemicals and weapons. Only this way the best AI models are more likely to indeed be used for frugal purposes (sadly, however, including ads). |
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| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wouldn't that just incentivize more consumption of models that fall outside of the jurisdiction of whatever you are proposing would be in charge of taxing these so-called best AI models? | | |
| ▲ | brunoborges 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you get caught with illegal guns and illegal chemicals, well... there are consequences. Bad actors will always find a way, at the risk of getting caught. However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models. | | |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wait, so now you are saying that consumption of models that fall outside of the tax jurisdiction would be illegal?? What other goods or services have this sort of precedent? "API call to a company that routed it to a Chinese model? Believe it or not, jail." |
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