> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want.

I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK.

Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.

I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.

Lobster Jesus FTW.

Democracy, even at its most ideal, is often about overriding preferences. Netflix helps to float an entire industry of creators and a tangible pop culture. It's not entirely clear (or softened, maybe not clear to communities) what AI build out floats currently except AI companies and the tangible negatives of generative AI.

I think that potentially the difference is that, while people do in some sense want AI, they don't want it in the same way that they want Netflix. I'd compare it to Amazon: it perfectly possible for people to like the ability to like 2 day shipping while also liking that the site is flooded in cheap crap.

So maybe it is that people like AI in certain domains but HATE the way that it is being used overall?

> How is there a big difference between those two things?

Netflix just serves existing data so their biggest need is data storage ala CDN for closer retrieval to the user. Very low requirements. Creating sweet baby lobster jesus requires incredible amounts of computer/power/cooling. The requirements are totally different. Yes, both ultimately deliver pixels to consumer's eyeballs, but how they get there are so different that it's laughable that people cannot see the difference.

The point is they don't use nearly the same amount of energy.

It's gotta be something. The actual apps I use to do work on my phone either were included in the OS or downloaded long ago.

That doesn't mean people want LLMs to replace their jobs so they can (hopefully) go on welfare, and to have ever more data enters built with that goal in mind.