Only if you pay a flat rate for electricity and cooling.

odo1242 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Most of the GPU cost is in the GPUs themselves (and in the space and maintenance costs of the building). Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.

There is cost, but the cost is mostly the opportunity cost of not being able to do something else.

	▲	toast0 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use. I don't have any insight on modern GPU datacenters, but in decades past, some owned and operated datacenters didn put effort into making sure power management worked because the cost savings were worth it. I'm pretty sure I saw plans to shed load and power off servers if a utility made a demand response request or in case of loss of cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if some owned and operated data centers do regular full shutdowns at off peak... WOL, IPMI or RTC wakeup can bring them back when needed and if you already have a dynamic service orchestrator and setup times are acceptable, why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...

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tristanj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But Anthropic isn't paying for the electricity and cooling. They don't run their own data centers, they rent compute from providers who cover those costs.

That's entirely why they can blow compute on the fun projects like this. If they had to pay extra for the electricity, they wouldn't do it.

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Barbing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is the electricity cost far greater than the marketing value?

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rightnutwingjob an hour ago | parent [-]

The first is a physical quantity that can be written down.

The second is approximately no better than astrology.

	▲	ehe78qhe an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The second point is, sadly, true of quite a lot of aspects of software, including "design" and "quality"

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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