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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#31

Post by jordanb »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

Water can range from serious concern to NBD depending on where the data center is located, where the water is coming from, and the specific details of how the data center's cooling systems are built.

To say that it's never an issue is disingenuous.

Additionally one could image a data center built in a place with a surplus of generating capacity. But in most cases, it has a big impact on the local grid or a big impact on air quality if they bring in a bunch of gas turbines.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#32

Post by killerstorm »

On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering:

* AlphaFold - SotA protein folding

* AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864

* "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software

So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story about "data workers" and water?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#33

Post by jtr1 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #18
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass. Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#34

Post by us-merul »

IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

This is a great summary! I've joked with a coworker that while our capabilities can sometimes pale in comparison (such as dealing with massively high-dimensional data), at least we can run on just a few sandwiches per day.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#35

Post by csomar »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #10

I'm surprised the companies fascinated with AGI don't devote some resources to neuroscience - it seems really difficult to develop a true artificial intelligence when we don't know much about how our own works. Like it's not even clear if LLMs/Transformers are even theoretically capable of AGI, LeCun is famously sceptical of this. I think we still lack decades of basic research before we can hope to build an AGI.

Many of the people in control of the capital are gamblers rather than researchers.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#36

Post by simonw »

dlord wrote: post #29
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

I think the water usage argument can be pertinent depending on the context. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-cent... https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-...

That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here:

> A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...]

> For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added.

> That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge.

That's not credible reporting because it makes no effort at all to help the reader understand the magnitude of those figures.

"40 million litres of water" is NOT "a lot of water". As far as I can tell that's about the same annual water usage as a 24 acre soybean field.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#37

Post by hagbarth »

killerstorm wrote: post #32

On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering: * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864 * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story abou…

I believe AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve etc are _not_ looking to get to AGI. The whole article is a case against AGI chasing, not ML or LLM overall.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#38

Post by fny »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

I'm personally excited for when the AGI-nauts start trotting out figures like...

> An H100 on low-carbon grid is only about 1–2% of one US person’s total daily footprint!

The real culprit is humans after all.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#39

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

killerstorm wrote: post #32

On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering: * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864 * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story abou…

I’m not sure you understand what AGI is given the citations you’ve provided.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#40

Post by per1 »

killerstorm wrote: post #32

On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering: * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864 * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story abou…

Hao is not just a "ai is bad" book... Those exist but Hao is a highly credited journalist.
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