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Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

anthropic.com

21–30 of 110 posts

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#21
post #19

"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

> These things are so hideously inefficient. Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient. If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant. Si…

Do keep in mind that 1 large prompt every 5 minutes is not how e.g. coding agents are used. There it's 1 large prompt every couple of seconds.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#22
post #19

"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

> These things are so hideously inefficient. Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient. If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant. Si…

So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?

Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#24

"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

Every piece of progress looks like this to begin with.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#25
post #4

> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers. This is great, but do they have an actual example of something that would have been passed on to consumers? Or is it just a hypothetical? In the location I’…

Georgia power already has a demand scaled recovery charge addition to bills that increases prices for residential customers regardless of where the demand originates. It used to be only applied occasionally during the summer. Now they've adjusted the peak / off-peak rates to be what it used to be plus the demand recovery, and now the demand recovery is additional and just applies pretty much all the time.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#26

"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

How are you measuring efficiency? They're better than most humans, which is what I would need more of as a substitute.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These things are so hideously inefficient. Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient. If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant. Si…

So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption? Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.

> So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?

Soon enough, we won't be able to avoid this question.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#29
post #13
post #9

> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. How does paying more monthly cover an infrastructure build out that requires up front capital?

Financing.

[deleted]

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These things are so hideously inefficient. Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient. If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant. Si…

So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption? Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.

You put them to work doing more things than were possible in a month before.
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