Here's a probably stupid question - if someone were unbounded by ethics and conceivably had enough power and connections to power to shield themselves from many consequences of their actions - and that person owned these DCs, could they in theory observe all the streams of tokens coming in and out of these models, and even exfiltrate copies of these models wholesale to have their own teams do what they will with them…
I think that's the datacenter with the gas turbine generators that operate without permits because they're "portable." Data centers have tremendous externalities but colossus is a particularly nasty offender, and not just due its size. Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
> xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
I think that's the datacenter with the gas turbine generators that operate without permits because they're "portable." Data centers have tremendous externalities but colossus is a particularly nasty offender, and not just due its size. Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year). I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sit…
The biggest issue with the interim onsite generation is the lack of meaningful stack height on the generating units.
Airplanes by virtue of their mode of operation stay out of the unhappy regime most of the time. Also, engines at/near idle produde orders of magnitude less emissions. Those aeroderivative generators are running at full capacity 24/7.
Dumping exhaust at ground level continuously is probably much worse than the airport. Even if it's a FedEx world hub.
What's the tremendous externality of gas generators? People heat their own homes with natural gas and it's no big deal. How can a datacenter that is miles away be worse than that?
The gas furnace in my basement don't have a massive jet turbine emiting high frequency noise
It's the low frequencies that's more of an issue apparently. Benn Jordan has a great series of videos about it, including one on Colossus
Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their model…
More people should try Grok. I don't use it for coding but it's replaced a lot of my ChatGPT usage. Definitely more perferred model for quick questions or easy answers.
One thing I do like about Grok is that it makes it stupid easy to see what its referencing, and gives you the links to those resources. Which most models sometimes either don't bother, or don't do much of a good job of doing. It's not the top model, but it is definitely high up there, people's blind rage for anything Elon Musk is the only reason most people don't realize how capable it is unfortunately. Grok is not exclusively made by Elon Musk, there's definitely other engineers working day and night on it.