What's slowing down the AI buildout
worksinprogress.news
What's slowing down the AI buildout
1–10 of 237 posts
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#2‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’.
And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#3Crusoe bypasses the grid completely by leveraging old batteries and wasted resources to power compute.
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#4‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’. And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#5The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#6‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’. And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
> And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
What isn't "purely political?"
Everything is political in the world, unfortunately.
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#7Maybe it's the same thing I heard it was six months ago when it was determined that more hardware was sold than twice the nation's supply of electric.
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#8We should have been building more nuclear. We’re not going to upgrade civilization with windmills and putting on sweaters. Think of how much power we’ll need for millions of robots?
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#9‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’. And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
Who is opposing renewable energy? Texas is projected to top California as the state with the largest amount of solar before the end of the Trump administration.
Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout
#10TFA isn’t about consumer usage, it is about training the next generation models. An interesting thought I heard recently is that a SOTA model has about the same parameters as the number of synapses in a Golden Retriever’s brain that are not dedicated to biological processes like breathing. Most of that should be wrapped in double quotes, don’t take it literally! But that number is about 100x lower than the same synapses in a human brain.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.