The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
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The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
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Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#2This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#3Checking the arithmetic in every paper published seems like an good use case for LLMs. Has someone built a better version than uploading a PDF to ChatGPT and asking it to check the arithmetic?
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#4Checking the arithmetic in every paper published seems like an good use case for LLMs. Has someone built a better version than uploading a PDF to ChatGPT and asking it to check the arithmetic?
LLM's are why we're in this mess, they can't do math or count r's
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#5This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.
If only there were some kind of international system of standard units.
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#6This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.
We need to standardize on using Earth circumferences as the unit of length. Or better, football fields! (the type of football of course being implied by the website's ccTLD)
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#7This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.
If only there were some kind of international system of standard units.
Olympic swimming pools for liquids, times around the the earth for length and number of double decker busses for height.
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#8This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.
We need to standardize on using Earth circumferences as the unit of length. Or better, football fields! (the type of football of course being implied by the website's ccTLD)
We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#9Checking the arithmetic in every paper published seems like an good use case for LLMs. Has someone built a better version than uploading a PDF to ChatGPT and asking it to check the arithmetic?
LLM's are why we're in this mess, they can't do math or count r's
Modern reasoning models are actually pretty good at arithmetic and almost certainly would have caught this error if asked.
Source: we benchmark this sort of stuff at my company and for the past year or so frontier models with a modest reasoning budget typically succeed at arithmetic problems (except for multiplication/division problems with many decimal places, which this isn't).
Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up
#10> If the "half a million tons" figure were accurate, a single 1 GW data center would consume 1.7% of the world's annual copper supply. If we built 30 GW of capacity—a reasonable projection for the AI build-out—that sector alone would theoretically absorb almost half of all the copper mined on Earth.
Quickly doing such "back of an envelope" calculations, and calling out things that seem outlandish, could be a useful function of an AI assistant.