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How AI labs are solving the power problem

newsletter.semianalysis.com

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Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#121

Post by skywhopper »

mhb wrote: post #106
g8oz wrote: post #101

>>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines. These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending. xAI says…

Why is the skin tone of the residents of the affected community relevant?

Because the people who decided where to locate it and the people in government who could do something to stop it make decisions about how much they care based on those folks’ skin color. If those generators were placed near a rich white neighborhood, the government response would be wildly different.

Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#122

Post by butlike »

dale_glass wrote: post #46
beepbooptheory wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inference itself is also very costly! But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?

Not really. I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15 seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to type.

An LLM gives AN answer. If you ask for not many more than that it gets confused, but instead of acting in a human-like way, it confidently proceeds forward with incorrect answers. You never quite know when the context got poisoned, but reliability drops to 0.

There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...

The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#123

Post by butlike »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #62
beepbooptheory wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "faster" really what we are talking about right now? It could be a lot faster to take a helicopter to work everyday too, versus riding a bike. Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?

There's a billion users. Why do we make massive cities and factories and fields if humans only need 2000 calories a day

idk, why?

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#124

Post by badc0ffee »

skywhopper wrote: post #119
badc0ffee wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas. My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue). Every building here (except for those connected to dist…

Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-air-p... Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were…

That is true of gas stoves, but gas furnaces don't exhaust into the house.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#125

Post by mucle6 »

g8oz wrote: post #101

>>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines. These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending. xAI says…

The phrasing 'historically black neighborhoods' feels like it pushes a specific agenda rather than just addressing the pollution.

It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.

Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people living there now.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#127

Post by PunchyHamster »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #99
O5vYtytb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days. [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...

Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by power, by all means, offer users a discount when their queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to save cents to fill up their tanks - you can’t say there isn’t precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better question is, is it really a constraint?

The customers time is not flexible like that.

And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#128

Post by bugglebeetle »

qchris wrote: post #77

I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative. > Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive. > Again, clever firms like xAI have fo…

It’s called “Semi” analysis for a reason. Dylan Patel is the Jim Cramer of industry reporting for this sector.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#129

Post by trhway »

bespokedevelopr wrote: post #95

I previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side. My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry. I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with buildi…

so we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end - residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago). That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration wave.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#130

Post by lawn »

mucle6 wrote: post #125
g8oz wrote: post #101

>>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines. These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending. xAI says…

The phrasing 'historically black neighborhoods' feels like it pushes a specific agenda rather than just addressing the pollution. It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance. Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people living there now.

> It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.

I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.

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