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How AI labs are solving the power problem

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Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#131

Post by PunchyHamster »

imglorp wrote: post #11
goda90 wrote: post #3

Power problem: solved Natural Gas supply problem: worsened Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened

And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors. This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized. I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea. https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...

It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical fuckups of the government

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#132

Post by oklahomasports »

miltonlost wrote: post #64
sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles - their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as they see it. The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".

"Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but rather sociopathic. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na... https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

Youve posted the same think like 4 times now

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#133

Post by mucle6 »

lawn wrote: post #130
mucle6 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes sense. For some reason though I still sense a hint of desire for retribution in the original comment

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#134

Post by guhidalg »

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.

The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.

The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#135

Post by redox99 »

AkelaA wrote: post #109

I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.

If you make it more efficient, then you train it for longer or make it larger. You're not going to just idle your GPUs.

And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's going to use your model if someone else has a better model.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#136

Post by redox99 »

pdpi wrote: post #7

Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W. So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.

How much energy did evolution "spend" to get us here?

I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#137

Post by SantalBlush »

mucle6 wrote: post #133
lawn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That makes sense. For some reason though I still sense a hint of desire for retribution in the original comment

I think this is an uncharitable interpretation.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#138

Post by libraryofbabel »

Does anyone know a really good source for basic information estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong reactions that tend to cloud the facts.

Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?

Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#139

Post by inkysigma »

AkelaA wrote: post #109

I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.

What makes you think that the entire process isn't being made more efficient? There are entire papers dedicated to pulling out more FLOPs from GPUs so that less energy is being wasted on simply moving memory around. Of course, there's also inference side optimizations like speculative decoding and MoE. Some of these make the training process more expensive.

The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#140

Post by mucle6 »

guhidalg wrote: post #134
mucle6 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods. The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clea…

You’re conflating race with poverty.

It feels racist to expect people to assume a neighborhood is 'resource poor' just because it is 'historically black'.

Also, the OP explicitly states that lawsuits are pending. Clearly, the community was able to mount a legal defense

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