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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

#141

Post by jordanb »

badc0ffee wrote: post #108
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…

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…

Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time, which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.

You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#142

Post by thisgetsit »

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…

> xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!

80ish% in the US live It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."

Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of people.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/generations/millennials-...

So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As long as human biology exists humans will solve for those problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes, ethno objects that come and go with the generations.

Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to the living.

Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#143

Post by redwall_hp »

skywhopper wrote: post #121
mhb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And TFA addresses this. South Memphis was a community largely composed of freed slaves, where manufacturers set up shop, the military dumped waste (now a superfund site), and people have continued to mark the area for polluting industries for generations.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#144

Post by jordanb »

skywhopper wrote: post #121
mhb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair they would definitely do this to rural and/or poor white people too.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#145

Post by doctorpangloss »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #127
doctorpangloss wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> The customers time is not flexible like that.

haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually quite flexible

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#147

Post by Dylan16807 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #127
doctorpangloss wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> The customers time is not flexible like that.

A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible. Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use naturally follows the sun anyway.

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

Some companies already have more chips than they can feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle part of the night.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#148

Post by marci »

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

It makes more sense to word it like this when you take into consideration historical trends, like drowned towns for lakes or dams, highway system along redline, thriving neighbourhoods erased to create parks… often preceded by violence and little to no compensation.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#149

Post by mucle6 »

SantalBlush wrote: post #137
mucle6 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My interpretation is it would be less likely to happen near a wealthy neighborhood compared to a poor neighborhood. Why talk about race if its not about race?

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#150

Post by Dylan16807 »

butlike wrote: post #122
dale_glass wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, but this has vanishingly little to do with the comment chain you replied to, which was about energy efficiency.
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