161–170 of 270 posts
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Yeah. I've heard about it. So this wouldn't be a problem if it affected a different group of people?
Probably not because if it affected white neighborhoods, it either wouldn't be enacted, shut down after complaints, or receive enough bad press as to be shut down.
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,…
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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.
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For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant. This is apart from the fact that right now we are at a choke point where it's much more important to generate less CO2 than it is to write scientific simulation code a little quicker (and most people are using AI for much more unnecessary stuff like marketing)
> For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant. That is certainly not a logical leap I'm making. AI doesn't make anybody redundant, the same way mechanized farming didn't. It just frees them up to do more productive things. Now consider whether LLM's will ultimately speed up the technological advancements necessary to reduce CO2? It's certainly plausible.
>>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…
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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 demand for both compute and electricity is higher while people are awake and using them. But not all demand is realtime, and some will shift in response to prices.
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.
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.
try to calculate 12312312.123213 * 123123.3123123 A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human. It's all about the task, humans are specialized too. EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.
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> It feels racist to expect people to assume a neighborhood is 'resource poor' just because it is 'historically black'. Statistically poverty is correlated with race. For reasons to do with (quite recent) history.
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