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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

#171

Post by osigurdson »

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…

They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions can be very low if done correctly.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#172

Post by ACCount37 »

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…

Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was there for what, a decade already? Before it, there was a coal power plant there too.

Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#174

Post by dullcrisp »

mucle6 wrote: post #149
SantalBlush wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Who said they were poor?

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#175

Post by enraged_camel »

mucle6 wrote: post #149
SantalBlush wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The correlation is extremely strong, especially in places like Memphis. And nobody said this particular neighborhood is poor.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#176

Post by ACCount37 »

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…

These "gas turbines" are located next door to the Allen Combined Cycle Plant, a grid scale natural gas power plant with 1.1GW capacity. It's there to power a nearby steel mill. That's the kind of neighborhood xAI has put its cluster in.

I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment, and "environmental racism" just reeks of the usual agenda pushing.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#177

Post by libraryofbabel »

lefra wrote: post #153
libraryofbabel wrote: post #138

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,…

US grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find. So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric... https://www.congre…

Thanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing.

1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)

Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#178

Post by eszed »

wyldfire wrote: post #42
einrealist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word 'pollution' appears exactly one time in this entire thing, the word 'community' or 'communities' never.

The only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do, in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look like the most affordable option, because they're not.

A carbon tax, you say? 9 out of 10 economists agree, and dozens of voters. Dozens!

[That read as snark, didn't it? Sorry. I absolutely, completely, 100% agree with everything you say.]

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#179

Post by crazygringo »

throwaway-11-1 wrote: post #164
crazygringo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Honest question - what are artists being freed up to do that’s more important? DoorDash?

Honest answer - making more art.

Think about how much cloud computing and open sourced changed it so you could launch a startup with 3 engineers instead of 20. What happened? An explosion of startups, since there were so many more engineers to go around. The engineers weren't delivering pizzas instead.

Same thing is happening with anything that needs more art -- the potential for video games here is extraordinary. A trained artist is way more effective leveraging AI and handling 10x the output, as the tools mature. Now you get 10x more video games, or 10x more complex/larger worlds, or whatever it is that the market ends up wanting.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#180

Post by hirsin »

mucle6 wrote: post #140
guhidalg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You've got an extra actor in the mix that makes for a different argument and actually supports the idea that it's racist, I think.

Namely - I think most agree that it's racist to mindlessly assume race and poverty are correlated. The argument here is that the AI companies made that assumption - in other words, they're being called racists.

I don't think it's racist to speculate that a corporation, that made choices that specifically impact black neighborhoods, is racist.

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