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US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

theguardian.com

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Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#181

Post by phil21 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #161
throwaw12 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's make some assumptions first: 1. DCs must be built anyway 2. You can't take away energy from households (3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion) based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be b…

Many problems with it: * power generation is not local in most of the cases. You'd be still fucking energy market to anyone outside it * power is also used by companies people actually want. Even if household power cost wont chance thanks to that approach, the price for power for every single business around will increase. * similarly any other manufacturing business will cost more. In essence, the AI boom will reduc…

> "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise.

And should never be a thing. It's not for others to decide something is useless. Let the market figure that out. It should simply be an even playing field, and in theory we already have the regulatory mechanisms to get that done. If the rates are currently able to be abused, that is entirely correctable.

It should not matter if I want to build 1000MW of aluminum smelting capacity, or a facility that digs holes and fills them back in again - so long as I'm paying the regulatory rates that have been set to be fair across all similar power consumers.

The bigger problem by far is that we spent 40-60 years not building anything. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's power capacity. Can only ride inertia and offshoring your industrial energy usage for so long. There are a lot of chickens coming home to roost in the next decade or three on this topic, electric grid was just pulled forward a bit due to the AI bubble.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#182

Post by trinsic2 »

buellerbueller wrote: post #150

Please Democrats don't fuck up the midterms.[1] Take the house and start legislating in favor of the humans. [2] [1] Narrator: they will [2] Narrator: they won't

Our whole system is a binary carrot and stick. Im not sure we are going to see much change when/if democrats return to power. IMHO politics is manufactured to keep the people placated while the people in power to continue business as usual. If you want real change there has to be some kind of movement from grassroots that ends citizens united and starts enforcing anti-trust legislation independent of party politics.

I was looking at this one organization[0], they want to do a constitutional amendment. At this point, I cant disagree with them, but with this administration, I don't know what good its going to do.

[0]: https://americanpromise.net/our-plan/

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#184

Post by drooby »

WarmWash wrote: post #171
drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption. The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?…

I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold.

AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict.

Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits.

The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#185

Post by vannevar »

WarmWash wrote: post #171
drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption. The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?…

>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?

The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#186

Post by filoeleven »

WarmWash wrote: post #171
drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption. The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?…

But AI is absolutely an incinerator of knowledge.

A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic.

What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness.

The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#187

Post by shimman »

WarmWash wrote: post #179
shimman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat. Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit. How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone ra…

Democratize means to make something available to everyone. I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government... So to reframe my argument for clarity; I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow ev…

[flagged]

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#188

Post by baxtr »

drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

> if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value

Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#189

Post by cucumber3732842 »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #169
mistrial9 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gonna fuck over any endangered frogs Extinction is forever -- your frustration, and that committee process, does not compare directly to species extinction.

you care, and i care, and i think even the person you're replying to cares; that's great, but the people involved in the business of making these decisions treat them as a matter of procedure. as long as the boxes are checked, most public sector employees are not going to stick their neck out. it's steady work that pays all right and has great benefits (and even pensions sometimes). a lot of people in the public sect…

The system optimized for these people.

So you get some guy approving some megacorps project because "well it says here that they've tested the stuff and the liquid mercury is below the It must be nice to live in a desert state where every 3rd parcel isn't "within regulatory range" of "wetlands" (most people don't know how expansive that word is).

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#190

Post by Arainach »

WarmWash wrote: post #179
shimman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat. Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit. How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone ra…

Democratize means to make something available to everyone. I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government... So to reframe my argument for clarity; I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow ev…

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