Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 265 posts

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

#201

Post by WarmWash »

Arainach wrote: post #190
WarmWash wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

If it's slop, why do they pay for it?

I mean, raise you hand if you have never paid for AI "slop", I see maybe a hand or two in this room of tens of thousands.

It's a strawman to frame it as AI labs get everything and society gets nothing. Bruh, the fastest growing applications of all time didn't explode in popularity because they "offer nothing of value". I'm not giving you an argument, I'm giving you a reality check.

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

#202

Post by orphea »

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?…

  > a personal PhD
Come on, spare us OpenAI's PR bullshit.

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

#203

Post by GrinningFool »

shimman wrote: post #176
WarmWash wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

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…

> 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 rather than benefiting the few.

You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep ownership.

This is in addition to the billions in PR already being spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and economic costs.

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

#204

Post by baxtr »

drooby wrote: post #197
baxtr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is d…

ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment.

not sure if that would work in this case since all these companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the right resources anyone could redo it?

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

#205

Post by BizarroLand »

abletonlive wrote: post #196
shimman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR Time to leave whatever bubble you live in. These are some of the most popular apps on the market today. It's incredibly popular.

[flagged]

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

#206

Post by tomrod »

simianwords wrote: post #104
tomrod wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid overload if they produce too much base load. Interconnection expenses. Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.

so no companies should build anything even if they attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just nimbyism.

You'll notice that I did not advocate against building and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being aware of tradeoffs.

In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right solution to a problem.

I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a follow up comment to understand your train of thought.

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

#207

Post by BizarroLand »

nDRDY wrote: post #167
blitzar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my read was ... we should cut down trees, burn them and bury the ashes to save the planet

It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.

I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid thing I've ever read on the internet.

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

#208

Post by mrguyorama »

dathinab wrote: post #105
harimau777 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.

it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues (Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to…

The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.

The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries.

IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.

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

#209

Post by pixl97 »

drooby wrote: post #155
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 assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space. But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

There is no us, there is only you, by default.

To move beyond that default you need to organize into things like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments.

Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your mind, it is now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it. This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws of men and their fickle will.

Much like we build on information from our past generations, AI will build its own new information on those foundations. And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly probable it will do it far better than we will and forever cement us in a prison of our own making.

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

#210

Post by pixl97 »

rybosworld wrote: post #191
drooby wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space. But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

> the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will flee if their taxes go up. Spoiler alert: they don't. Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we wi…

Ah yes, we'll depend on the democratic nations of the free world to protect our rights over the billionaires.

looks at the US

Well, looks like we lost that.

Post reply on HN