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

theguardian.com

211–220 of 265 posts

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

#211

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…

> vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize

Lol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a continuous attack against the idea of nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the population. Us the population have already lost a war we had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far longer game than most of us.

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

#212
post #195

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…

> anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies. Sorry what? Authors are gatekeepers to what? Their books that they wrote and now will never get paid for cuz the LLM ripped it?

Considering that books have probably been the easiest thing to pirate for the last 30 years, and LLMs are probably the worst way to try and read a book free, I'm not sure why authors would be focusing their anger at AI.

Many books you can even get free at a library....

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

#213

It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.

>Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.

Capitalists don't care about money. Capitalists collect money for it's power in a capitalist system.

If they get "AI" and industrial robots, they don't care that nobody can buy their products anymore because they never cared about selling products in the first place.

Right now capitalists loathe that they can "only* collect a 10-50% return on the things "they build", and the rest of the value has to go to the consumer. They want nothing more than getting rid of that "waste", and just having their personal factories create whatever they want and their personal farms making whatever they want and we all just fucking die.

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

#214

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?…

> This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is Paying for access to information is not democracy

Plenty of free models you can run on your own hardware. I don't think those are going away either

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

#215

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…

> Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome

Average people who wants to go home from work and game are angry at AI for raising the ram prices.

Average person who wants to own the stuff and not have things on cloud are angry at AI for raising prices 5 times in such a short period of time.

Have you talked to an average person and how they use AI? They use it as a glorified no-code editor (I would admit not no-code editor itself but rather the vibe-coding aspects with no regards to what tech stack is being used, how its being deployed, literally anythoing) and search engine. Refer to how things like lovable etc.

A search engine which can make some pretty wrong cases which can literally lead to near death like scenarios all while being completely trust me bro attitude.

A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every brain cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

Normal people use AI to confide in it secrets, seek therapy somehow. And the same AI generates AI pyschosis.

Now coming to tech industry: Tech industry is worried about that such levels of democratization just means that nobody is going to pay for them yet at the same time, we will see projects who are completely created by AI seek money. It's this weird mush where if you are a genuine guy who just loved computing, who loved tinkering, yeah we're offloading that capability to AI

I have seen this even more and more with as agents want to get more autonomous or we are letting them be. The projects generated feel hollow to me. I don't consider myself a full fledged programmer right now and AI did supercharge me and made me have projects. Nowadays, it just feels like prompt ---> (Time) --> Output.

It just feels hollow and AI companies did it by abusing the passion of these same developers and scraping stack overflow, scraping github and having all disregards for properties.

People could spend years creating a book about say postgres and an AI took it, ripped it in half and then decided to use that info and not even give credits.

All, at the same time that AI is being pushed down on employees. Some just don't want to have it but nope, they must. they are forced.

Essentially engineering with AI feels like it becomes a marketing gimmick. Anyone who can market somehow (Ahem ahem Openclaw) can get a job at OpenAi all because in some attention hype breeds hype and they had stars and people talked about stars on twitter, and more people found it and starred it and so on and started using it

Turns out that nowadays there are allegations being made against Openclaw

> Star velocity shocked analysts. Moreover, the repository added roughly 220,000 stars within 84 days of launch. In contrast, Kubernetes needed five years for similar numbers. Many builders call the growth organic. Nevertheless, some observers link the surge to hype, bot accounts, and headline attention, fueling the GitHub Stars Controversy. Independent GitHub Archive pulls show several single-day jumps above 25,000 stars. Such abrupt spikes often signal scripted starring, yet no formal audit confirms abuse. These patterns feed community debate. Consequently, trust in the star metric has weakened, prompting calls for verification.

https://www.aicerts.ai/news/openclaws-github-stars-controver...

The marketing industry has been very closely linked to sometimes scam prone areas and shady areas of the internet and engineering used to be clean from all of this for the most part. Now, the norm to me feels like buy github stars and buy twitter attention or pray to be in an algorithm which you can't read but it reads every move you make, and yes this is your business strategy now

Have you looked at truly AI-first companies and what they do/like how do they generate numbers in the first place?

These are two distinct points. I don't think that people of here would be any mad if someone made a little prototyping script for themselves with the power of this Phd that you mention. Heck, these same programmers that you now call gatekeepers have never gatekeeped much of it. They worked and contributed to open source for free while being severely undermainted.

The audacity to call these same people gatekeepers shockens me because open source people if anything are the Opposite of that and yet AI stole their rights and their licenses from them. An AI can take AGPL code and then somehow churn it into MIT tada! It doesn't even have to give any accredits when it gets trained on AGPL or ANY type of code, no matter how restrictive or permissive.

these are the same people btw who are on programming forums which yes at times did have moderation issue but still tried to help noobs learn for free. They did it because they loved tinkering with computers

That's my take on it. feel free to ask for more things if you may as I would love to tell you more but for the sake of this discussion, I think enough can be relevant.

It's absolutely ironical to call say the Open source people gatekeepers because AI violated their rights and licenses.

Calling Open source Contributors gatekeepers might as well be an oxymoron.

Edit: I have been downvoted in so little time after I wrote this comment that I am pretty sure that someone might not have even read my comment and had it downvoted.

The topic can be at times too polarizing to even have a discussion.

Oh well. That's completely okay but to any human who read this, I know my writing can be sporadic and it was written in much frustration over how people try to frame AI as this harbingers of liberty. I absolutely think that's not the case and its viewing things from a very rose tinted glasses.

So thanks to all the humans who read my comment and were patient haha!

I really appreciate this patience in a world of TLDR and I wish you to have a nice day!

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

#216
post #209
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.

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…

No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality.

Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code.

Calling information "entropy" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on.

You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them.

You don't get it both ways.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

trust me, this happens even in dense, deep blue places like Seattle and LA.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 chec…

Congratulations, you ignored all the substance in my post and focused on one word.

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

#219
post #12

Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)? Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.

The current US government is systematically attacking anything which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and claims it's mostly all a scam. So no. But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage. Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not on…

Acid rain and smog are not much of a concern with gas turbines. The most problematic exhaust is probably nitrous oxide.

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

#220
post #204
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, two things worth considering.

First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies are continuously scraping new data, training new model generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output too. There's always a live point at which to assert a collective claim.

Likely - these models will always be training on us to better understand us and continue to be of value to us commercially.

Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources" is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions. That concentration of capital is exactly why a public claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with oil.

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