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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

#241

Post by vibrio »

drooby wrote: post #224
drooby wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways. The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitor…

Addition: Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce their rights every time their music gets played, so they pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical to the training data problem. Each individual contribution is tiny, but the col…

Interesting analogy.

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

#242

Post by shimman »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #234
shimman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> No that is not what democratize means, how asinine. You're wrong, and are getting upset with GP over your own lack of vocabulary. > democratize (verb) > [...] > 2. [+ object] formal : to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something) > * The magazine's goal is to democratize art. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/democratize

[flagged]

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

#243

Post by shimman »

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

#244

Post by bakies »

thecarbonista wrote: post #232
bakies wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughable statement https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

[dead]

Good one, shill

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

#245

Post by abletonlive »

shimman wrote: post #243
abletonlive wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

> If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit?

Because they are optimizing for growth not for profit

> Why are they struggling to show large returns

Because they are growing their reach

> Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves?

"Securing corporate welfare" well this is one of those reject the premise things. They aren't doing that in any capacity that is different than any other company or sector.

> These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess?

You're welcome to do that any time, you'll just find that your reality breaks when you realize people actually like LLMs and use them a lot. go ahead and do some basic research

> Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality.

Yawn. You're speaking about the tech bubble but live in a bubble that doesn't match that bubble's reality. Developers love LLMs. Demand is ATH, we have less capacity to deliver LLMs than there is demand.

How do you operate in the regular world when you're so unaligned with reality?

Both apple and google's app store has LLMs as the #1 downloaded app "BuT thEy ArEn't PoPuLar EvErYbody HaTes Them".

Maybe you should unsubscribe to your bubble subreddits or wherever you are getting information to form such a discordant understanding of reality. I don't think it's working for you.

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

#246

Post by terminalshort »

ajam1507 wrote: post #175
terminalshort wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.

How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible? Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.

The author is not fairly compensated in that case, but if you buy the book, he is. If you bought books and learned to code from them and then went on to go found a startup that ended up being worth billions, you don't owe that author one dollar more than you already paid him when you bought his book. That's more like the AI case here.

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

#248

Post by mike_d »

terminalshort wrote: post #170
dsl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers. We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter. This absolute…

Good. I want more power plants built, especially ones that don't emit CO2.

You seem to be missing the point that they should be public utilities.

Tech companies are exceedingly good at giving things away for free to get all the "market share" and then monetizing.

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

#249

Post by mike_d »

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.

No they should not. They should donate that money to non-profit public utility operators instead.

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

#250

Post by jpetso »

WarmWash wrote: post #212
bix6 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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....

Free books for you as an individual, not free for the library and the city backing it. What's in your library still ends up paying authors (and their publishers).
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