551–560 of 683 posts
Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…
I believe in AGI because I believe you can estimate where a line is going by its slope. Is there not a way to evaluate the resilience of a rate of change? Like the variance of that rate of change? If so you could almost prove with greater and greater certainty that we will get there.
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I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI ) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines…
I'm definitely more optimistic about Helion. It's the one that would really dramatically change the economics of power generation at scale, and they seem to have substantially engineered around major challenges like not requiring ignition and minimizing losses to Bremsstrahlung radiation. I like that they're laser-focused on launching and delivering commercial value, even if that means a bit less transparency and les…
Helion's latest funding round was US$425 million, bringing total funding to over a billion, on a US$5 billion valuation. To give that money back to their investors, assuming a 40% profit margin, they'd need to sell something like 100 copies of Orion at US$30 million each, totaling 5 gigawatts. For the investors to consider them successful, it would need to be more like 2000 copies of Orion, totaling 100 gigawatts.
That's a completely plausible market size (although it's not just "all over the country", because the country they're in only has 1161 GW of generation capacity and is barely building any), so their NRE costs to date are not an impossible burden. It really depends on four things:
1. Can they hit such a low price target as US$30 million per 50-megawatt power plant? Can they ship anything for US$30 million a pop?
2. Will they be allowed to sell to China, where the customers are?
3. Will solar energy get cheaper still, forcing them to an even lower price point?
4. Will opex of the resulting reactors be manageable?
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Hard problem of consciousness seems way harder to wolve than the easy one which is a purely engineering problem. People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea.
> People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea I'm not sure what you mean by this. I think there is a pretty large consensus that our neocortex is a prediction machine (predicting future observations/outcomes from past experience), and the reason WHY it would have evolved to be this is because there is obvious massive survival benefit in successfully…
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I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reactio…
It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism." I have no idea why. I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.
You have just trained your brain to be so obsessed with politics you can't but help to see it everywhere.
Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…
Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from lo…
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I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority. I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else. We all ne…
This is an odd perspective to me. I'm an atheist because I don't find the truth claims of theistic religions convincing. Whether or not the centralized structure of modern religion is problematic is tangential to that
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Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from lo…
The fact that certain specific data centres are being proposed or built in areas with water issues may be bad, but it does not imply that all AI data centres are water guzzling drain holes that are killing Earth, which is the point you were (semi-implicitly) making in the article.
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> People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea I'm not sure what you mean by this. I think there is a pretty large consensus that our neocortex is a prediction machine (predicting future observations/outcomes from past experience), and the reason WHY it would have evolved to be this is because there is obvious massive survival benefit in successfully…
Not why it was created, why the systems in the brain lead to consciousness. Your option B requires understanding not just mechanically how but the fundamental reason for why consciousness appears. If we just understand the mechanics all we can confidently do is work toward a more and more accurate representation of the brain. AGI without consciousness is speculated but hard for me to believe in.
I would expect that all intelligent animals are conscious, and any AI we build with a roughly brain-like architecture in terms of connections, looping, and being prediction based would also report itself to be conscious and describe a similar subjective experience. LLMs seem much too simple (just layer-wise pass-thru data flow) to be conscious.
It's possible that some of the neural connections supporting consciousness may have evolved, or been enhanced, due to the evolutionary value of enhanced self-prediction (i.e. this is the reason), but as noted I expect it basically "comes for free" with any complete enough cognitive/sensory architecture.
> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment). Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable. Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Sud…