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Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

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Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#81

Post by deaux »

gosub100 wrote: post #79
deaux wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it. This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small com…

> the other sacrifices I make This frames the dilemma that you just need to make this little sacrifice so Trillion.ai can make it's trillion. We shouldn't sacrifice anything.

That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code, in truth.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#82

Post by javcasas »

pjc50 wrote: post #66
venk12 wrote: post #56

We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase. These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation. I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do…

> how our planet will survive this critical phase. > trillions in valuation. This is more or less literally the "yes we destroyed the planet, but for a brief moment we created trillions in shareholder value" meme. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask to what extent this benefits humans as humans, not as economic units. Especially given the explicit threat in the AI marketing material to destroy all creative in…

We were told the "paperclip maximizer" as a cautionary tale. Instead, we constructed the "valuation maximizer".

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#83

Post by chasing0entropy »

deaux wrote: post #81
gosub100 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the other sacrifices I make This frames the dilemma that you just need to make this little sacrifice so Trillion.ai can make it's trillion. We shouldn't sacrifice anything.

That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code,…

The key word is "feel" which has a direct and causal relationship to societal programming which is directly impacted if not dictated by media/marketing _ both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using AND it's markup which is ostensibly used for marketing and the consumption guilt "feeling" feedback loop grows.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#84

Post by digitalPhonix »

pmontra wrote: post #38
digitalPhonix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human consumes about 100 watts when not doing any physical exertion (round number, rule of thumb). So unless you can show an LLM running on 100w compute with capabilities similar to a human, they’re less efficient.

100 W is only the start. Let's say that I consume 100 W all along the day. I use an LLM for coding assistance in the old way of asking questions and copy pasting code. It's much faster than me at writing that code. I don't think it ever works 1 hour for me per day. It's probably 10 cumulative minutes, probably much less. Round it up to 12 minutes to make it 1/5 of a hour or round it down to 6 minutes for a 1/10. So i…

If you as a human are coding for 24 hours a day as the benchmark for LLM efficiency we have other problems.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#85

Post by gosub100 »

deaux wrote: post #81
gosub100 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the other sacrifices I make This frames the dilemma that you just need to make this little sacrifice so Trillion.ai can make it's trillion. We shouldn't sacrifice anything.

That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code,…

I agree with your statement, but the difference is we all will pay higher electricity costs whether we use it or not. That's the difference between Mc.D's and AI.

Yet another example of socialize the costs, privatize the profits (except AI isn't profitable yet, lol)

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#86

Post by deaux »

chasing0entropy wrote: post #83
deaux wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code,…

The key word is "feel" which has a direct and causal relationship to societal programming which is directly impacted if not dictated by media/marketing _ both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using AND it's markup which is ostensibly used for marketing and the consumption guilt "feeling" feedback loop grows.

> both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using

Hah, if only. Man, I wish that companies succeeded in doing that, then we'd have a lot more people making such sacrifices. That'd be great.

No one wants their customer to feel guilty because it makes them less likely to buy the product. It's the worst nightmare of any marketer.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#87

Post by pbmonster »

conductr wrote: post #61
pbmonster wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.

We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.

disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out.

First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries.

They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#88

Post by moralestapia »

deaux wrote: post #65
venk12 wrote: post #56

We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase. These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation. I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do…

> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it. This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small com…

Indeed, it's all bullshit.

But it's the bullshit some people like so it's not going to go away soon.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#89

Post by gosub100 »

keeda wrote: post #19
unltdpower wrote: post #3

"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome." > Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

> These things are so hideously inefficient. Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient. If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant. Si…

Are you excluding the cost of training the AI from the calculation?

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#90

Post by deaux »

gosub100 wrote: post #85
deaux wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code,…

I agree with your statement, but the difference is we all will pay higher electricity costs whether we use it or not. That's the difference between Mc.D's and AI. Yet another example of socialize the costs, privatize the profits (except AI isn't profitable yet, lol)

But that too goes for the others all the same. We all pay with our health because some people fly with private jets, or drive Lambos, or indeed eat hamburgers every day. Our health being quite the more precious resource than our money.

But even on the subject of electricity costs. It looks like the biggest electricity consuming sector globally is.. the oil industry! So we're back to the Lambo drivers.

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