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The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

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Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#91

Post by zahlman »

crote wrote: post #27

With regards to the copper market: it keeps surprising me that some people seem to assume copper is a hard requirement for conducting electricity. In reality copper is just convenient . We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else! For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, whic…

> In the Earth's crust, aluminium is the most abundant metallic element (8.23% by mass[68]) and the third most abundant of all elements (after oxygen and silicon).

TIL. I thought it would be relatively expensive due to the difficulty of extracting it.

(Iron is much cheaper than I thought, too.)

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#92

Post by margalabargala »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #44
y-curious wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an electricity/wiring guy so maybe you can help me understand. I thought aluminum is dangerous to wire with because it is a fire hazard (I bought a home this year and this was a prominent warning in my reading). Is that because it needs to be done very carefully? I imagine most data centers would not mess with a fire risk on such a scale.

Old aluminum wiring in your walls with cloth insulators, designed for a time where electricity consumption was a small fraction of today's electrified usage is dangerous because you're overloading an old, unprepared system. Aluminum bus bars(solid, often exposed) would be designed for the required power levels and installation criteria.

Household electrical usage has decreased, not increased, since that time. Your scaling is backwards.

Old aluminum wires in your walls were designed for a time when you lit your home with 100 watt incandescent lamps rather than 12 watt LEDs.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#93

Post by zahlman »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #89
nine_k wrote: post #10

> If the "half a million tons" figure were accurate, a single 1 GW data center would consume 1.7% of the world's annual copper supply. If we built 30 GW of capacity—a reasonable projection for the AI build-out—that sector alone would theoretically absorb almost half of all the copper mined on Earth. Quickly doing such "back of an envelope" calculations, and calling out things that seem outlandish, could be a useful f…

Nobody on HN is a bigger AI stan than I am -- well, maybe that SimonW guy, I guess -- but the truth is that problems involving unit conversions are among the riskiest things you can ask an LLM to handle for you. It's not hard to imagine why, as the embedding vectors for terms like pounds/kilograms and feet/yards/meters are not going to be far from each other. Extreme caution is called for.

That sounds like the sort of thing I'd expect them to be good at. What goes wrong?

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#94

Post by CamperBob2 »

zahlman wrote: post #93
CamperBob2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody on HN is a bigger AI stan than I am -- well, maybe that SimonW guy, I guess -- but the truth is that problems involving unit conversions are among the riskiest things you can ask an LLM to handle for you. It's not hard to imagine why, as the embedding vectors for terms like pounds/kilograms and feet/yards/meters are not going to be far from each other. Extreme caution is called for.

That sounds like the sort of thing I'd expect them to be good at. What goes wrong?

I edited the post with a speculation, but it's just a guess, really. In the training data, different units are going to share near-identical grammatical roles and positions in sentences. Unless some care is taken to force the embedding vectors for units like "pounds" and "kilograms" to point in different directions, their tokens may end up being sampled more or less interchangeably.

Gas-law calculations were where I first encountered this bit of scariness. It was quite a while ago, and I imagine the behavior has been RLHF'ed or otherwise tweaked to be less of a problem by now. Still, worth watching out for.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#95

Post by crote »

zahlman wrote: post #91
crote wrote: post #27

With regards to the copper market: it keeps surprising me that some people seem to assume copper is a hard requirement for conducting electricity. In reality copper is just convenient . We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else! For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, whic…

> In the Earth's crust, aluminium is the most abundant metallic element (8.23% by mass[68]) and the third most abundant of all elements (after oxygen and silicon). TIL. I thought it would be relatively expensive due to the difficulty of extracting it. (Iron is much cheaper than I thought, too.)

It used to be extremely expensive!

The Washington Monument has an aluminum cap, which at the time was as expensive as silver. Two years later the Hall-Héroult process was invented, and as a result the price plummeted.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#96

Post by jandrese »

nirui wrote: post #85
crote wrote: post #27

With regards to the copper market: it keeps surprising me that some people seem to assume copper is a hard requirement for conducting electricity. In reality copper is just convenient . We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else! For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, whic…

> In reality copper is just convenient. We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable It's convenient, it's easy to work with, great conductivity, and cheap enough all at the sametime... Dude, I think you just explained why cropper is used instead of anything else.

> and cheap enough

Not anymore. :(

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#97

Post by Ekaros »

Pinus wrote: post #8
testplzignore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to standardize on using Earth circumferences as the unit of length. Or better, football fields! (the type of football of course being implied by the website's ccTLD)

We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!

How hard would it be to fix this? Could we theoretically add or subtract enough material or make whole thing slightly more dense or less dense to compensate?

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#98

Post by zahlman »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #94
zahlman wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the sort of thing I'd expect them to be good at. What goes wrong?

I edited the post with a speculation, but it's just a guess, really. In the training data, different units are going to share near-identical grammatical roles and positions in sentences. Unless some care is taken to force the embedding vectors for units like "pounds" and "kilograms" to point in different directions, their tokens may end up being sampled more or less interchangeably. Gas-law calculations were where I…

> In the training data, different units are going to share near-identical grammatical roles and positions in sentences.

Yes, but I would also expect the training data to include tons of examples of students doing unit-conversion homework, resources explaining the concept, etc. (So I would expect the embedding space to naturally include dimensions that represent some kind of metric-system-ness, because of data talking about the metric system.) And I understand the LLMs can somehow do arithmetic reasonably well (though it matters for some reason how big the numbers are, so presumably the internal logic is rather different from textbook algorithms), even without tool use.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#99

Post by Aerroon »

program_whiz wrote: post #25
wongarsu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each person uses about 100W (2000kcal/24h=96W). Running all of humanity takes about 775GW. Sure, using or not using your brain is a negligible energy difference, so if you aren't using it you really should, for energy efficiency's sake. But I don't think the claim that our brains are more energy efficient is obviously true on its own. The issue is more about induced demand from having all this external "thinking" cap…

Is there an AI system with functionality at or equal to a human brain that operates on less than 100W? Its currently the most efficient model we have. You compare all of humanity's energy expenditure, but to make the comparison, you need to consider the cost of replicating all that compute with AI (assuming we had an AGI at human level in all regards, or a set of AIs that when operated together could replace all huma…

>Is there an AI system with functionality at or equal to a human brain that operates on less than 100W?

Obviously not equal to a human brain, but my GPU takes about 150W and can draw an image in a minute that would take me forever to replicate.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#100

Post by paulddraper »

eterm wrote: post #5
daeken wrote: post #2

This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.

If only there were some kind of international system of standard units.

There are standard units, yes.
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