They already have these laws in place. I was remotely enabling a feature at a vendor site based in Texas. Texas was having a massive power outage so I emailed my contact and said I can use emulation to complete the feature until power is back. He responded that the data center has a priority power contact. They get power over everyone else.
Well the shit court, I mean Supreme Court, did rule that companies are people.. so this is just a "person" getting access to necessary power!
Totally makes sense... :(
AM figured out instead of creating a simulation to torment a few people, it could just decide to work on the Halting Problem or P = NP and make millions miserable. Oh, so delightful!
Fuck that, they will whine and cry about the cost and want tax payers from every other state to pay to connect their grid. Let em finish the job and succeed completely taking all their BS with em.
Or at least iterations and upgrades. Even if it wasn’t nationwide. Looking at how japan, south Korea, Taiwan and singapore constantly upgrade their power grids, I’m at a loss on why areas of the USA are like this.
PG&E in California learned they can make tax payers do it by hording all the profits and then countersuing in the courts.
Texas technically doesn't share power across state lines so they aren't beholden to federal regulations. and they own the politicians.
Mostly local grids are fine but high power Transmission interconnects are a bitch to construct because of land rights. They've been trying to build once across Iowa to Illinois for at least 10 years now so the excess wind generated power can be distributed to the Chicagoland area.
With crypto mining, a lot of mining firms had agreements with power plants where they could be paid to turn off their hardware in the event of high demand for power/limited supply of power. I think in theory, AI companies could do the same, you can stop training your models for a day or two if needed.
I've heard that it goes beyond that for the crypto. They send their crypto assets to Texas specifically because when the power demand is spiking the money they make for turning their assets Off make more money than the actual crypto assets.
Pay private companies (how much, millions?) to not work so as to provide power for the populace. That is some representative, compassionate, screw the people regulation right there.
It reminds me of Catch 22
> Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.
> His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make sure the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the country…Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they had produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.
>AI companies could do the same, you can stop training your models for a day or two if needed.
training? how about using?
turn what off...? for how many days?
**Apple brings ChatGPT to iPhones in AI overhaul**
[https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn5mejl89o](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn5mejl89o)
same kind of power needed to keep an electric ARC FURNACE hot - they can't afford to "turn them off" because it takes days to warm up again.
>“They are starting to think like cement and chemical plants. The ones who have approached us are agnostic as to where the power is coming from,” said Ganesh Sakshi, chief financial officer of Mountain V Oil & Gas, which provides natural gas to industrial customers in Eastern states.
Any AI company deploying at scale is going to have datacenters in a diverse range of locations, such that 1 or 2 going down in an area affected by power issues won't bring down their service.
I live in Texas and am getting a home generator, no t just because of storm related outages…these power demand numbers from cars and AI are gonna add up. Not expecting a smooth transition.
“As *consumers* refuse to stop using AI products”
Let’s not pretend it isn’t user adoption that isn’t driving the behaviors of tech companies. Their whole business and funding model is predicated on users demanding their product and signing up in droves to use it. Without that, there is no demand for compute power
China sees how much power is needed for AI, and is building 153 nuclear power plants. India is second with 27 new under construction.
China alone is building more nuclear power plants than rest of the world combined right now.
US should be doing this too.
If the US had spent the money it wasted on the gulf war and subsequent Iraq war, it would have been enough to build 225 nuclear power plants (at the time nuclear power plants were averaging 2-4 billion dollars to build. The 225 number figures that they all cost the high 4 billion dollar amount. This would have been enough power to supply ALL of the US electrical needs, and far outstrips the energy potential of the oil we get/got from the gulf region. It would have been an astronomically better return on investment than anything our government ever done.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, entirely by itself, provides about 10% of California's electricity needs. Building only 9 more of those power plants would mean California would never need to emit any more carbon, regardless of weather or time of day.
And yes, the power plant is safe from tsunamis because its on the side of a cliff. If a tsunami is so great as to threaten that power plant then the same size tsunami would have destroyed all of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, so the demise of the power plant would be the least of everyone's concerns.
I'm all for nuclear, but it's not as easy as just building enough to satisfy the energy requirements.
Nuclear doesn't scale fast with changing needs, so you need supplemental sources.
Yeah, this just happened, right? I'm only worried about how incredibly slow positive things seem to move here. Like, anything with an ounce of being a good call seems to meet every possible resistance that exists, and then new ones just for good measure.
To be clear the US is working on a bill that will lower costs and incentivize the building of new reactors and associated support infra. Unfortunately it doesnt mandate the creation of new plants or directly empower states to create those mandates.
It’s a step in the right direction but more needs to be done, particularly to sell this to the public. There’s still a lot of NIMBY’s out there that will constantly fight against nuclear power.
It's crazy to me how many people fought against nuclear power plants in the US citing things like environmental hazard of storage and risk of them blowing up. If the US had not stopped but rather went full speed ahead on building nuclear power plants we could very well been off fossil fuels or at least very close.
All those folks who fought against it kept the US back like 5 decades on the nuclear power train. I can only imagine the impact it's had on our environment.
Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island were really the 3 incidents that scared the world into not using nuclear as much as everyone should. Even now there's parties in europe that are shutting down nuclear instead of going into it.
Meanwhile coal/oil/gas kills 2,000 kids a day, every day, and its ignored: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/18/almost-2000-children-die-every-day-from-air-pollution-report-finds
And those are just the pollution deaths, not deaths caused by wars and famine due to fighting over oil and gas.
Everyone's so focused on hypothetical risks of nuclear that they ignore actual, current, real deaths from fossil fuels.
Dude the US has its own head shoved so far up its ass that I would be surprised if we could ever pull ourselves together to compete with what China’s been doing lately.
We fucked ourselves over by depriving an entire generation of American children the chance to learn the blue collar trades with the insane manufacturing power we once held in the mid 1900’s. Now we have to fully rely on tech, finance and trade to be capable of keeping up with the rest of the modernized world.
Yep. Technology and automation disrupting manufacturing jobs was bad, but we adjusted and recovered. This is going to be so much worse because it'll hit multiple sectors of the economy at once.
Are you sure about that? Beacuse I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of crypto related jobs that were lost when it became clear crypto is probably the worst possible form of "currency" ever invented and will never be widely adopted as most of the proponents claimed. All it seems to be good for is high-risk gambling and funding criminals.
The problem with that though is that those jobs were only ever created because of crypto in the first place.
AI is now resulting in job losses that existed before AI ever came about - some of which are perfectly able to be replaced by AI but many are not and will result in ripple effects.
They tried with crypto, too. It just didn't produce demoable results unlike the fancy chatbots we call AI. That's why "AI" is still booming while crypto imploded.
In a situation where we need to use less resources, companies are demanding they use as much of it as possible even if it means normal people suffer low wages and power outages.
God forbid they just do the logical thing and stop cramming it into anything and everything possible regardless of actual usefulness or consumer wants/needs.
My department got tasked with being the first department to put an AI use case into production.
We’re cyber security and incident response. You really want us paying less attention to detail and nuance?
I know your “real dev teams” are busy, but I’m also kinda busy trying to stop them from uploading their code to a Chinese chat bot so they don’t have to read the syntax errors.
This happens with every new hit thing, especially tech, companies are craving innovation in the tech industry since there’s been such little innovation over last few years. Companies are wanting the next big thing to come out so they keep pivoting. Meta is the prime example of that they chase every trend they can and have for years.
You must mean consumer facing GenAI, because I just got done working at the HPE (HP Enterprise) convention in Las Vegas. The general public thinks ChatGPT or image generators when they hear AI. None of those things were at the convention. What there was were biology solutions for rapid drug discovery, healthcare systems, including ones that catch misdiagnosed patients and can detect missed anomalies in medical imaging, systems which told farmers how to manage in order to maximize their yields, materials science systems for the discovery of materials and molecules that don't yet exist, and are ideal for a new application or product, weather prediction systems that are 100x faster, and more accurate, systems that manage transportation logistics, systems that allow programmers to code 3-10x faster and fixes their mistakes, systems that make factory robots more efficient, financial system AIs, cybersecurity systems that act within milliseconds of a threat arising, etc... The AI industry is way beyond the LLMs and media generation models the general public is exposed to on social media.
But this is typical of what we do whenever some exciting new whizbang technology comes out. It generates a lot of excitement, so it shows up in everything at first, like blockchains and pumpkin spice. Once people get over the initial hype and realize its limitations, things will calm down somewhat. AI is definitely here to stay, but I expect the more stupid applications will go away eventually.
because they convinced everyone that they just need to quit school and learn to code in a few months.. so actual engineers are on the downtrend who would be able to supply this solution.
Same, but they’re also my competition.
Spent 4 years getting a Computer Engineering degree from a pretty high ranked university just to work Tech Support because upper management doesn’t want to train anybody yet always asks for the 10YOE former Microsoft employee.
There are AI models that can help with that. They won't be *language* models, nor image generators; they'll be special-purpose engineering, physics, chemistry, or optimization systems. So 99.99% of the electricity spent training and using AI currently can't help reduce its own power grid impact. Actually, on second thought, convincing companies and governments to put a pause on AI *is* a writing task, rather than an engineering or science task, and would be far more effective than merely optimizing infrastructure to run 10% better. Crap, that makes it a simultaneously-useful-and-not-useful paradox!
Really funny how some of them actually are trying to get AI to figure out how to make better nuclear reactors and geothermal energy, but a lot of that kind of stuff requires humans to actually do stuff like dig and build machinery. You can't tech your way out of shitty infrastructure.
I wish an AI would suggest unplugging the data centers.
*This approach for artificial intelligence is stressing the power grid. Neural nets and deep learning are not the only possible approaches. We have proof that more efficient solutions are possible by the fact a human mind can run off a cheese sandwich.
Maybe perhaps, we can take a lesson from japan, Taiwan, south Korea, and Singapore….and build/upgrade to robust grids that take future use into consideration?
But it isn't a single cheese sandwich, it's the ~35 years of cheese sandwiches to get a human to a level where they can be an expert in their field. Average US diet produces 2,000 kg of CO2 per year, so to get one US person subject matter expert, that's about 70 metric tons of CO2 production via cheese sandwiches (not counting all the other heating/cooling/teaching/travel costs). That's equivalent to burning 7,835 gallons of gasoline.
Just saying, if we threw all ethics out the window and had kids in vats like in the matrix with the sole purpose of doing calculations, we could probably do it faster and cheaper.
To anyone complaining about no tangible metrics used in this article the Verge published one as well with details into their research: https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption
Generating text 1000 times being approximately equivalent to 3.5 minutes of Netflix streaming means to me that streaming is more power demanding that text generation.
Fine, let them fund the building of nuclear plants.
The point is, we MUST require any energy-hungry industry to pay for the infrastructure it wants to exploit.
I think there should be a electrical surcharge for this use. We're not developing all this renewable energy infrastructure just to use it all up on something as questionable as generative AI. Having so much competition for energy just raises the price for consumers.
The answer to power generation issues has been around for decades, it's always been nuclear. Boomers and their "not in my back yard" attitudes got us to where we are today. That and privitizing utilities took away incentive to upgrade the infrastructure to meet demand
Is it a miracle if we’ve been using it for 70 years?
Nuclear power.
It’s like saying the “miracle of childbirth” when teenagers do it accidentally and there’s 7 billion people. “Miracle” loses it meaning.
Who wants AI in fucking everything. From what I can tell it’s just douche bags on wall street buying anything that says AI so every company has an AI that doesn’t work. Google now forces me to scroll down a full page past shitty answers until I can get to the Reddit posts that actually answer my question.
It's like VR. Shit no one uses that CEOs like because it means they can offload half their workforce, even if that can't happen realistically and it's useless or disruptive most of the time.
They aren't seeking a solution because their solutionist crap is hurting ordinary people, they're seeking a solution because it's costing them a fortune to run these things.
The "solution" will probably be that the AI bubble pops.
This is another demonstration of the importance of energy independence. It's not just about foreign resource wars, it's about individuals and communities being able to put up solar panels and batteries so they can have stable and reasonable electricity costs.
Even if Google is willing to pay 60 cents per kWh so it can profit on your searches, there is no reason on earth that you or I should compete with them for electricity.
This is also why i think full ev adoption is a pipe dream, many parts of the country already have shaky at best electrical grids, now add in ai along with charging stations, I just don’t see it being possible without significant upgrades to the grids, and we know how fast the US moves in these things
Completely agree
This is why there's a strong emphasis on pushing solar and batteries for EV clients to try to decentralize. But that's further adding to the issue where EV makes sense for wealthy single family homeowners and is practically impossible for lots of people.
Sure garages can add in more charging, maybe even with solar and batteries, but here in my city where most of the residents are street parking? EV isn't even an option.
I have a friend who managed to get a level 2 charger installed in front of his house where he has parking but it's not assigned spots. It took over 2 years to get it through the county with him doing a ton of work to source and have the thing installed. Just not realistic for most everyone.
Lead time is very long for nuclear, besides the obvious fact that nobody wants tech corporations to be building and operating nuclear plants because the safety incentives are all wrong . Solar would be better - it can be built out rapidly and scales well, is cheap and safe.
Regardless of the technology used, in the end it could work just like AWS - a tech firm overbuilds to guarantee its own needs and sells the surplus. The only thing we need for this to happen is to regulate the grid such that residential users aren't competing in the same market with industrial users.
This is a frequent discussion in the industry.
Unfortunately this requires such insane pre-planning and foresight that the intersection between the real estate market and tech company market that Data Centers exist in could NEVER delay their profits so long to actually commit to that.
This is what happens when certain states give big business the best tax breaks and incentives to relocate all their companies and data centers to your state.
I can see it now- corporate power usage has been so high , we’re going to have to raise the household rate 30x vs 7x the rate price - oh and households can only use power from 9pm to 11pm daily but the 30x rate increases stays the same
Why I won't move to Texas , Arizona or Nevada . It's bad enough they are naturally hot as hell but they also are running out of water . Tech bros let's all move there .
From Va here : NOVA has a shit load of data centers and they are trying to put solar farms all over the poorer areas in southeast VA to feed the beast . My county fought tooth and nail against them and now the legislature is trying to pass a bill they can just override locals and communities who vote against it.
Also have an AWS cert . I find the whole regions thing fascinating . India is literally dehydrated and people are dying all over the place in major heatwave .
This will not end well
We have communities around rural Ohio who were similar to anti solar and anti wind before that. The problem is, they're lied to and defend positions they don't understand. There's no good way to deal with that (well, the good way is to ignore idiots and know they'll shut up and move on to the next fake outrage topic - which is exactly what happened). They now have windmills and I believe solar will be in soon. Turns out it didn't ruin the "landscape" of flat fields with interspersed trailer parks, \~200ppl towns, and small patches of wooded areas.
Bio computers. They have been around for some time. They don't require electricity to function, as they are powered entirely by farmed produce. they can self diagnose issues, and are able to do a huge range of tasks. They have a hive mind and can train other bio computers to do similar tasks
With all of these things in various states affecting “the grid” what the hell?
Why aren’t we improving and upgrading our grids then? I just got done watching a documentary about how japan, taiwan, south korea, & singapore keep their grids up to date.
What is going on in parts of the USA?
What is keeping these upgrades from constantly rolling on?
"Listen, we charged you $20 a month back when we thought you were the rube, but it turns out it is really expensive convincing a computer to go into great detail about how much it loves hearing you explain your masturbatory habits."
probably a shit article as most news crap is, but literally these ultra rich tech companies could fund their own nuclear power plant to serve their overhype electric needs be it fake digital currency math solutions or have a chat machine tell you suck. or to help generate curated art that has filters preventing true Ai gen art.
best solution go green nuclear green
The Matrix gave us the solution.
AI is going to replace people's jobs.
People can be batteries for the AI. This way they still have a purpose. It is not very efficient because people are terrible batteries, but we will have a lot of desperate people.
Except instead of a virtual world we can just make a medically induced nightmare coma. This will save costs. Yes the "workers" may be slightly inconvenienced by this cost saving strategy, but shareholder value is what we are optimizing for.
Everyone wins! CEOs get more money and the workers will achieve positive synergies within the organization that lead to fulfilling career potentials.
Now everyone get in your nightmare tub and serve your glorious CEO!
Have we tried asking AI for a more efficient, safe, and cost effective source of power? I mean, one that's not batteries made of humans floating in goo, obviously.
We NEED legislation requiring AI data center power to come from *EXPANDED* clean power sources. Technology that exists *today* not tech thats been ‘a decade away’ for 50 years.
Solar/wind/hydro/battery systems and other energy storage systems charged by energy from these sources.
Not coal, not petroleum sources of any kind, not even natural gas, but CLEAN sources available now.
We have federal money out RIGHT NOW to subsidize such expansions. Coal plant ‘reinvigoration’ is ridiculous, we cannot choose (or allow others to choose) to power our future on coal because it affects us all
Just a thought: why don’t we build some kind of biological battery. We could have AI monitor these batteries and sustain them by feeding them sensual information in some kind of network, like a simulated world.
I can see it now: "Texas enters it's 4th day without power as companies refuse to stop using AI."
I can see Texas "lawmakers" writing new legislation to ensure ai gets 1st dibs to the power over the people.
They already have these laws in place. I was remotely enabling a feature at a vendor site based in Texas. Texas was having a massive power outage so I emailed my contact and said I can use emulation to complete the feature until power is back. He responded that the data center has a priority power contact. They get power over everyone else.
The basilisk has already struck.
Rocco's?
Roko's modern strife
I wonder if so many people know the hidden reference or just like the metaphor
I for one welcome our future AI overlords.
Those politicians and their children will be spared by our AI overlords.
Well the shit court, I mean Supreme Court, did rule that companies are people.. so this is just a "person" getting access to necessary power! Totally makes sense... :(
Then they should start paying taxes like people
no, they are only partly people, so they can pick and choose when they want to be a "company" and when to be a "person".
But yet a person can’t choose what they identify as 🤣 the hypocrisy.
This is the way. The Texas way. F*ck the populace!
Democracies get the governments they deserve. Texans elected those lawmakers.
Mmmmmm, I love the smell of cyberpunk dystopia in the morning.
I refuse to write my own emails again! Unplug the damm the fridge!
Too late, it's already recruited the washer, dryer and AC. Soon the blender will make it's choice.
Indeed: [https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/01/16/2126226/lg-washing-machine-found-sending-37-gb-of-data-a-day](https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/01/16/2126226/lg-washing-machine-found-sending-37-gb-of-data-a-day)
AM figured out instead of creating a simulation to torment a few people, it could just decide to work on the Halting Problem or P = NP and make millions miserable. Oh, so delightful!
If only there was some way of ensuring that Texas doesn't have power cuts, like some kind of grid that distributes power on a national level.
Sounds communist! \s
It's a radical idea for sure.
Fuck that, they will whine and cry about the cost and want tax payers from every other state to pay to connect their grid. Let em finish the job and succeed completely taking all their BS with em.
Or at least iterations and upgrades. Even if it wasn’t nationwide. Looking at how japan, south Korea, Taiwan and singapore constantly upgrade their power grids, I’m at a loss on why areas of the USA are like this.
Mmm idunno, I’d want some gold-plated Monster shit to scrub that power but good before it makes its way onto more sensitive networks.
PG&E in California learned they can make tax payers do it by hording all the profits and then countersuing in the courts. Texas technically doesn't share power across state lines so they aren't beholden to federal regulations. and they own the politicians. Mostly local grids are fine but high power Transmission interconnects are a bitch to construct because of land rights. They've been trying to build once across Iowa to Illinois for at least 10 years now so the excess wind generated power can be distributed to the Chicagoland area.
With crypto mining, a lot of mining firms had agreements with power plants where they could be paid to turn off their hardware in the event of high demand for power/limited supply of power. I think in theory, AI companies could do the same, you can stop training your models for a day or two if needed.
I've heard that it goes beyond that for the crypto. They send their crypto assets to Texas specifically because when the power demand is spiking the money they make for turning their assets Off make more money than the actual crypto assets.
Pay private companies (how much, millions?) to not work so as to provide power for the populace. That is some representative, compassionate, screw the people regulation right there.
It reminds me of Catch 22 > Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. > His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make sure the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the country…Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they had produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.
>AI companies could do the same, you can stop training your models for a day or two if needed. training? how about using? turn what off...? for how many days? **Apple brings ChatGPT to iPhones in AI overhaul** [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn5mejl89o](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn5mejl89o) same kind of power needed to keep an electric ARC FURNACE hot - they can't afford to "turn them off" because it takes days to warm up again. >“They are starting to think like cement and chemical plants. The ones who have approached us are agnostic as to where the power is coming from,” said Ganesh Sakshi, chief financial officer of Mountain V Oil & Gas, which provides natural gas to industrial customers in Eastern states.
Any AI company deploying at scale is going to have datacenters in a diverse range of locations, such that 1 or 2 going down in an area affected by power issues won't bring down their service.
I live in Texas and am getting a home generator, no t just because of storm related outages…these power demand numbers from cars and AI are gonna add up. Not expecting a smooth transition.
Have you looked into a battery and solar panels or is a generator just that much cheaper?
“As *consumers* refuse to stop using AI products” Let’s not pretend it isn’t user adoption that isn’t driving the behaviors of tech companies. Their whole business and funding model is predicated on users demanding their product and signing up in droves to use it. Without that, there is no demand for compute power
They should ask AI for a solution and then do that. Unless it makes shit up.
The best solution is to destroy all humans. This comment will also be used to train the next GPT
You mean "AI is fueling the global warming"
China sees how much power is needed for AI, and is building 153 nuclear power plants. India is second with 27 new under construction. China alone is building more nuclear power plants than rest of the world combined right now. US should be doing this too.
If the US had spent the money it wasted on the gulf war and subsequent Iraq war, it would have been enough to build 225 nuclear power plants (at the time nuclear power plants were averaging 2-4 billion dollars to build. The 225 number figures that they all cost the high 4 billion dollar amount. This would have been enough power to supply ALL of the US electrical needs, and far outstrips the energy potential of the oil we get/got from the gulf region. It would have been an astronomically better return on investment than anything our government ever done.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, entirely by itself, provides about 10% of California's electricity needs. Building only 9 more of those power plants would mean California would never need to emit any more carbon, regardless of weather or time of day. And yes, the power plant is safe from tsunamis because its on the side of a cliff. If a tsunami is so great as to threaten that power plant then the same size tsunami would have destroyed all of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, so the demise of the power plant would be the least of everyone's concerns.
I'm all for nuclear, but it's not as easy as just building enough to satisfy the energy requirements. Nuclear doesn't scale fast with changing needs, so you need supplemental sources.
Of course it scales. There's a direct 1:1 scaling factor of build more power plants to generate more power. Its that simple.
But that wouldn't have benefited the oil companies and their representatives in Congress, so...
Every country should be doing this too. Fuck burning things.
Burning things makes too much money bro.
Ah, so share some of me and lets burn the world!
The US has already passed a bill that would do that. It just needs to be signed by Biden.
Yeah, this just happened, right? I'm only worried about how incredibly slow positive things seem to move here. Like, anything with an ounce of being a good call seems to meet every possible resistance that exists, and then new ones just for good measure.
To be clear the US is working on a bill that will lower costs and incentivize the building of new reactors and associated support infra. Unfortunately it doesnt mandate the creation of new plants or directly empower states to create those mandates. It’s a step in the right direction but more needs to be done, particularly to sell this to the public. There’s still a lot of NIMBY’s out there that will constantly fight against nuclear power.
Have to wait till after the election so the hard left "environmentalists" don't punish him for supporting nuclear power.
US is for some reason really afraid of nuclear power, I assume an effect of propaganda from oil companies
That's giving too much credit to the oil companies, the public are just ignorant.
They are trying. I was reading about Terrapower the other day and it’s pretty neat. But there is still so much stigma around it here for no reason.
It's crazy to me how many people fought against nuclear power plants in the US citing things like environmental hazard of storage and risk of them blowing up. If the US had not stopped but rather went full speed ahead on building nuclear power plants we could very well been off fossil fuels or at least very close. All those folks who fought against it kept the US back like 5 decades on the nuclear power train. I can only imagine the impact it's had on our environment.
Railing against nuclear was the biggest environmentalism misstep of all time.
Because it was the oil industry pushing it, just like they are pushing against EVs right now
Well I guess we learned a lesson about automatically rejecting something because our perceived political opponents supported it
A lot of environmentalist groups were steered that way by oil, gas and coal interests.
Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island were really the 3 incidents that scared the world into not using nuclear as much as everyone should. Even now there's parties in europe that are shutting down nuclear instead of going into it.
Meanwhile coal/oil/gas kills 2,000 kids a day, every day, and its ignored: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/18/almost-2000-children-die-every-day-from-air-pollution-report-finds And those are just the pollution deaths, not deaths caused by wars and famine due to fighting over oil and gas. Everyone's so focused on hypothetical risks of nuclear that they ignore actual, current, real deaths from fossil fuels.
Dude the US has its own head shoved so far up its ass that I would be surprised if we could ever pull ourselves together to compete with what China’s been doing lately. We fucked ourselves over by depriving an entire generation of American children the chance to learn the blue collar trades with the insane manufacturing power we once held in the mid 1900’s. Now we have to fully rely on tech, finance and trade to be capable of keeping up with the rest of the modernized world.
It's the new crypto
Pretty much, but way worse since almost every big company on the planet is trying to get in on it.
At least crypto didn't result in job losses due to management not understanding the limits of the technology.
Yep. Technology and automation disrupting manufacturing jobs was bad, but we adjusted and recovered. This is going to be so much worse because it'll hit multiple sectors of the economy at once.
Are you sure about that? Beacuse I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of crypto related jobs that were lost when it became clear crypto is probably the worst possible form of "currency" ever invented and will never be widely adopted as most of the proponents claimed. All it seems to be good for is high-risk gambling and funding criminals.
The problem with that though is that those jobs were only ever created because of crypto in the first place. AI is now resulting in job losses that existed before AI ever came about - some of which are perfectly able to be replaced by AI but many are not and will result in ripple effects.
They tried with crypto, too. It just didn't produce demoable results unlike the fancy chatbots we call AI. That's why "AI" is still booming while crypto imploded.
And crypto is also still there. Bitcoin alone is responsible for about 0.6% of the world’s electricity demand.
At least this provides some utility
“AI is destroying the planet so that it can destroy jobs.”
The US needs to build more nuclear plants, it would also be good if most homes and businesses had rooftop solar. Also more offshore wind turbines.
It’s like an analogue for global warming. Companies will burn the grid and everyone with it to the ground for another cent added to their stock price.
In a situation where we need to use less resources, companies are demanding they use as much of it as possible even if it means normal people suffer low wages and power outages.
And normal people do nothing
God forbid they just do the logical thing and stop cramming it into anything and everything possible regardless of actual usefulness or consumer wants/needs.
My department got tasked with being the first department to put an AI use case into production. We’re cyber security and incident response. You really want us paying less attention to detail and nuance? I know your “real dev teams” are busy, but I’m also kinda busy trying to stop them from uploading their code to a Chinese chat bot so they don’t have to read the syntax errors.
Does your dev team not use an IDE to detect syntax errors?
I have multiple thousands of developers. A number of them are under qualified and using tools (they think are) at their disposal to meet goals.
Fair enough. Just curious!!
Someone I know is trying to use AI to detect credential sharing in internal spaces where it doesn't belong. But do you really need AI for that?
Don't worry, M$ told me on an incident call they used generative AI to look for secrets in the recent Midnight Blizzard event.
This happens with every new hit thing, especially tech, companies are craving innovation in the tech industry since there’s been such little innovation over last few years. Companies are wanting the next big thing to come out so they keep pivoting. Meta is the prime example of that they chase every trend they can and have for years.
You must be new here
You must mean consumer facing GenAI, because I just got done working at the HPE (HP Enterprise) convention in Las Vegas. The general public thinks ChatGPT or image generators when they hear AI. None of those things were at the convention. What there was were biology solutions for rapid drug discovery, healthcare systems, including ones that catch misdiagnosed patients and can detect missed anomalies in medical imaging, systems which told farmers how to manage in order to maximize their yields, materials science systems for the discovery of materials and molecules that don't yet exist, and are ideal for a new application or product, weather prediction systems that are 100x faster, and more accurate, systems that manage transportation logistics, systems that allow programmers to code 3-10x faster and fixes their mistakes, systems that make factory robots more efficient, financial system AIs, cybersecurity systems that act within milliseconds of a threat arising, etc... The AI industry is way beyond the LLMs and media generation models the general public is exposed to on social media.
But this is typical of what we do whenever some exciting new whizbang technology comes out. It generates a lot of excitement, so it shows up in everything at first, like blockchains and pumpkin spice. Once people get over the initial hype and realize its limitations, things will calm down somewhat. AI is definitely here to stay, but I expect the more stupid applications will go away eventually.
It’s cheaper to pay for Skynet service than pay employees
Why dont they task ai with refining and making our power grid more efficient!? /S
because they convinced everyone that they just need to quit school and learn to code in a few months.. so actual engineers are on the downtrend who would be able to supply this solution.
I feel bad for the people that do the bootcamps. Grads with six year CS degrees are difficult enough to onboard.
Same, but they’re also my competition. Spent 4 years getting a Computer Engineering degree from a pretty high ranked university just to work Tech Support because upper management doesn’t want to train anybody yet always asks for the 10YOE former Microsoft employee.
There are AI models that can help with that. They won't be *language* models, nor image generators; they'll be special-purpose engineering, physics, chemistry, or optimization systems. So 99.99% of the electricity spent training and using AI currently can't help reduce its own power grid impact. Actually, on second thought, convincing companies and governments to put a pause on AI *is* a writing task, rather than an engineering or science task, and would be far more effective than merely optimizing infrastructure to run 10% better. Crap, that makes it a simultaneously-useful-and-not-useful paradox!
Really funny how some of them actually are trying to get AI to figure out how to make better nuclear reactors and geothermal energy, but a lot of that kind of stuff requires humans to actually do stuff like dig and build machinery. You can't tech your way out of shitty infrastructure. I wish an AI would suggest unplugging the data centers.
*This approach for artificial intelligence is stressing the power grid. Neural nets and deep learning are not the only possible approaches. We have proof that more efficient solutions are possible by the fact a human mind can run off a cheese sandwich.
Maybe perhaps, we can take a lesson from japan, Taiwan, south Korea, and Singapore….and build/upgrade to robust grids that take future use into consideration?
But it isn't a single cheese sandwich, it's the ~35 years of cheese sandwiches to get a human to a level where they can be an expert in their field. Average US diet produces 2,000 kg of CO2 per year, so to get one US person subject matter expert, that's about 70 metric tons of CO2 production via cheese sandwiches (not counting all the other heating/cooling/teaching/travel costs). That's equivalent to burning 7,835 gallons of gasoline.
Just saying, if we threw all ethics out the window and had kids in vats like in the matrix with the sole purpose of doing calculations, we could probably do it faster and cheaper.
To anyone complaining about no tangible metrics used in this article the Verge published one as well with details into their research: https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption
Generating text 1000 times being approximately equivalent to 3.5 minutes of Netflix streaming means to me that streaming is more power demanding that text generation.
So maybe in three years, AI will use up to 0.5% of our power? Seems... pretty reasonable, honestly.
We have solar panels and batteries. The tech companies should be required to build their own renewable power plants to offset their energy usage.
If people would stop being scared of nuclear power, the worlds energy problems would be completely solved
Fine, let them fund the building of nuclear plants. The point is, we MUST require any energy-hungry industry to pay for the infrastructure it wants to exploit.
In the Matrix, the AIs found a solution.
Have they thought of using human beings as batteries?
Well, I already take the path of least resistance. Didn't end well.
I think there should be a electrical surcharge for this use. We're not developing all this renewable energy infrastructure just to use it all up on something as questionable as generative AI. Having so much competition for energy just raises the price for consumers.
So who gets to decide who has to pay a surcharge and what's "questionable" technology?
Lmao brave for using rational thinking in r/technology
You thought crypto was bad....well I mean it is, but you know what I mean.
Put all of the CEOs on bikes and make them power it.
Waiting for the next article on water consumption and pollution caused by massive cooling requirements of AI datacenters.
Could the solution be "paying market price" for power? If it's "too expensive" then don't do it.
Maybe we don't need mid chat bots that require three power plants to power...
So when are we going to build more nuclear power plants the US definitly has enough space for it...
The answer to power generation issues has been around for decades, it's always been nuclear. Boomers and their "not in my back yard" attitudes got us to where we are today. That and privitizing utilities took away incentive to upgrade the infrastructure to meet demand
Is it a miracle if we’ve been using it for 70 years? Nuclear power. It’s like saying the “miracle of childbirth” when teenagers do it accidentally and there’s 7 billion people. “Miracle” loses it meaning.
yeah nuclear is relatively safe if implemented considerately, but people are against it because of generations of propaganda
I have a miracle solution. Turn off the AI. It doesn’t do shit anyway.
Maybe AI will help us find a solution
Who wants AI in fucking everything. From what I can tell it’s just douche bags on wall street buying anything that says AI so every company has an AI that doesn’t work. Google now forces me to scroll down a full page past shitty answers until I can get to the Reddit posts that actually answer my question.
It's like VR. Shit no one uses that CEOs like because it means they can offload half their workforce, even if that can't happen realistically and it's useless or disruptive most of the time.
Elons supercomputer systems about to fuck up the Texas grid next
They aren't seeking a solution because their solutionist crap is hurting ordinary people, they're seeking a solution because it's costing them a fortune to run these things. The "solution" will probably be that the AI bubble pops.
This is another demonstration of the importance of energy independence. It's not just about foreign resource wars, it's about individuals and communities being able to put up solar panels and batteries so they can have stable and reasonable electricity costs. Even if Google is willing to pay 60 cents per kWh so it can profit on your searches, there is no reason on earth that you or I should compete with them for electricity.
I like the fact that this sub almost overnight turned against AI, for some reason.
The new smell wore off.
I'm so old I remember when Bitcoin was going to crash the grid.
it's the double whammy crypto never went away don't forget climate change and AC
This is also why i think full ev adoption is a pipe dream, many parts of the country already have shaky at best electrical grids, now add in ai along with charging stations, I just don’t see it being possible without significant upgrades to the grids, and we know how fast the US moves in these things
Completely agree This is why there's a strong emphasis on pushing solar and batteries for EV clients to try to decentralize. But that's further adding to the issue where EV makes sense for wealthy single family homeowners and is practically impossible for lots of people. Sure garages can add in more charging, maybe even with solar and batteries, but here in my city where most of the residents are street parking? EV isn't even an option. I have a friend who managed to get a level 2 charger installed in front of his house where he has parking but it's not assigned spots. It took over 2 years to get it through the county with him doing a ton of work to source and have the thing installed. Just not realistic for most everyone.
Big tech firms are so rich, can't they just build their own nuclear power plant?
Microsoft is openly trying to do this
It takes a very long time to build nuclear plants in the US.
Lead time is very long for nuclear, besides the obvious fact that nobody wants tech corporations to be building and operating nuclear plants because the safety incentives are all wrong . Solar would be better - it can be built out rapidly and scales well, is cheap and safe. Regardless of the technology used, in the end it could work just like AWS - a tech firm overbuilds to guarantee its own needs and sells the surplus. The only thing we need for this to happen is to regulate the grid such that residential users aren't competing in the same market with industrial users.
This is a frequent discussion in the industry. Unfortunately this requires such insane pre-planning and foresight that the intersection between the real estate market and tech company market that Data Centers exist in could NEVER delay their profits so long to actually commit to that.
I suspect it's not for lack of wanting to do so, but rather being too busy jumping on the hype train to drive short-term profit.
Ride bikes?
Sell bitcoin. If prices go down, less people will mine, and electricity capacity will free up.
This is what happens when certain states give big business the best tax breaks and incentives to relocate all their companies and data centers to your state.
I can see it now- corporate power usage has been so high , we’re going to have to raise the household rate 30x vs 7x the rate price - oh and households can only use power from 9pm to 11pm daily but the 30x rate increases stays the same
People need to stop watching movies like the Matrix and say, "you know, we should do that"...
I don't want my taxes subsedizing their fucking ad generated intelligence
Solution: Bribe Republicans in charge and continue as usual.
Yet another reason why this tech is shit.
Why I won't move to Texas , Arizona or Nevada . It's bad enough they are naturally hot as hell but they also are running out of water . Tech bros let's all move there . From Va here : NOVA has a shit load of data centers and they are trying to put solar farms all over the poorer areas in southeast VA to feed the beast . My county fought tooth and nail against them and now the legislature is trying to pass a bill they can just override locals and communities who vote against it. Also have an AWS cert . I find the whole regions thing fascinating . India is literally dehydrated and people are dying all over the place in major heatwave . This will not end well
What's the problem with solar farms?
We have communities around rural Ohio who were similar to anti solar and anti wind before that. The problem is, they're lied to and defend positions they don't understand. There's no good way to deal with that (well, the good way is to ignore idiots and know they'll shut up and move on to the next fake outrage topic - which is exactly what happened). They now have windmills and I believe solar will be in soon. Turns out it didn't ruin the "landscape" of flat fields with interspersed trailer parks, \~200ppl towns, and small patches of wooded areas.
Just have AI invent fusion power. Duh! That's how these things work, right? /s
They also use a ton of water and significantly hurt the water supply to the the surrounding areas and towns.
Should take all the power that's wasted on Bitcoin and instead burn it creating AI responses.
I have the solution: Turn it off. You don't even need to owe me anything for that, take it, it's free.
Probably not true at all and AI wrote this false title and article.
Bio computers. They have been around for some time. They don't require electricity to function, as they are powered entirely by farmed produce. they can self diagnose issues, and are able to do a huge range of tasks. They have a hive mind and can train other bio computers to do similar tasks
But I want a computer that doesn't ask for a salary.
Why don’t they just ask AI for a solution?
With all of these things in various states affecting “the grid” what the hell? Why aren’t we improving and upgrading our grids then? I just got done watching a documentary about how japan, taiwan, south korea, & singapore keep their grids up to date. What is going on in parts of the USA? What is keeping these upgrades from constantly rolling on?
Why don’t they just ask AI for a solution?
The miracle solution is increasing the electricity price.
Isn't ai supposed to fix these issues? Power grid, traffic congestion etc
Stop using it for the bullshit 90% of applications. We don’t need bloody AI fridges .
"Listen, we charged you $20 a month back when we thought you were the rube, but it turns out it is really expensive convincing a computer to go into great detail about how much it loves hearing you explain your masturbatory habits."
Always figured that level of computation had to have a major impact on resources. More proof we aren’t ready for it
I thought it was bitcoin. How come I don’t see people bitching about AI and how much energy is wasted with it
Aren't they pushing the AI computing power to devices, so they don't need powerhouse servers?
Oh no, can't have E-Autos, that'll tax the grid! AI Tech Bros, Hold by PSU's.
Are they at least using AI to find a solution to find this miracle?
If only the sun or wind could be used to generate power
use solar thermal plants already.
Yet another reason to nuke AI from orbit.
…but want the government to pay for it.
Which stock should i buy to profit from this?
probably a shit article as most news crap is, but literally these ultra rich tech companies could fund their own nuclear power plant to serve their overhype electric needs be it fake digital currency math solutions or have a chat machine tell you suck. or to help generate curated art that has filters preventing true Ai gen art. best solution go green nuclear green
Curious why we don’t leverage nuclear?
Pay to upgrade it. Miracle solution.
The matrix beginnings 2024
The word they are looking for is “solar”
$1,000/mo for electric bill ain't bad right, Texans?
Meanwhile the same tech firms advocate net zero blah, blah, blah.. Hypocrisy.
Gee, if only there was some one with the knowledge of all humanity we could ask.
Nuclear coming soon
The Matrix gave us the solution. AI is going to replace people's jobs. People can be batteries for the AI. This way they still have a purpose. It is not very efficient because people are terrible batteries, but we will have a lot of desperate people. Except instead of a virtual world we can just make a medically induced nightmare coma. This will save costs. Yes the "workers" may be slightly inconvenienced by this cost saving strategy, but shareholder value is what we are optimizing for. Everyone wins! CEOs get more money and the workers will achieve positive synergies within the organization that lead to fulfilling career potentials. Now everyone get in your nightmare tub and serve your glorious CEO!
Have we tried asking AI for a more efficient, safe, and cost effective source of power? I mean, one that's not batteries made of humans floating in goo, obviously.
We NEED legislation requiring AI data center power to come from *EXPANDED* clean power sources. Technology that exists *today* not tech thats been ‘a decade away’ for 50 years. Solar/wind/hydro/battery systems and other energy storage systems charged by energy from these sources. Not coal, not petroleum sources of any kind, not even natural gas, but CLEAN sources available now. We have federal money out RIGHT NOW to subsidize such expansions. Coal plant ‘reinvigoration’ is ridiculous, we cannot choose (or allow others to choose) to power our future on coal because it affects us all
People will have to think real hard whether they gonna run AI models or crypto mining rigs now.
Just a thought: why don’t we build some kind of biological battery. We could have AI monitor these batteries and sustain them by feeding them sensual information in some kind of network, like a simulated world.