Thank Kevin Oleary
Building a 62 sq mile facility
Everyone hates that fuck
“not in my backyard” stance.
I would think any human would be opposed to a bunch of machines sucking up all of their water and energy just to make a very few people rich and powerful beyond their wildest dreams. I’m still not convinced that it is beneficial and why is the tech/business/media world pushing this so hard? Value means a happy community, not owning a yacht for your private island.
even R voters are up an arms, they specifically built them in republican counties to avoid regulations. pollution, air temperature increase, electricity consumption, is hard to ignore.
I pass an anti data center yard sign quite regularly that is featured right next to a pro trump yard sign. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
We are seriously going to need to stop being a bunch of weak ass losers and overthrow this corrupt government
This, and the next, democrats facilitated republicans turn into this with their corruption. This has not gone from A to Z in a single government change. A government must work for their people, not just their rich or Israel.
I was listening to an interview today where they brought up the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act (NAFTA). People were working these manufacturing jobs they hate and the idea was. NAFTA would make things cheaper for Americans which it did. The downside was it took away many more high paying jobs for the middle class.
AI is like a second version of this law. It’s going to take away tons of jobs in the name of increased productivity with a reduced focus on safety.
People talk about illegal immigrants taking jobs away but they should be way more concerned with AI. The profits from all AIs saved labor that saved labor will go into the pockets of a few mega corporations. What incentive do those companies have to provide spread the wealth around and improve the lives of those suffering from AI? It’s deeper than just one country. There is income other countries rely on that will stop flowing and they will feel the deep impact as well.
ChatGPT, et al. are the “immigrant or alien” we should really be opposed to. They don’t even like pierogis. Like, what kind of monster doesn’t like pierogis?
If you build a factory someplace, the factory consumes a lot of resources and can be a nuisance. But in return, it provides jobs; at the very minimum. Going beyond that, usually someone in the corporate heirarchy is smart enough to realize that building good will with the neighbors is important and they encourage the employees to give back to the community to that end.
The actual impact may vary but if nothing else, symbolic gestures that say, “we know our presence here has an impact and we want to make sure it’s a positive impact as much as possible.” tend to go a long way in terms of winning support and acceptance from the community.
Data centers consume lots of resources and can be a nuisance. Unlike other operations, they provide very few long term jobs and give basically nothing back to their host community beyond that. They take far more than they give back. If the “geniuses” who run these tech firms spent less money lobbying politicians and instead offered to pay for the college tuition of every student who successfully graduated from the local high school, they would probably get a very different reaction from the public.
Factories also produce tangible products
If the “geniuses” who run these tech firms spent less money lobbying politicians and instead offered to pay for the college tuition of every student who successfully graduated from the local high school, they would probably get a very different reaction from the public.
Yeah , they could do a lot with their wealth. Unfortunately they are stupid and selfish. They’re playing a dangerous game and eventually they’ll roll for guillotines.
Well the people with money don’t care about people. They lobby the politics so they can fuck you over and you are ordered by law to like it
I get the feeling the 3,000+ data centers aren’t being built so everyone can generate slop, but instead are going to end up being the infrastructure for the digital cage. AI won’t replace humans, but it can certainly spy on them quite effectively. Big tech and the U.S. government have been trending towards a fascist merger of state and corporate power for quite some time, and the FBI’s recent partnership with Flock and OpenAI becoming an official member of the military industrial complex are not good news. I fear we are headed towards a historically unprecedented ability for governments to track and control the populace. No matter what, these data centers are not for the benefit of the average citizen.
When was the last time you heard someone mention the NSA? After Snowden’s revelations, one thing that was pointed out was you need massive storage for all of the surveillance data. Interpreting text and visual data being one of the strongest abilities of this AI, it seems obvious that this is what the real push to make it omnipresent is for. All of our data to be fed into the machine to generate lists of dissidents.
It seems they’d better hurry up and finish, because the natives are getting restless and sabotaging construction projects is really cheap.
That is despite huge propaganda campaigns by tech giants and the government in favor of them mind you. Everyone who experienced what it‘s like living near one absolutely hates it for many reasons including health issues from the noise and vibration. Anyone who doesn‘t already got a taste of it when utility bills climbed up.
Not hard to figure out why. There‘s an oil crisis and these AI bro fucks keep constructing giant diesel engines to power the giant data centers. Everyone else loses.
There‘s an oil crisis and these
they are selling our strategic reserves overseas while Iran is not over and we running low every day.
I cant believe this.What’s even crazier: Only 20% of the world’s oil production is affected. That means 80% are still available.
It would be trivial to save 20% of oil, but we just don’t want to.
People are driving just as much. There’s no push to home office. No push to make people stop buying crap they don’t need. No push to decrease flying or anything at all.
Instead, offices are still uselessly illuminated all night. Useless ad screens are playing at any time of day, burning precious fuel for no purpose.
We still throw away 30-40% of the food we produce. We still don’t have a massive push to pivot to renewable energy.
Collectively, we don’t care about energy shortages, and politics and companies don’t either.
Instead, we just price the poorer nations out of competition. We can afford gas at €2/l, and we don’t care that entire nations are collapsing right now because they can’t afford fuel at all.
That’s the problem we have locally. No one wants these things, but local government keeps trying to push them through anyway because all they see is tax dollars.
Did they stop filling polls with AI generated answers or something?
It’s all topology, man. Well, technically entanglements, really, but you read The Buddha et al, right? Christ said the same ish - Server, Client, Holy Internet - just different pedagogy, just as occult leaders have done to teach the hidden throughout history.
They increase the cost of consumer electricity and water; they increase the temperature of the local area; they generate (in some cases) heavy metal pollution and (in most cases) sound pollution.
What’s not to love? ;)
Not to mention the probably worst part is that they needlessly consume energy which could have been used for actual useful purposes, adding more carbon emission at a time when we desperately need to lower that for the sake of not burning our own fucking planet.
It looks like some of them even threaten to render the region the occupy uninhabitable for humans, too! A lot of people are really concerned that the global invasive human epidemic, so they might like that.
Not to mention some idiot decided to put these water-pollution factories in places that historically have limited access to water and right now are experiencing one of the worst droughts of all time (at least in the top-5). People are a little protective of their precious water at times like these.
We all knew that this century’s history would come to be dominated by the Water Wars. We just never realized that AI would be one of the major combatants in those wars.
And CEOs are using ai as the new excuse to not give raises on top of mass firings. They’re really expecting thank you cards?
trying to get right wing govts to adop sureveillance AI, and India to help build the datacenters in the country.
And they raise the prices of consumer electronics.
Also air pollution because quite a few are gas-powered (mobile units). Elon Musk’s among them.
The 10 year almost complete lack of regulation for all things AI might have something to do with it.
China would prefer USA to have less data centers as well. This could help them get and edgeon AI where they are currently like 10 months behind the USA. Dont get me wrong. I don’t want a data center in my backyard. But USA needs better infrastructure planning like china and not leave it up to billionaire, their companies and their short sighted quarterly reports.
A constriction on GPUs is literally the best thing to ever happen to Chinese ML dev.
It made them thrifty, it made them focus, it forced them to go open weights, it made them build proper ASICs, research new techniques, pay engineers to implement them, and now their models are supremely efficient, dirt cheap, running Nvidia free on Huawei NPUs, and close to better tools than the US models.
Meanwhile, US models are all (except maybe Google) enshittifying and getting benchmaxxed. Engineers are wasting man hours hopelessly trying to scale training, which does not scale like people think, and are literally giving GPUs busywork to meet utilization quotas. They’re trying to scale data and parameter count, without improving architecture or data quality or even basic problems like random token sampling, and it’s not working anymore.
At the same time, the big US AI houses have squashed nearly every bit of “garage innovation” I’ve seen. Cool teams, hero devs with proven work on a budget, they all just disappear into the maw of Microsoft or whomever like it’s a black hole, their work never integrated into anything.
US AI is GOING to collapse because we gave all the money to tech bros so they can poison the well. The ML research community has been screaming this since like 2022. And apparently before, as Aaron Swartz allegedly identified Altman as a sociopath right before he died by suicide.
Sorry to rant.
Not that China doesn’t have significant dev issues, to be clear.
Europe, too.
But this is a sensitive point for me. Hobbyist machine learning has been a passion of mine for a decade, and it makes me sick to hear people quote Altman, like throwing GPUs at tech bros going to fix this. That. Is. A. LIE.
I don’t have a solution either. In the AI space, I do not even see a path back to moonshot-style cooperative innovation like the US has repeatedly pulled off before.
Keep in mind, while China is aggressively pushing for Data Centers and AI expansion like the US is, the one thing the US has to deal with is property rights and disjointed regulations. A lot of infrastructure projects in the US end up running over budget or get halted entirely, whereas in China, if the Government wants something built, they relocate you and take the land.
Many years ago, I remember Verizon wanted to build a Data Center in my area located in the middle of a farm field for their Terremark and 5G MEC projects. They had the ability to purchase the land. It was located in an industrial area near a power plant. The owner of an adjacent plot of land, who was doing absolutely nothing with said land (it was all weeds and brush), and still hasn’t done anything with said land, ended up blocking the entire project to the point where Verizon just gave up. This was before we got into the weeds with AI and Crypto, but back when the intent of a data center was still do something useful with it rather than waste power on unprompted/unasked requests.
Given China’s determination, the US will likely end up losing on the Infrastructure front, like it has been with many infrastructure projects. The US will continue to remain on the forefront for a while on engineering and development. But long term usage and deployment? That’s going to depend on who can open source all of this crap the fastest…
It’s a huge waste of money at this point, and the technology will become rapidly antiquated. The depreciation will be insanely high, while the software that’s requires it becomes much more efficient. At this point we already have enough data centers, we just need more efficient software and smarter usage.
Gotta admit, my strong feelings about them didn’t start til my power costs doubled out of the blue
What’s not being mentioned enough is they’re mainly being used to collect more data on people. It’s mass surveillance masquerading as AI.
Americans as a whole are really fucking slow. The slop factory “industry” should have been eighty-sixed for its waste of resources before they ever built the first data center. It’s not like the costs weren’t known from the start.
Even if the specific costs weren’t known, it would at least have been obvious from the start that they would be impossibly large.
