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Obviously the AI rollout should be slowed down and AI use regulated, like stopping any replacement of workers by AI.
But China is set to win the AI race with their open weight models on par with the current frontier models. And they are building nuclear power and solar and wind like no tomorrow. And they just started to produce sodium ion batteries to solve the grid storage problem.
Spurned by the embargo they are developing more efficient algorithms and “Extreme UV lithography” to catch up to the embargoed chips. The neoliberal model of the west is now falling behind even the high tech sectors.
In case anyone is curious it takes 8 Nvidia B300 cards to run this Kima K3 frontier model yourself (2.8 trillion parameters), costs about half a million. For a big corporation or institutions even in the global south that is relatively cheap and that is the top tier option for running a frontier model. Including complete data sovereignty. Using AMD will be cheaper, and prices will go down once China catches up in like 2030. And you could run that on solar panels and batteries and regenerative water cooling. 8x 1.4kW x24 so maybe 300 kWh LiFePo4 battery so another 50k. Solar panels are basically free these days.
So basically less than 10% extra costs to make AI data centers sustainable. This is a capitalism problem, both the hype / bubble / psychosis (b2b marketing induced) as well as the sustainability question.
i think the layoffs/hiring kinda past the point of no return, i think they will be even more reluctant to hire back all these people and fresh graduates anytime soon. essential become like research/lab industry, barely hiring because they want already “trained” people upon graduation. people have posting on other sites, being unable to look for said job, and they do admit using Ai to generate/mass apply too.
Question is, how long are they going to keep making their new models open weight? GPT2 was open too, y’know. Hell, the company that made it is called "Open"AI. Money corrupts.
And how many concurrent users do you get with 8 B300s on the Kimi K3? I’m not 100% sure on the math, but apparently about <= 4 with full context size.
They can make these models open weight because basically nobody’s gonna be able to run them and you can’t just build a brand new model out of it like you can with regular open source software. That 8 nvidia B300 card minimum isn’t enough to run it commercially, it’s good for like a small 10-20 person company of fairly heavy users, or slightly more if not using heavily.
Money corrupts.
You say it as if OpenAI started with good intentions and got corrupted by the money. But the most likely explanation is that it was a scam from the start.
and texas was going to add another 1800 datacenters, until they saw thier elections of the gop is jeopardy.
They will add them after the elections…
it will be hilarious when they try to power them up
Hey but we a flood of impossible gymnastics moves, fake soldering videos, and even fatter fart videos!
it’s very well comprehensible if you’re good with numbers.
I’ve never seen a data centre with a chimney stack. This must be an American thing.
its the polluting gas turbine power plants that will power these AI DC.
It’s the “temporary” power plants that are stood up to feed the massive power demands. These are usually gas turbines that are not environmentally friendly at all.
One example would be the ai data centers Musk has that he illegally had gas generators installed at. The fine compared to not running them at all is small in comparison to keep them on. This is why it needs to be a percentage or increasing stack of cost not just a small fine every time.
thats why he set them up in rural tennesee, actually most of the datacenters are in red states for those purpose.
Well that’s one way to speed run environmental catastrophe.
Usable quantum computing will annihilate the need for these data centres. They’ll be defunct within a decade. The earth will be worse off and the money laundering that they provide will move elsewhere. Fuck this timeline.
Sure, sure… Host them in space, built from privately mined asteroids and powered by fusion!!!
Sorry to burst your bubble but DC’s aren’t going anywhere. Even if we are in a position to make quantum computers commercially available in the next 10 years they’ll still need to be housed somewhere, powered, cooled and connected.
Besides, quantum computers are great at complex calculations and simulations but you wouldn’t use them to host a website or a VPS. They’ll be hideously expensive so will only be used for the specific workloads that they excel at and everything else will done with the same servers we have now.
AI data centers use complex calculations. Why bring up websites or VPS? these are data centers are no issue, their footprints are small and don’t require much energy to work, unlike the AI data centers.
Neural nets and LLMs are not doing complex math, they’re doing very large amounts of simple math. Quantum computing is probably not going to accelerate our current NN tech.
This is why GPUs are excellent for AI applications, they are built around the goal of doing large amount of pixel shader computations, which is pretty simple math. You could do the math to shade a pixel by hand, for example.
Fair enough, I didn’t realise they were so different from traditional DC’s.
They’re not servers. It’s just gpus. It’s not really a data center, basically the same as bitcoin mining.
They’re still servers, the focus is on the GPU side though. A single DGX B300 has 8 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 2 Xeon 6776P CPUs. And networking, RAM, storage. Consumes 14 kilowatts and looks like this
You COULD host a website on one if you wanted to. You’d be stupid to do it, but you could.
They shouldn’t be. One of the issue the sheer size and volume, they’re being built based only on speculation not actual need (all the ssd/ram/gpu are sitting in warehouses waiting for these DC to be built — if they’re fabricated at all). They’re also being built where it’s cheap, not where they would be needed (industrial and urban areas) just to save money, externalize costs, and avoid regulations.
I don’t understand why they don’t use nuclear. We need to resist this.
Americans are very wary of nuclear anything, because we know that our government will allow sociopathic corporations to cut corners until it fails, and spews it’s poison over a quarter of the nation. And they’ll just dump the nuclear waste in our lakes and rivers.
And if they get caught, they’ll pay a fat fine to the government, but nothing substantial will change.
It works in Europe where the governments care about their citizens, and can be trusted to protect them for the most part. Here in America, our government despises us.
I think in the U.S. the nuclear permitting process is so much longer than the methane generator permitting process, and they don’t want to wait.
The world has gone mad
i wish we could focus on making small LLMs better.
some companies are doing this. some definitely aren’tI’m keeping an eye on Hailo for this purpose. I think the future is small embedded AI systems, not massive data centers.
Woth thé Qwen 3.6 3.8 something nice happened most US company LLM got beat by miles. NVIDIA nemotron 27b isn’t as good as qwen two version prior than the one just released. US are beaten on Local LLMs already.
if you start excluding the 1000+ B param models …
using smaller models, would initially ease hardware demand by 60% .
OFC you cant… and probably shouldnt, ignore and disrespect SOTA flagship modelsEven “big” open source models like DSV4 and Ling/Ring are very efficient. They’re big, but (seemingly) sparser than US models, so they’re cheap.
They run surprisingly well with hybrid CPU+GPU inference on desktops. And thats not even getting into the efficient attention mechanisms.
I can run DSV4 Flash, barely quantized, with ~1M context on my Ryzen desktop at ~11 tokens/s. If you told me that two years ago, I would not have believed you.
to be fair, the scale of pretty much any global industry is incomprehensible to most people
It’s true, I can not understand how all grocery stores constantly have fruit and vegetables available.
That always blows my mind, still. If you ever grew cherry tomatoes, you know how long it takes and how much it yields. Even the smalltest corner super market has cherry tomatoes, every day of the year. It’s not even a necessity, it’s just there.
“AI is a tool stop being a luddite” mfs when being exposed to this reality
To make AI data centers sustainable with solar and batteries costs about 10% of the price of the base hardware. The AI hype is still insane but we can have a little AI.
Man I want your supplier for batteries and panels tbh.
A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW. Costs about 500k. Assuming you live far enough from the equator to have seasons, you’ll have about 8 hours of daytime at the worst points of the year (less at my latitude for an example, we get ~6 hour days in the dead of winter, with sun angles below 10 degrees and sunshine available… not every week)
Even in a slightly less extreme location, You’d be looking at roughly a 100 kW array to fill the battery and power that one server reliably like when there’s clouds, about 300 kWh battery capacity to get through long nights. Easily 6 figures total cost, maybe 20-40% of the server itself. This assumes no electricity used for cooling, so it’s very much back of the envelope math, reality could be much worse or a tiny bit better depending on your latitude.
Looking at the actual numbers (less than 1%) as opposed to clickbait headlines other commentors are posting, I’m not seeing the issue.
Note that the negative impact of these facilities are, by designed, concentrated on the communities that get stuck with them. The overall percentage has to be considered in the context of them focusing that impact into relatively small, super dense footprints.
Also, the percentage is higher than 1%, and in the US is about 5%. This reflects the current situation that the AI companies lament is just too constrained on them, with ambitions of getting to 20% if circumstances allow them to build up the way they want. So it’s already somewhat significant, especially with the way it gets concentrated, and further they want to bump it up at least four fold beyond what they’ve managed to do so far.
In anticipation of that, energy strategies that planned to be more tame and grow by renewables got pushed aside in favor of more natural gas, and especially portable power generation which tends to be more polluting.
I’m exhausted of all this. The data centers have been so pervasive that some communities have been thinking about rationing electricity to get around the requirements. That’s… a dystopia future if Ive ever seen one.
The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.
When a data center permit is applied for, it should be weighed against the state of the grid. If there’s not enough production, it should not be allowed unless they also build a bunch of electricity production capacity, which needs to come online first.
There are instances where this could actually be a net benefit for the grid. Right now in my country, power prices go negative at peak sunlight hours in the summer because we have nothing to do with all that electricity. If you produce solar, gotta disconnect from the grid at those points. A reliable consumer working 24/7 would help even things out for the consumption side of the grid math.
Not that I want them in my country, we have a very dirty grid (shale plants, yay) and live far enough north that solar only works for about 7-8 months a year. But somewhere more moderate in terms of solar availability, it would be fine. Here we need more consumption in the summer and less in the winter.
Hyperbole is hyperbole. I refuse to fall for bullshit just because it’s aligned with my views and opinions.
I personally think it’s bullshit that these things are happening to begin with, not that people are ringing the alarm to our new reality. The latter is just us doing our part to fix this.
If only we had invested in renewables we could power all the AI we could ever want…
No but we gotta use fossil fuels still you guys! - the top suits
“But but but! If we’re going to solve pollution, we’ll need more of those AI data centres!”
“The answer to pollution is 42.”
It’s going to be so funny when they build their god AI and ask it to save us and it spits out “should’ve build solar panels 30 years ago”
The real Roko’s Basilisk is that it’s disappointed in you and thinks you wasted your life playing with computers.
well, they train their AI with pro fossil propaganda as you see in forums like this. in fact, AI searches forums like this and makes summaries to answer questions you might ask it.
AI will solve this! We just need more data centers!
/s
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the people behind the biggest investment and financial scam of the century would, to make more money, fuck up people other than just investors!
by the current weight of growth my niece will weigh 260.000 kg by 2030
