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How to feed all the power-hungry AI data centers
- bitwize 3y agoThis might be why Bill Gates is invested so heavily into TerraPower.
- grecy 3y agoBill Gates has a $1B short position on Tesla. I wouldn't use what Bill Gates is investing in as any indicator of what we should be doing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoTesla has been on a steady [and IMHO rightful] decline since Jan 3, 2024.
- grecy 3y agoI meant in terms of doing the right thing for the planet
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoThey're not doing that, either... the only reason you would drive a Tesla is performance. The environmental impact of making a full-EV is much more damaging than using a gas engine.
- Nasrudith 3y agoThat old oil industry FUD line again? Seriously it seems like a switcy was flipped and now people who claim to care about the environment spout oil industry myths.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoThe real "oil industry myth" is that of your carbon footprint [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE
- hnbad 3y agoI thought it's widely accepted that the Tesla stock price is heavily inflated relative to the company's actual performance and that Elon Musk is increasingly considered a liability as his vaporware marketing (e.g. the various blatantly misleading claims about the trajectory of FSD capabilities) was a major factor to the stock's growth in the past.
- pmcf 3y agoTBH I was expecting something about plugging humans into a huge bioenergy farm and letting them live out their lives in a simulation.
- ponorin 3y agoi have a crazy idea... how about... not focusing on ever increasing the size of ai models, so that we don't need to build all those power-hungry ai training datacenters? just a thought
- CuriouslyC 3y agoEven if the models aren't gargantuan, millions of people using AI applications is going to burn a lot of power.
- amelius 3y agoThis only makes their argument stronger.
- flextheruler 3y agoI still haven’t seen a use case that will make AI adopted by the masses I think it’s still mostly hot air. It’s good for what it is for office jobs and higher education, but only for specific tasks and it has to be triple checked. Just yesterday at work I asked it for a Powershell script to upload a local file to S3 and it hallucinated a method. The whole script is like 10 lines. How could it mess that up, but meanwhile it’s about to change the world and be mass adopted? This is Claude 3 the best model for coding… After using these models for awhile I think they’re really helpful to get off the ground in terms of coding and writing and to help review coding and writing, but that’s about all I’ve seen so far. It feels like we’re also getting diminishing returns with the current paradigm so we’ll see if I’ll be eating my hat next year, but I really don’t see mass adoption like a search engine.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI've had GPT4 produce quite a bit of useful code, and it's indispensable when working with new libraries or in new domains.
- parpfish 3y agoEven if every dev in the world adopted an LLM copilot, that’s a teeny tiny sliver of “the masses”.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoThe problem is that massive amounts of PV is needed to replace existing fossil fuels, so these would be extending the carbon output of coal/natural gas. If AI training is being that power hungry, maybe we shouldn't be doing it ... right now. It's all fueled by speculative VC funding. This isn't a slam dunk economics calculation, certainly no more than regulation to shut this nonsense down would be.
- philipkglass 3y agoThat makes sense if PV deployment is limited by supply. But the solar industry is currently limited by demand. You can see it in market news for solar components: "Wafer prices stable-to-soft on market oversupply" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/15/wafer-prices-stable-to-soft-on-market-oversupply/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/15/wafer-prices-stable-t... "Wacker Chemie’s sales, earnings fall in tough market" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/30/wacker-chemies-sales-earnings-fall-in-tough-market/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/30/wacker-chemies-sales-... "China polysilicon prices fall 51.8% year-on-year amid supply glut" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/19/china-polysilicon-prices-fall-51-8-year-on-year-amid-supply-glut/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/19/china-polysilicon-pri... "China solar cell prices decline on sluggish downstream demand" https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/05/china-solar-cell-prices-decline-on-sluggish-downstream-demand/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/01/05/china-solar-cell-pric...
- wffurr 3y agoI thought building new solar plants was cheaper than operating existing gas and coal plants. What’s hold up on building solar capacity as fast as we can, saturating demand? Permitting? Capital deployment in utility markets?
- PeterisP 3y agoIt's not a replacement for the cost of operating existing gas and coal plants; building up new solar capacity enables you to burn less gas or coal at the times when the sun is shining and thus cut its fuel costs, but it does not enable you to shut down the plant and cut any its other operating costs, because you still need the same capacity for e.g. winter evenings when at peak daily consumption there is zero sunlight.
- richrichie 3y agoSolar is no way close to being reliable, all weather and cheap source of energy that nuclear and fossil fuel can be, which are critical for the tech industry in general.
- bee_rider 3y agoThe actual workload in ML model training is totally deferrable. It ought to be very compatible with intermittent power, and actually great for the renewable grid. The two solutions for intermittence are: buy batteries or buy so many solar panels that you still get enough power even when they are operating at like 30% efficiency. A workload that will pay big bucks for any excess power you’ve got will provide the needed ROI for the latter solution. Unfortunately the chips are all to expensive so everybody wants to run them full-out all the time.
- dsr_ 3y agoIf your business model depends on a continuous growth curve where your profitability point is more than two years away... you may be planning for an exit in 18 months. The only reliable long term growth curves so far are world population and global average temperature.
- x86x87 3y agoCheck notes.... World population? We're in for a rude awakening.
- caminante 3y agoThis article is keyword stuffed nonsense. Take the first sentence. > As recently discussed on The Carbon Copy with Brian Janous, utilities are seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades, and almost entirely from data centers. Utilities aren't seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades. It isn't entirely from DCs. The author appears to have a startup, pitching a Power to NatGas plus direct air capture system because "Why not?™" [0]. I'm offended on behalf of chemical engineers everywhere. [0]https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-ter...
- Nonoyesnoyes 3y agoEasy: utility of AI is huge, load is understandable and controllable. DC are run by companies with a shitload of money. Not a hard problem. And we can use the heat to heat houses too!