I voiced this concern elsewhere recentley, it terrifies me to think of how much energy, bandwidth, computing power, and storage all goes into what is essentially, frivilous, pointless, lazy, stupid bullshit when it comes to AI and what people actually use it for.
My AI girlfriend is not bullshit good sir.
I mean, I am as anti-AI as any rational human being.
but when you start describing digital things as frivilous, pointless, lazy and stupid bullshit… That kinda describes about 98% of technology and internet usage.
That is a bit oversimplified imo. The Internet is a storehouse of knowledge, lots of books and videos and news articles, lots of archives. AI cannot produce any real, helpful information.
Do we actually know where the money for all this is coming from? The hardware and power bills alone should look like a huge black hole for any company doing this. Completely unsustainable, and yet Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple all continue to function without issues.
The revenue generated is tiny, so where is the money coming from?
Duh, the datacenter holding company is funded by openAI, which is funded by nvidia, who makes their money selling chips to the datacenter holding company, who then rents out their equipment to openAI, who gets funding from nvidia. So basically Enron 2.0
We ran a lot of QE during Covid, which is still going into stocks. VTI doubled the last 4 years.
From the real economy. It will be syphoned off, until the circular card house of imaginary money flows is going to collapse under the weight of reality.
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But heaven forbid you use a PC power supply that’s not 80+ efficient!
AI has basically obliterated 30 years of energy efficiency gains.
Some companies like Microsoft have started buying old closed down nuclear power plants like Three Mile Island in order to use them to power their AI, so hopefully it can offset a large portion of the energy demand.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai
These nuclear plants were closed for a reason. It was determined that they were unsustainable and required major maintenance and reconstruction.
If Tech Companies (who have no experience in running Nuclear power plants) start recommissioning them, and don’t properly maintain them, it is going to get very disastrous, very quickly.
Great, just what the world needed: bigtech buying (scarce, non-renewable) uranium and selling the resulting plutonium to the highest bidder.
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Yup, crazy thought, but we see worse in the news these days so I’m not ruling it out.
if the nuclear plant is actually reopened, it’s still be a huge waste. Because we really need that energy elsewhere rn
Microsoft isn’t the sort of company I would want to run a nuclear power plant. That’s a huge responsibility
It would be nice if that nuclear power was used to power cities instead of AI trash.
Microsoft isnt just reactivating old nuclear power plants.
They are building what could very well be the first functional commercial fusion power plant
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/world-first-fusion-power-plant-helion
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Does anybody know how many data centers are actually planning to be built? Because it can’t just be “whatever we need”.
