Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be “you should’ve stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago.”
“Oh no what do about all this waste heat?”
“Generate more waste heat”
Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it’s God’s problem.
But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.
The US god will team up with the Chinese god and the Russian god to beat the crap out of us.
Then the middle eastern god will blow up the indian utopia because he is bored and the british fungus space god will rule over the remains.
This was exactly what I had in mind but for the life of me I can’t remember the title.
Supergods by warren ellis i think.
Where’s that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn’t actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related
how much it does use anyway? 5GWe was from delusional openai talk for investors, so maybe lower
That’s the fucking problem, it’s impossible to tell since MSFT won’t tell you directly, and only the people who run the datacenters could.
The only relatively reliable numbers I was able to find were in this research paper by Luccioni and Strubell from ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024. Now, that’s an obscure conference (not even ranked by CORE), by Dr. Luccioni appears to be right on the money about dangers of AI (https://www.sashaluccioni.com/).
i started to look up satellite photos and openinframap in order to figure out maximum capacity of their substations, but powerlines for them are probably massively oversized, and substations are probably oversized too in order to make it redundant and high-availability so there might be some way to guess it but then some of these will be underground and if they’re doing load-following to match their renewables (which might be cheaper for them) then it’s also oversized a bit on top of that
Well the main problem is that a datacenter is running much more than just AI. You’d need to somehow subtract “normal” cloud usage from just the promptfondling.
ez. remember that announcement when ms said their energy use got up 36%? that’s ai, and includes both training and use
this still can be fudged with more efficient office heating, shutdowns of least efficient dcs and so on, but only to a limited degree
They think they’re going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it’s made of mathematics. I’m a little freaked out.
They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.
Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.
Jesus 2.0 is an AI, and he’s American
@dgerard I dunno if you’ve read it but one of the wellsprings of this lunacy is “The Physics of Immortality” by Frank Tipler (1997), in which an astrophysics prof tries to square the circle of cosmological expansion and the resurrection through simulation, outing himself along the way as a very conflicted Christian fundamentalist who is determined to torture relativity until he can derive Jesus … https://archive.org/details/frank-tipler-the-physics-of-immortality/mode/1up
oh yeah
and for the present, just how incredibly many of the rationalist subculture turn out to be ex-evangelicals
