Technology

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. ~~To power one complete AI server you'd need about 134 m² in solar panels which are basically free these days.~~

For solar panels you'd need about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². Plus chargers, and large public pool to cool those 270kW. But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.

So basically less than ~~10%~~ 50% extra costs upfront 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.

and texas was going to add another 1800 datacenters, until they saw thier elections of the gop is jeopardy.

it's very well comprehensible if you're good with numbers.

"AI is a tool stop being a luddite" mfs when being exposed to this reality

Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030

The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.

So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.

That 'almost' in "Almost Incomprehensible" is doing a lot of work there.

Hey but we have a flood of impossible gymnastics moves, fake soldering videos, and even fatter fart videos!

I’ve never seen a data centre with a chimney stack. This must be an American thing.

Billionaires trying to kill the rest of us faster.

to be fair, the scale of pretty much any global industry is incomprehensible to most people

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.