Everyone is using AI for everything now. Including people on here. It's "AI this" and "AI that". Why are people surprised this is what has happened? Has nobody on this forum ever lived in the contrast of a home with minimum appliance, then moved to a place with 4 gamers all over clocking their GPUs for 3 to 4 hours a day, and not observed the delta in utility bills? I'm honestly shocked everyone is surprised at what is happening.

According to the article, a lot of those requests are a result of speculative spamming, not unique, set-in-stone commitments to build.

I thought that the gas was being flared off anyway, feeding it into a turbine at least makes some use of it.

What’s happening is that Texas, a state largely owned by the fossil fuel industry, is trying to create demand in their state for that product by trying to attract energy intensive industries but then incentivizing them to power everything with gas.

If those incentives come from that taxpayer then this is a roundabout transfer of tax money to gas companies.

This is a bubble. AI just got hot a few years ago and it takes years for the semiconductor industry to design and produce new kinds of chips at scale. I expect tons of new chips to hit the market in 27 and 28. These will run models much faster with less power because they are designed for this specific use case.

Meanwhile there’s constant ongoing research on more efficient models and ways of quantizing them without performance loss.

It is also disconnected from the rest of the US power system. There was a Planet Money episode on it a few years back. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/21/1124365488/the-midnight-conne...

It is also poorly regulated and failed recently and killed several hundreds of people.

Oh, and the energy market that underpins the Texas grid was designed by Enron, literally.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power...

I am not climate change activist. But spending that much energy coming from fossil sources sound like something that we really should be very critical about... Is this really the best use for energy we have?

Pangram says mostly human

Seems so. AI is unlikely to make A16Z cheaper, if anything, we might see the first 4-and-40 fund from them next year. As long as the Senate is controlled by Republicans and the Fed is led by Warsh.

I totally disagree? It seems quite human-written on the contrary; I don't see any strained metaphors, weird word usage or other AI hallmarks.

It might be worth reviewing the site guidelines around shallow comments of this nature. There are much more substantive elements to comment on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are a few dipshit NY pols playing this game right now. They have their signs and literature out touting their "votes to (temporarily) stop data centers".

The tell is so obvious. All the GOP candidates distancing themselves from Trump and saying data centers are bad.

Normally that would earn you a 2AM all caps tweet labeling you a RINO or worse, and getting primaried. Instead, not a peep.

Which tells you its a ruse and he's in on it.

Absolutely, as soon as the midterms are over these corrupt buttnuggets will roll right back over and let the data center construction resume unabated.

Why would putting data center in space solve these problems? I feel like this is a total non sequitur. The solution is pay for more substations and power generation. This problem exists there regardless of space based compute and let me tell you the space based compute would 1000000x more expensive because you still need to build everything required in the current solution except in space! Its just not a real response to a lack of investment into infrastructure. And that means asking business to pay for the infrastrure they need as a collective industry.

Ok, first solve cosmic rays, then solve space hardening silcon, then solve dumping megawatts of heat without convection.

oh and then solve data affinity whilst training.

oh and connectivity.

Oh and lossless RDMA over free space lasers.

Maybe if HN's favorite bad guy said the quiet part out loud about exploring space compute to avoid regulation...instead of making bombastic claims about possible technical efficacy. I'm not really interested in giving credit to leaders that lie about their motives. Note the blog you linked doesn't mention this either.

there's still so many things to invent before this moves out of fiction... radiation, cooling, communication, costs ...

Put them on container ships, and pretend you launched them into space. You'll come out ahead in every way.

Not really, no. It still look absurd and a way to lobby local governments. Nothing has changed. It’s really just a way to say „let us do whatever we want, how we want, or we go to space“.

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