> It’s not only new projects putting strain on the grid though. The report found that an estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work.
Containerized sandbox environments for AI can be incredibly wasteful. If those sandboxes are kept available so the user gets sub-second access that is a continual user of RAM, and thus overall computing resources. We built the first version of https://www.aha.io/builder/overview using a typical containerized environment - just like you see with products like Replit - but were appalled at the inefficiency and waste. We rebuilt it from the ground-up to use shared architecture instead with Javascript-level isolation, and almost zero waste. Using shared computing instead of containers means instant startup time, and (almost) zero resource consumption when not active. You still consume disk to store the artifacts, but there is no ongoing RAM or CPU.
I think a reckoning is coming for container-based AI systems too. We are seeing tokens trend towards reflecting the actual cost, and I think the same will be true of containerized runtime environments too.
I just discovered that a bunch of repos that I forked on github are running all sorts of Actions daily, to the tune of $200/month.I don't get charged for it because they're public repos. But its evidently doing a bunch of zombie compute, and is happening across everyone's forks... Maybe it's partly why github is shit now.
We need reliable and ubiquitous checkpointing, then it won't matter if your workload executes in a container runtime or in a WASM sandbox or even on bare metal.
During the dot com boom they said data centers consumed 8% of US electricity. It was later proven to be a lie, created with fake studies by coal companies to trick the US into building more coal power plants using environmental activist outrage to implant the idea that the internet needs coal into the mainstream. Make of that what you will
China might not win on GPU or Software Stack, but they will definitely win on the lower end of the stack which is Datacenters and Electricity Grid infrastructure building out. And I wouldn't be surprised they are 10x the rate of US.
Putting the human freedom issues aside, I don't see how Datacenter and Electricity production have much environmental or social concerns especially when they are built in mostly remote places. This isn't some manufacturing facility that leaks toxic substances into river. And China's annual solar installation rate is more than the rest of the world combined.
>Economically it might be more successful
Economics is what gives you power. US needs to wake up and start taking it seriously rather than feeling good about themselves being the best country in the world.
Theres this weird false dichotomy people do in energy discussions where they imply that you can either be an authoritarian regime with no property rights and build power plants, or have a rule of law and not build any energy infrastructure at all.
Don’t get it twisted. Their superpower is that they actually just build solar panels, wind turbines, and nuke plants. The answer to should we build, is “yes.”
BTW, look at what is happening today, under this administration, at the US EPA sometime.
I do think token demand might actually become satiated at some point. Machine to machine scenarios imply the potential for infinite sprawl, but machines don't run for free or forever. There is always a human with interest involved somewhere. You can try to hand wave the human away, but at some point you would be forced to reveal who is paying for the electricity, computers, real estate and internet connectivity.
Sure, but presuming next generation AI is nearly as high utility as a good as a junior engineer, a team of 1-3 seniors could be running projects with 10-30 junior engineers as is. Then consider that much of the throttle on adding more is cost per engineer matching cost of living oriented salary and demotivation effects of giving engineers projects that don't ship and don't further their career path.
I could easily see the equivalent of tens of thousands of engineers being used for companies that had dozens today, making prototypes of every imaginable solution to every RFE in case they are needed by management.
Cost will naturally serve as a limiter but I think most companies will find it hard to compete in their field with anyone who keeps costs similar to today by replacing salaries with energy and hardware capital and continues that cost level by turning all efficiency gains into new build out.
context matters. chatbots on sites? companies are wasting money. great way to lose customers. we ripped ours out, i warehouse the data and we had people canceling accounts literally because support agents weren't humans. 99.9% of convos were basically the equivalent to "fuck off clanker let me talk to a real human". for context we have millions of customers in NA, retail company. chat bots are a great way to piss people off is what we learned (i mean most of us called that out at the beginning but the leadership pushed it thru the pipeline anyways). felt very vindicated after we showed them the numbers of how much people hated these things.
latest trend im seeing is the only people touting how great their agent is is people who made their agent. no one is interested in using someone elses agent. very funny social friction we've got growing.
claude/gpt/whatever? yea. sure, i guess but that's a pretty bad faith way of talking about what people love. its just the only mode of taking advantage of this shit, so i guess you could say they like "chatbots" but they are llms so that's exactly how you're supposed to interface with them. so not really meaningful to say "people love chatbots" when it's more likely people like being lazy and having stuff done for them.
im reminded of mark zuckerberg, who thinks that people want to socially network with fake not-real AI profiles. there isn't a soul in the world except mark who thinks this is a cool idea. mark is the goat of having the worst vision ever.
inb4 "why would you want to hinder progress" types.
seriously its not hard calculus to understand that we were barely scaling energy needs for people, if you're in the US you got a hostile asf admin thats calling everything woke and cancelling the possibilities that we could scale this in a way thats good for the damn planet. so to have datacenters come in and feel entitled to the same utilities that deprioritizes actual living breathing people .... like there is no "progress" argument to be made here. that is the opposite of progress. that is a damn regression.
if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves. since these things are being bankrolled from billionaire entities and idiots, they should have no problem scheduling the mar a lago dinners with the million dollar checks to get this mob of an admin to allow them to do it using "woke" energy infra. we can still live without AI, so you're not a utility yet stop pretending you are one.
same shit as the bitcoin nonsense from 14-17, all the dorkus maximus types claimed that bitcoin mining would force energy to scale and everyone would collectively benefit from greener energy sources. total fever dreams touted by people chasing greed. all of that is a pipe dream, not happening with the powers that be in control and everyone knows it.
The backlash is and always has been incredibly fucking stupid. The same dipshits who want to bring manufacturing back to the US cannot tolerate goddamned data centers when the negative externalities and infastructural strain would be orders of magnitude worse.
If the data centers paid for their own negative externalities instead of foisting them off on the local people, the local people wouldn't be so pissed off.
Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Sucking gigawatts from the grid and making the rest of the people pay for the necessary upgrades is not a way to make friends.
Putting up scores of loud and polluting diesel or methane generators running 24/7/365 for main power, not just backup, without mitigating the noise and pollution, so a mile away it is 70dB on someone's front porch day and night, will really piss people off.
If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
And it is not like the companies putting up the data centers do not have the money to do it right. They just lack the attitude to consider their effect on others.
If a new rich neighbor decided to park their semi-truck on your lawn idling all night, or pipe their sewage through your apartment water intake, you wouldn't be happy about those negative externalities either. The only "incredibly fucking stupid" thing I see here is the attitude in the post to which I'm replying.
Most of the concerns are massively overblown. For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid. With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water, so that it doesn't have any continual draw on the local water supply. And even the legacy data center water cooling systems that draws on local water supply consumes less than 3% of what U.S. gulf courses consume. Every industry uses water. This idea that this industry is especially bad as a consequence of that is simply ignorant.
>If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
I'm skeptical that this would have any impact at all. Considering how much less data centers pollute than other industries, relative to the economic value they generate, and the disproportionate amount of hostility they receive, I don't see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement. Most of those complaining about data centers don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations, meaning that this is just a pretense for their opposition, not the motivation for it.
can’t wait for people to complain about how much water or energy bringing manufacturing back to america uses. oh wait, they won’t, cause it’s not AI. people didn’t care about data centres before AI. this is an ideological issue wrapped up with a bow on it by environmental issues. that’s not to say america is absolutely handling it’s energy transition terribly, it is
This is the part that really stood out to me.
> It’s not only new projects putting strain on the grid though. The report found that an estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work.
Containerized sandbox environments for AI can be incredibly wasteful. If those sandboxes are kept available so the user gets sub-second access that is a continual user of RAM, and thus overall computing resources. We built the first version of https://www.aha.io/builder/overview using a typical containerized environment - just like you see with products like Replit - but were appalled at the inefficiency and waste. We rebuilt it from the ground-up to use shared architecture instead with Javascript-level isolation, and almost zero waste. Using shared computing instead of containers means instant startup time, and (almost) zero resource consumption when not active. You still consume disk to store the artifacts, but there is no ongoing RAM or CPU.
I think a reckoning is coming for container-based AI systems too. We are seeing tokens trend towards reflecting the actual cost, and I think the same will be true of containerized runtime environments too.
I just discovered that a bunch of repos that I forked on github are running all sorts of Actions daily, to the tune of $200/month.I don't get charged for it because they're public repos. But its evidently doing a bunch of zombie compute, and is happening across everyone's forks... Maybe it's partly why github is shit now.
We need reliable and ubiquitous checkpointing, then it won't matter if your workload executes in a container runtime or in a WASM sandbox or even on bare metal.
During the dot com boom they said data centers consumed 8% of US electricity. It was later proven to be a lie, created with fake studies by coal companies to trick the US into building more coal power plants using environmental activist outrage to implant the idea that the internet needs coal into the mainstream. Make of that what you will
Even assuming this was true at all, something happening 30 years ago is not evidence that the exact same thing is happening today.
> It was later proven to be a lie
Source?
China might not win on GPU or Software Stack, but they will definitely win on the lower end of the stack which is Datacenters and Electricity Grid infrastructure building out. And I wouldn't be surprised they are 10x the rate of US.
Well yes but they don't have to worry about environmental or social concerns. They can just pollute wherever they want and jail anyone who complains.
Economically it might be more successful but I'd prefer being a citizen somewhere else.
> They can just pollute wherever they want and jail anyone who complains.
Hey don’t worry, the US is catching up: https://www.fox4news.com/news/woman-arrested-facebook-post-c...
I suspect the drug addicted pedophile SV elite will start endorsing other Chinese social ideas so that we “don’t fall behind”.
Putting the human freedom issues aside, I don't see how Datacenter and Electricity production have much environmental or social concerns especially when they are built in mostly remote places. This isn't some manufacturing facility that leaks toxic substances into river. And China's annual solar installation rate is more than the rest of the world combined.
>Economically it might be more successful
Economics is what gives you power. US needs to wake up and start taking it seriously rather than feeling good about themselves being the best country in the world.
Theres this weird false dichotomy people do in energy discussions where they imply that you can either be an authoritarian regime with no property rights and build power plants, or have a rule of law and not build any energy infrastructure at all.
Don’t get it twisted. Their superpower is that they actually just build solar panels, wind turbines, and nuke plants. The answer to should we build, is “yes.”
BTW, look at what is happening today, under this administration, at the US EPA sometime.
..china? what
I do think token demand might actually become satiated at some point. Machine to machine scenarios imply the potential for infinite sprawl, but machines don't run for free or forever. There is always a human with interest involved somewhere. You can try to hand wave the human away, but at some point you would be forced to reveal who is paying for the electricity, computers, real estate and internet connectivity.
Sure, but presuming next generation AI is nearly as high utility as a good as a junior engineer, a team of 1-3 seniors could be running projects with 10-30 junior engineers as is. Then consider that much of the throttle on adding more is cost per engineer matching cost of living oriented salary and demotivation effects of giving engineers projects that don't ship and don't further their career path.
I could easily see the equivalent of tens of thousands of engineers being used for companies that had dozens today, making prototypes of every imaginable solution to every RFE in case they are needed by management.
Cost will naturally serve as a limiter but I think most companies will find it hard to compete in their field with anyone who keeps costs similar to today by replacing salaries with energy and hardware capital and continues that cost level by turning all efficiency gains into new build out.
The Coming ‘Power Wars’ Between Humans and Datacenters
https://sourceryintel.com/reports/humans-vs-datacenters
Seems the humans love the AI chatbots though. But I guess they figure they run on magic, not actual electricity and water.
context matters. chatbots on sites? companies are wasting money. great way to lose customers. we ripped ours out, i warehouse the data and we had people canceling accounts literally because support agents weren't humans. 99.9% of convos were basically the equivalent to "fuck off clanker let me talk to a real human". for context we have millions of customers in NA, retail company. chat bots are a great way to piss people off is what we learned (i mean most of us called that out at the beginning but the leadership pushed it thru the pipeline anyways). felt very vindicated after we showed them the numbers of how much people hated these things.
latest trend im seeing is the only people touting how great their agent is is people who made their agent. no one is interested in using someone elses agent. very funny social friction we've got growing.
claude/gpt/whatever? yea. sure, i guess but that's a pretty bad faith way of talking about what people love. its just the only mode of taking advantage of this shit, so i guess you could say they like "chatbots" but they are llms so that's exactly how you're supposed to interface with them. so not really meaningful to say "people love chatbots" when it's more likely people like being lazy and having stuff done for them.
im reminded of mark zuckerberg, who thinks that people want to socially network with fake not-real AI profiles. there isn't a soul in the world except mark who thinks this is a cool idea. mark is the goat of having the worst vision ever.
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Some humans do.
Just as well SpaceX can put them in space instead. Maybe.
inb4 "why would you want to hinder progress" types.
seriously its not hard calculus to understand that we were barely scaling energy needs for people, if you're in the US you got a hostile asf admin thats calling everything woke and cancelling the possibilities that we could scale this in a way thats good for the damn planet. so to have datacenters come in and feel entitled to the same utilities that deprioritizes actual living breathing people .... like there is no "progress" argument to be made here. that is the opposite of progress. that is a damn regression.
if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves. since these things are being bankrolled from billionaire entities and idiots, they should have no problem scheduling the mar a lago dinners with the million dollar checks to get this mob of an admin to allow them to do it using "woke" energy infra. we can still live without AI, so you're not a utility yet stop pretending you are one.
same shit as the bitcoin nonsense from 14-17, all the dorkus maximus types claimed that bitcoin mining would force energy to scale and everyone would collectively benefit from greener energy sources. total fever dreams touted by people chasing greed. all of that is a pipe dream, not happening with the powers that be in control and everyone knows it.
[flagged]
> degrowthers
lmao im wheezing, AI lovers have definitely reached cryptocurrency-adjacent levels of lmao out here
If you think the parent is being unreasonable, just wait until you see how the general public gets after another couple of years of this.
Your use of the word “degrowther” outs you as a neoliberal shill. And oh look at that. You have <100 karma.
The backlash is and always has been incredibly fucking stupid. The same dipshits who want to bring manufacturing back to the US cannot tolerate goddamned data centers when the negative externalities and infastructural strain would be orders of magnitude worse.
If the data centers paid for their own negative externalities instead of foisting them off on the local people, the local people wouldn't be so pissed off.
Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Sucking gigawatts from the grid and making the rest of the people pay for the necessary upgrades is not a way to make friends.
Putting up scores of loud and polluting diesel or methane generators running 24/7/365 for main power, not just backup, without mitigating the noise and pollution, so a mile away it is 70dB on someone's front porch day and night, will really piss people off.
If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
And it is not like the companies putting up the data centers do not have the money to do it right. They just lack the attitude to consider their effect on others.
If a new rich neighbor decided to park their semi-truck on your lawn idling all night, or pipe their sewage through your apartment water intake, you wouldn't be happy about those negative externalities either. The only "incredibly fucking stupid" thing I see here is the attitude in the post to which I'm replying.
You're repeating a false story.
Most of the concerns are massively overblown. For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid. With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water, so that it doesn't have any continual draw on the local water supply. And even the legacy data center water cooling systems that draws on local water supply consumes less than 3% of what U.S. gulf courses consume. Every industry uses water. This idea that this industry is especially bad as a consequence of that is simply ignorant.
>If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
I'm skeptical that this would have any impact at all. Considering how much less data centers pollute than other industries, relative to the economic value they generate, and the disproportionate amount of hostility they receive, I don't see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement. Most of those complaining about data centers don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations, meaning that this is just a pretense for their opposition, not the motivation for it.
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> Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Huh? What's this one? Which data centre sucks 30% of water?
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> The same dipshits
Are they? "Bring manufacturing back to the US" is vaguely right-aligned and ideological AI opposition is vaguely left-aligned in my experience.
can’t wait for people to complain about how much water or energy bringing manufacturing back to america uses. oh wait, they won’t, cause it’s not AI. people didn’t care about data centres before AI. this is an ideological issue wrapped up with a bow on it by environmental issues. that’s not to say america is absolutely handling it’s energy transition terribly, it is