Comment by 737min

> the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).

Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.

I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.

All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.

But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.

Agreed, if you had to pick just one reason why AI is tremendously unpopular, it is because the US AI companies, lead by Dario Amodei, are telling the US public that it is going to take ALL their jobs, as well as disrupt society. Amodei even wrote his "Machines of Loving Grace" essay, his "positive" spin on the impacts of AI, saying as much.

This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.

The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!

As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.

Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.

For many, it's about water.

There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.

They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.

Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.

I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.

If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.

> job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism

A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:

- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...

- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...

I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.

This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.

>Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.

Today's America has no FDR to save runaway capitalism from itself.

> Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances

It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.

linking .gov as a source for a claim the government is making lol