Comment by kennywinker
3 days ago
Feelings about elon aside, the fact that they’re using gas generators to run these is a dealbreaker for me.
Source, to preempt the inevitable musk stans: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexais-colossu...
43% of the US electrical grid runs on natural gas, it's the largest single source by a considerable margin.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
They're not using gas generators to run the other models?
Gas generators are common in new data center buildouts. I'm not a fan, because they are insanely loud, but they do prevent the data centers from weighing down the grid and raising rates for all the neighbors.
My local llm running on my eight year old gpu and ten year old pc is powered by hydroelectric dams. I can’t vouch for the other data centers tho.
What models do you run?
Hydroelectric dams disrupt biosphere by flooding areas previosly inhabited by animals - and kill the whole populations of wildlife and fish.
How do you feel destroying our planet and murdering innocent creatures for your entertainment clanker?
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>My local llm running on my eight year old gpu and ten year old pc is powered by hydroelectric dams.
how do you still have a job?
As far as I know at least Anthropic also rents space in Musk's gas generator powered data centers.
Pretty sure you're not able to use many models, besides local, if you need to guarantee where the energy produced powers them. I don't align with much of what's going on in frontier AI today. And I don't actually use it as much as I had been as I've invested in local hardware. But I'm still curious and continue to test frontier models on different tasks. My limited experience with Grok is that it's boundaries are much less rigid than Anthropic and OAI, IME.
But if the planet is the only consideration here you can't use any in of these models when pointing a finger at one. They're putting them wherever they can. And I'll be one of the first one to cheer some of these systems being dismantled after the fallout / when the US has some political leaders that have a spine again.
> But if the planet is the only consideration here you can't use any in of these models
This is simply a purity test. Just because they’re all bad, doesn’t mean there isn’t better and worse options.
I don't buy that - you can't distinguish. This sounds like a convenient way for people to say "my choice is better for the planet" with basically no basis.
Feel free to elaborate.
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