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I think at this point there are some questions where AI has started to work noticeably better than regular search engines, not because it’s gotten good but because the search engines are being made so bad at their jobs. 
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The article didn’t say, but I assumed they were talking about cooling towers, and the numbers make sense.
A large chunk of the cooling in a cooling tower is from water evaporating. That evaporated water needs to be topped up.
The water consumption numbers they’re talking about are consistent with the cooling of a few-hundred-megawatts of heat using cooling towers.
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Powerful. Brave. Scary, but also empowering.
This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr
(Sorry if it’s already been posted – it could go in several threads.)
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The best use I’ve heard of was a group trying to make a medicine using AI to analyze thousands of chemical compounds and narrow them down to a few dozen that were worth having the human scientists actually test, which led to productive results that would have been impossible to achieve without that aid. I’m not sure if I’m remembering every detail correctly, but that’s the gist- using AI for something it’s actually better at than humans, analyzing and sifting huge piles of data. Not doing the actual research, drawing any conclusions, or making shit up based on what people on the internet posted. I could see AI being a very useful tool for limited applications like that, rather than the more common definition of “shitty lying chatbot shoehorned where it’s not wanted” that seems popular with tech bros right now.
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I’ve used machine learning for classifiers before. It can be a really helpful way to take advantage of a well-built data set. It’s also nothing new and doesn’t need to involve these kinds of data centers, which go with trying to use whatever thoughtless tools to squeeze whatever drops they can from raw data stolen in bulk. They both get called “AI” but it’s like comparing a ferry for crossing a river to a mega-yacht where any function is an afterthought.
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They don’t have closed system cooling towers?
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Possible, though closed systems can’t cool below the ambient dry bulb temperature, and in e.g. Arizona the building interior would need to be cooler than that most days. So they would need a combination system, with the closed circuit carrying only part of the load.
Which really brings us back to “massive data centres in hot dry places are a bad idea”.
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“There is no such thing as a ‘fish’.”
General Predictive Text engines are not the same, even a little bit, as an Image Generation AI, or a Machine Intelligence System, or a learning system, or, or, or…
Calling them all “AI” is a massive bait and switch: “You can’t crack down on ChatGPT! What about this other AI which is curing cancer! Why are you stopping us from building more data centers for GPT? Why do you hate children with cancer?”
It’s a bullshit rhetorical hack. It’s like aliens who see all members of the species Homo sapiens as “person”, and you get arguments about how you can’t institute laws which imprison murderers because it will punish babies and brain surgeons, and the arguments are all along the lines of “You can’t stop persons, because what about these persons, why do you want to restrict the freedoms of persons when there are persons doing good things?”
I don’t want to stop “AI”, I want to stop generative slop from fulfilling the nanotech fears, and turning our noosphere into grey goo. Expert Systems which are analysing drugs and folding proteins and smoothing traffic flow, they’re just fine. Small scale chat engines? (Like how I’ve heard of smaller GPT engines trained on specific limited corpuses intended for education, in the form of Socratic dialogue with students) OK, I’m listening.
But turning the noosphere into grey goo? Fuck all the way off with that shit, and saying that it’s a restriction on “AI” without specifying further is becoming tantamount to a lie.
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For the record, ichthyologists basically use the definition of “a vertebrate that isn’t a tetrapod” and it works perfectly well except for all these online weirdos who somehow got the idea that English words have to be monophyletic groups. They don’t even in biology, they just can’t be taxa. It’s really annoying how people seize up on these things and try to be pedantic without understanding them.
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I get your point, but this is more like a misleading conflation:
“Why are you proposing to ban all goldfish?”
“I’m not, I just prefer not to swim amongst hungry sharks.”
“Why? What have hagfish ever done to you?”
“I didn’t say anything about hagfish?”
“And yet you propose these restrictions which would stop the good work that lungfish are doing.”
That’s what the arguments about AI feel like.
At one level they’re all basically the same thing. At another, more practical and important level, no they’re fucking not.
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Sorry, I’m not actually disagreeing with what you said, I’m just kind of sick of that phrase. There absolutely is such a thing as a fish despite what people who learned just one fact keep repeating.
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and here i was thinking that the prevailing misinformation was that birds are not real.
what am i actually catching when i take the boat out to the reef? what are those scaly, tasty creatures that bite my hooked baits and lures?
…and the birds have scales and the fish have wings…
is the simulation hallucinating me?
i fish, therefore i…
.
.
.
“i cannot do that, Dave”
daisy, daisy, …
…
…
.
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The idea is that while “bird” can be defined as anything past a particular point on the evolutionary tree – though palaeontologists do not always use the same one – “fish” needs to be defined as anything between two points. And since you would only do that if you were interested in some aspect of the animals other than their genealogy, some people who don’t care about anything else have started insisting that makes it an impossible concept.
I’m sorry to be derailing about it, but it’s really dumb, and it goes with this whole thing of making evolution just about statistics on gene sequences and ignoring all the changes in what living things are actually like. I wish it would die already.
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You could argue that the defining trait of modern techno-fascism is that the ruling class simply believes anything not made by them is inherently worthless. They don’t want us to be able to make a living from what we create because they think it’s a waste of resources for us to do it at all.
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These are the stupidest people of all time.
Yes, please, “delete” IP laws. Make it a trivial matter to reverse engineer and release a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TilTok clone into the world (or just plain copy it wholesale) and undercut your wealth and influence.
I double dog dare you.
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Word.
If people don’t think enshittification is also coming for Bluesky like an out of control freight train then they are deluding themselves. Enshittification is coming for everything.
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He’s probably sure that nobody is going to steal his full self driving IP.
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They had the CEO of Bluesky on On the Media this week trying to make the case that they have firewalls against enshittification, but I’m not convinced…
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