This map shows readings from about 770,000 home sensors, with red zones indicating areas with the most distorted power.
Bloomberg News analyzed data from about 770,000 Ting sensors from Whisker Labs, which are plugged into homes across the country, to better understand the distribution and severity of an important power-quality measure known as total harmonic distortion (THD). A lower THD is better.
Good large source of data, but possibly misleading about the severity of the problem (as well as the source being somewhat dubious as it’s from a private company).
I’m from Washington and was actually surprised at how small the problem is in the Seattle area and surrounding compared to the rest of the country. We have explosive data center growth here that seems ill represented by this map.
Further, a lot of the massive data centers in Washington are actually on the Eastern side of the state, particularly in Wenatchee, which on this map is just basically entirely black. The small line of spots on the East side of the state seems more in line with Yakima/Tri-Cities/Spokane while not really including the more rural Wenatchee/Chelan area. I wish you could zoom in more on this map so I could do a proper overlay to see what areas are being missed.
Is that because it’s mostly rural and not a lot of the rural residents have the money to be adding home-sensors to be testing their energy and whether its “clean?” Like seriously, that seems more like a wealthy-people service, I had never heard of Whisker Labs or Ting before now. So not only is the data going to be limited to bigger cities (so like so many maps its really just a fucking population map), but it’s going to miss every area that isn’t as wealthy.
So Wenatchee is sparsely populated, shows up as basically black on the map, but is also home to some of the largest bitcoin mining datacenters in the state, if not the largest. Part of the reason they set up there is the cheap electricity due to close proximity to hydroelectric power. Because the population is small, more rural, and generally poorer, there’s fewer sensors showing higher THD in the area.
So anyway, a lot of words to say that this problem may be even more serious than this map shows, because there’s a lot that this map isn’t showing including the explosion of data centers in more rural areas with cheap electricity, where there not be as many rich folks with Ting sensors.
I was going to point out that Seattle’s electricity usage is small on the map but the datacenters are going to Wenatchee and Quincy. The state has plans to remove dams and switch more to wind but the massive investment in datacenters for AI is going to derail that.
Power use by the Washington/Oregon data center cluster was almost entirely covered by a local surplus of hydropower until a couple years ago. That might be why it looks different from elsewhere.
All of the data centers in the US combined use 4% of total electric load.
Once again, not the faulty of the technology. Don’t blame your shitty infrastructure on ai
If you’re doing a massive load increase, build out emissions-free generation to match. Some mix of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and geothermal would do fine. Otherwise, don’t do the big load increase.
I’ll go the opposite way. The fact that there are serious plans to spin up nuclear reactors to run nothing but AI datacenters is ridiculous.
Nuclear reactors take a decade+ to spin up, so by the time these reactors are online the AI bubble will have long since popped…
as someone who uses ai daily i’m not sure what could replace it, ecosia search results are sometimes ok (i haven’t used google in years) but a lot of the time the questions i ask have bot style “articles” with the exact same page layout anyway, so no use there or i don’t get my question answered
When I want real world opinions on a product or thing i used to pop site:reddit.com on the end but now i use https://thegigabrain.com/ as it does a far better job with searching and summarising the posts into useful information
then i use usually a 7b or 14b local llm using gpt4all, lately i use reasoner which has a built in javascript sandbox
https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/gpt4all-scaling-test-time-compute
basically you can watch ai fix any errors that it generates in real time and produce better coding results which helps me code and i have a home battery powered by solar so no grid usage there
finally i use https://chat.mistral.ai/chat when generating random ai images which i think are funny or interesting or i’m not at my pc
i’m probably 75% ecosia 25% ai but that 25% gets me answers and is invaluable, not to mention the answers are getting better every week as opposed to web searches which appear to be getting worse
The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches. Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending. AI is making web searches less useful by flooding the internet with AI-generated garbage. Also? Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me. Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?
The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches
Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we’re rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?
Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending
I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won’t as it’ll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers… so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:
Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-lemmy-ml-Q_mHphL3T.i2dA16PDKtAw
When using social it’s summarising reddit, when using Academic it uses academic sources:
You can also use AI for language learning:
To quote Mistral 7b:
A bubble in finance is when the price of an asset or security rises far above its true value due to speculation and hype, fueled by investors buying with the expectation of selling at a higher price. Prices rise based on market sentiment rather than fundamental value, creating a self-reinforcing cycle until enough investors realize the bubble’s unsustainability and sell, leading to a sharp decline in price and potential losses for those who bought during the bubble phase.
I’m certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?
In crypto it’s easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you’re talking about but a hype one?
Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain’t going anywhere
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending
Not only that but from all the examples I’ve given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):
The Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbXZoMocpM8
Songs: AI Took My Job https://suno.com/song/14572e0f-a446-4625-90ff-3676a790a886
It’s hard to say it’s a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there
Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?
About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I’m not sure, I just search a bit more, there’s no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^
I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?
They’re investing into huge, energy intensive compute resources that aren’t going to pay off for at least a decade, and meanwhile investors are going to want returns on those investments ASAP. They need to fill warehouses with compute and power them with nuclear reactors, but there’s no profitability model. That means stranded assets, especially if investment dries up and they can’t pay or if demand shifts away from their models. This is set up to be a massive crash.
NVIDIA will probably be fine though.
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air or draw made up conclusions from real sources. They’re just LLMs, no matter how much data you feed them and how much the results are tinkered with they only regurgitate a statistically likely answer. Perplexity is a bullshit machine. It’s fine if you don’t really care about the answer and are just kind of curious, but no serious researcher should ever rely on a chatbot.
As much as I think this is a great solution and should be written into law, the anti-ai crowd only asks it from one industry and it’s a clear sign of bias.
Not to mention that the big companies are literally doing it, either building new nuclear plants or restarting old ones. They aren’t the one holding green energy back, the oil cartel and their corrupt politicians are.
One industry? People are so mad at AI because it’s just another industry, a new one with massive environmental impact, and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists. It’s the absolute worst face of the tech sector, and totally deserving of all the hate it receives.
basically no real use
"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.”
Also, will you get mad at the next new industry? I highly doubt it.
People advocating for the 99 shitty technologies that die always seem to like to quote the people talking about the one technology that survived from past generations as if that somehow made criticism of the 99 others a bad call.
Ai is going nowhere mate, you’re on the wrong side of this one. It’s too broadly useful already and has too much potential in the future
If the next new industry is an energy hungry propaganda machine, yes I will
and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists
This shows you think all AI are LLMs or generative art. Those are only the most visible faces of the tech, and you’re showing your name ignorance of the field.
If you want to talk about machine learning in general, that’s a different conversation. Like it or not, colloquially, AI is LLMs and chatbots
How exactly is the rest of AI a different conversation??? Were talking about the power requirements of running AI at scale and somehow you think it’s not only correct but implied that this convo should just be about colloquial parts AI and anything else is a totally different topic in regards to power consumption?
totally deserving of the hate it gets
Yeah so breakthroughs in chemistry and other sciences for example, deserving of hate eh?
Nothing good comes from AI… when all you know about AI is colloquial lmao
Oh fuck off with “stealing from artists” - that just proves you know nothing about the subject and and should be completely ignored.
This added zero to the discourse other then making you look like a complete idiot. Are we in the shitpost community here?
