it is difficult to comprehend for me that soneone spends all this time thinking through and calculating how to harness as much energy as possible and then wants to use it for large language models instead of something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird priorities.
Sometimes (often) solving the problem is the most fun part, regardless of how it’s used.
The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard, and there’s a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that seems to me a decent reason to think about that.
I haven’t heard yet that food production is constrained by these kind of things.
It appears to make that you’re just taking a cheap jab at AI.
Food distribution is still a problem in vast part of the world.
Handling food waste is another issue.
Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...
I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...
But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.
I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...
But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:
From a purely engineering perspective I think it becomes difficult to argue with the gas turbine once you get into the gigawatt class of data center. The amount of land required for this much solar is not to be understated. In many practical scenarios the solar array would need to be located a distance away from the actual data center. This implies transmission infrastructure which is often the hardest part of any electrical engineering project. You can put a gigawatt of N+1 generation on a 50 acre site with gas. It's dispatchable 24/7/365 and you can store energy for pennies on the dollar at incredible scale.
Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators indefinitely.
datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for something else when it’s rarer.
This is basically the same argument made by people in domain-specific language models but rather than physical space (in space) it's mind-share, so actually your argument makes more sense? lol.
Also not a rocket surgeon, but to my understanding, modern satellites already have solar panels and radiators that account for the system's overall energy absorption and dissipation in low Earth orbit [1]. Therefore, plugging a supercomputer into the solar array instead of another instrument would likely not affect the overall heat profile meaningfully. Most energy in LEO is ultimately derived from solar irradiance and passes through the spacecraft regardless of internal usage. That said, take this with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned lack of astrochirurgical bona fides.
Edit: Added some primary sources [2][3][4], including an interactive website by Andrew McCalip which lets you play around with the unit economics of orbital 'datacenters' at various price points [4].
If you think this is what LLMs are, then you are a bit behind the times. Opus 4.5 is a huge step up. The previous generation was good for starting basic hobby projects, now we can do pretty big time-consuming changes with it.
I have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of LLMs for a long time, but after a certain level of improvement you have to realize that at least for programming the advantages are substantial.
it is difficult to comprehend for me that soneone spends all this time thinking through and calculating how to harness as much energy as possible and then wants to use it for large language models instead of something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird priorities.
Sometimes (often) solving the problem is the most fun part, regardless of how it’s used.
The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard, and there’s a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that seems to me a decent reason to think about that.
I haven’t heard yet that food production is constrained by these kind of things.
It appears to make that you’re just taking a cheap jab at AI.
Exactly this, you need a (big) problem to motivate people to actually take a serious jab at a (big) new idea
if anything we are producing too much food
and what communications you find lacking?
Food distribution is still a problem in vast part of the world.
Handling food waste is another issue.
Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...
https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-and-...
https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-conditi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-cli...
I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...
But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.
I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...
But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-altma...
the main bottleneck for the civilization in communications currently is the sparsity of cynical, negative HN comments
From a purely engineering perspective I think it becomes difficult to argue with the gas turbine once you get into the gigawatt class of data center. The amount of land required for this much solar is not to be understated. In many practical scenarios the solar array would need to be located a distance away from the actual data center. This implies transmission infrastructure which is often the hardest part of any electrical engineering project. You can put a gigawatt of N+1 generation on a 50 acre site with gas. It's dispatchable 24/7/365 and you can store energy for pennies on the dollar at incredible scale.
Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators indefinitely.
If you have predictable demand at that scale, nuclear might make more sense than the combination of gas and solar.
I am hoping nuclear batteries make a comeback by the desire for all this compute and its voracious appetite for energy.
We have rolls royce small modular reactors (SMRs) driving a similar functionality in the UK
they are talking about covering the desert with solar panels. why would you not put the data center in the middle of it?
Simply because latency is a competitive advantage, one worth paying for. At the speed of light, making a trip out to the desert and back is too slow.
20 ms extra, for models which respond in 5 minutes
Slightly OT, but I see the Chinese are talking about space DCs now too which would suggest they reckon it could work too. (Unlike me and others here)
datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for something else when it’s rarer.
This is basically the same argument made by people in domain-specific language models but rather than physical space (in space) it's mind-share, so actually your argument makes more sense? lol.
I think it's more of a classic mirror move where IF they do work, they're at danger of falling behind.
Not a physician, but wouldn't space be terrible for heat dissipation?
Also not a rocket surgeon, but to my understanding, modern satellites already have solar panels and radiators that account for the system's overall energy absorption and dissipation in low Earth orbit [1]. Therefore, plugging a supercomputer into the solar array instead of another instrument would likely not affect the overall heat profile meaningfully. Most energy in LEO is ultimately derived from solar irradiance and passes through the spacecraft regardless of internal usage. That said, take this with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned lack of astrochirurgical bona fides.
Edit: Added some primary sources [2][3][4], including an interactive website by Andrew McCalip which lets you play around with the unit economics of orbital 'datacenters' at various price points [4].
[1] https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
[2] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...
[3] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
[4] https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
Yes, you would need massive amounts of radiators
I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers.
Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)
Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks)
He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?
Why are we wasting resources on toy chatbots?
Because fusion energy isn't cool anymore.
If you think this is what LLMs are, then you are a bit behind the times. Opus 4.5 is a huge step up. The previous generation was good for starting basic hobby projects, now we can do pretty big time-consuming changes with it.
I have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of LLMs for a long time, but after a certain level of improvement you have to realize that at least for programming the advantages are substantial.
Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with over-engineered massive boondoggle projects.
That regulatory capture con strangled more emerging economies than most like to admit. =3
"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)