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...
Source, to preempt the inevitable musk stans: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexais-colossu...
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.
how do you still have a job?
How do you feel destroying our planet and murdering innocent creatures for your entertainment clanker?
Dams aren't as a nuclear explosion. They don't burst into appearance, in a way where animals cannot walk away from the rising water. Birds lose nests all the time (wind knocks down trees, for example) and they merely build another. And they only need nests to rear young, and those fall out of trees so they... build another.
What happens in reality, and not in fantastical, hyperbolic renditions of the truth, is that one ecosystem replaces another. Where before was river, is now lake. And this is an entirely natural process. There have been cases of earthquakes causing river blockage, and of course the reverse!
And of course our friendly beaver blocks rivers all the time, sometimes to the extent that it can be seen from space. Rivers being blocked is a natural, normal, common practice.
But I suppose you hate all the beavers too? Do you raise fist to air, shake it in emotive angst, and rail against the horrors of natural geological processes too? Do you hunt the noble beaver, too?
How about instead of dismissing, deriding, and debasing one of the most environmentally friendly methods of power generation, you get behind it? How about instead of suppressing a hydroelectric dam, which means people will build Ng generators, or use coal, you support them.
Or would you prefer nuclear, for that stable, steady, backing, of which windmill and our friendly sol does not provide? Or would you prefer massive acres of batteries, instead?
I beg you sir, please cease this mindless chatter!
(no I don't normally talk like this, but what the hell, a but of levity may bring less conflict here)
I mean, if you think about this, burning stuff is also a part of nature, wildfires happens regularly, volcanos active right now, etc. Burning fossils like gas was(from caveman burning wood) and is still most popular way to generate energy among humans. I don't get what's so special about datacenters people find compared to any industrial facilities to fuel hateboner on most absurd nitpicks.
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.
This is simply a purity test. Just because they’re all bad, doesn’t mean there isn’t better and worse options.
Feel free to elaborate.
Anthropic: no sustainability goals or claims
OpenAI: no sustainability goals or claims
SpaceX AI: no sustainability goals or claims
Some other non-lab inference providers:
https://regolo.ai/ Eu based, 100% renewables powered
https://greenpt.com/us/sustainability Eu based, allows you to track carbon cost of inference.
Acting like there is no difference between bad things is how you get worse things.
This also highlights my point: the norm is that the bulk of the inference and training providers have no goals.
And you don't get to put a feel good landing page from Meta and "declare victory" (I didn't) just the same. It means nothing because there isn't any accountability. Nice try.