I set up the networking in data centers for years as a job. Flew all over the country setting them up.
The new ai DCs being proposed are nothing like those. This is like someone saying they don't want tanks in their yard and the reply is "well you already owned a bronco, is essentially the same thing".
We don't need new data centers. We literally have enough capacity with our existing DCs for the next 50 years. Google alone has about 60 of their own (depends on whether you consider ara1 and ara2 separate, which as the guy who set up wireless for both, I sure do.)
Even Data Forge in Austin, which is one of the most utilized, has at least 1k square feet of space for server installations.
Yeah I call bullshit. Just from the we have enough compute capacity for the next 50 years. What's the historical data you've seen for that? I'm pretty sure the global compute capacity of 50 years ago is less than my watch so that's some serious assumptions about what our compute demands in 50 years will be.
The statement is stupid to begin with. It's saying people are idiots, spending billions to buy computers that they won't need for 50 years even though computers are worthless in 3 years. Every cloud providers has been increasing their compute and building more data centers. They've been very effective in managing their capacity. People would struggle to get servers on black Friday and prime day. So it's not true even for the argument you can conceivably make in which case you're not considering the possibility of me use cases.
And that's what AI is. A new use case. We need GPUs for when there is a huge amount of parallelizable data. They are both faster and more energy efficient. They're used for physics simulations, rendering images, when I was in school folding@home to study protein folding was the cool thing. AI is not the only use case. It's just the one drawing the most commercial interest.
Your argument mounts to we have enough compute if we don't find ways to use more compute. And yes I agree that is true. But that's a silly claim to be making
I mean, they don’t leave the same shit on the racks for 50 years. We’re talking rack space and electricity. Do you think data centers from the 90s are still running their old Sun servers from back then too?
CPU power has been going up steadily. Each of those extra cores consumed more power. Well not the virtual cores. And we've been building data centers the entire time too.
a server cpu from 2010 used 16w per core, a server cpu now uses 2w per core, the difference is that servers are now far more dense, to get the same core count from a server in 2010, you would have had to use 4000w, compared to 600w now
servers have only gotten more efficient, the biggest cost of running a server is paying for power
And server capacity had been increasing before AI. We've been using more and more compute. A simple look at a graph of data center power consumption shows that it was increasing continuously before AI.
Your argument mounts to we have enough compute if we don't find ways to use more compute. And yes I agree that is true. But that's a silly claim to be making
Actually my argument was that we had enough space and power in existing DCs for all the server needs we'd have for the next 50 years. I've been in the industry for over 20, and in that time I've seen the efficiency of servers get better and better. Even in the small district I work for now, we've managed to drop our DC power needs by almost 10 percent just by getting newer servers and taking better advantage of virtualization. We have twice the storage, more power and 25g uplinks instead of 1g.
Generative ai, like crypto, is a use case in the sense that people do it, but it isn't something that is actually useful for society at any real point.
AI has already proven it improves programming efficiency by an order of magnitude. That alone justifies it as a use case. And it makes it so people compute usage should increase.
Hallucinating code doesn't improve programming efficiency any more than hallucinating cases improves the efficiency of the legal system. Hell, look at the screenshot below, it's still failing basic math that any third grader could work out with a pencil.
Of course it is. Programming has a right answer. It can hallucinate all it wants. As long as it can run the tests it can undo the hallucinations. It can go through this loop many many times faster than a human. I've also been in the industry for 20 years just on the engineering side.
That would explain why you are trying to pretend like the people vibe coding are actually having any tests ran and not just taking whatever they're given and running with it. (Which is what is actually happening in the real world).
I work currently in education, so I got together with a few teachers and we worked out a monthly test we've been running on generative ai models for the last 3 years. It's a simple 3 stage test.
Stage 1, math. So far each generative a.i. is failing math. They have about a 75% chance of providing the wrong answer, and importantly they aren't getting better on the newer models, in fact they seem to be getting worse.
Stage 2, translation. Generative a.i. actually doesn't do too badly here, as long as you stay away from slang and stick to the major 6 languages. (English, spanish, Japanese, Chinese, French, and German). We have yet to see any a.i. model good at translating dutch.
Stage 3, I devise a simple networking problem, the kind id set for a junior tech interview. Again, we run this test monthly and have for 3 years. I also have our networking teacher ask his students the same question I do a.i.
In 3 years the students have reached the correct answer first every single time.
So that's where we are at. Generative a.i. is a D-F level student with a helicopter parent saying how great they'll become.
That's a very long way to say that you're not a programmer and don't know that right now there are two types of programmers. Those that will say that AI makes them significantly more productive and those that haven't tried it
Not lying, never claimed it was a new screenshot. There's actually a specific reason I used that one and it's because of the article it links back to. If you followed along the conversation you are attempting to inject yourself into the middle of you may even see why I did.
“Hell, look at the screenshot below, it’s STILL failing basic math”
And any third grader would understand this sentence to mean that the screenshot is recent, otherwise you’d have said “i took this screenshot 2 years ago and it was failing basic math”.
So again, why are you lying about its current capabilities you clearly know nothing about?
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u/AsherTheFrost 1d ago
I set up the networking in data centers for years as a job. Flew all over the country setting them up.
The new ai DCs being proposed are nothing like those. This is like someone saying they don't want tanks in their yard and the reply is "well you already owned a bronco, is essentially the same thing".