This line of thinking has been so effective in capturing the mindshare of powerful decision makers that president Trump just last week announced the Stargate Project, a $500B private investment into data centers & other computing infrastructure for OpenAI. 12/ - ThreadSky

karenhao.bsky.social • 32 days ago

This line of thinking has been so effective in capturing the mindshare of powerful decision makers that president Trump just last week announced the Stargate Project, a $500B private investment into data centers & other computing infrastructure for OpenAI. 12/

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karenhao.bsky.social•32 days ago

Should Stargate follow through with $500B, it'll be the largest infrastructure spend in history and significantly accelerate the already startling pace of data center development post-ChatGPT. In turn that will significantly accelerate the aforementioned consequences. 13/

karenhao.bsky.social•32 days ago

Now on top of the negative externalities on people’s power, water, air, and global climate, we have another: the ceding of more & more control over critical energy & water infrastructure to Silicon Valley. I wrote about this last week in @theatlantic.com. 14/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/openai-stargate-maga/681421/

boboinparadise.bsky.social•32 days ago

This seems like the critical subtext missing from the "discussion" about stealing water from N California.
That and that Trump Nat'l GC is in LA.

karenhao.bsky.social•32 days ago

But DeepSeek shows - in the same moment as the Stargate announcement - that the trade off that OpenAI & co frame as wholly necessary is actually not. 15/

sam044.bsky.social•30 days ago

That's not very capitalistic of china. 😆 Of course the US wants to develop as many different industries as possible to solve "problems". Doesn't matter that we create the problem. Same as the tech security industry, which is huge because we use easily compromised passwords instead of token.

sam044.bsky.social•30 days ago

Western EU has been using tokens for security (a device that generates unique codes) for 20 years. Much much harder to hack. So your well explained scenario makes a lot of American sense. Pass expense on to users, create multiple bloated industries that'll have to be replaced eventually. Thank you!

sam044.bsky.social•30 days ago

Clarifying that EU uses tokens to secure their bank accounts. They also had chips in their ATM cards in the 1990's, again, 20 years before US.

karenhao.bsky.social•32 days ago

Wait a minute. You mean to say that we don’t need to blanket the earth with data centers and coal & gas plants to maybe arrive at a future where we can wave a magical AGI wand to make all of the consequences of that go away?

Yes. This is a false trade off. Let that sink in. 16/

karenhao.bsky.social•32 days ago

As I said earlier, scaling was always more about business than science. Scientifically, there’s no law of physics that says AI advancements must come from scaling rather than approaches using the same or fewer resources. Scaling is just an incredibly easy-to-follow formula. 17/

karenhao.bsky.social•32 days ago

DeepSeek now also undermines the business case for scaling. OpenAI has been burning through staggering sums of cash to keep up its scaling paradigm and has yet to figure out how to balance its checkbooks - and it turns out it didn’t need to spend so much cash. 18/

grimandgrimy.bsky.social•30 days ago

I hope they figure it out with two sticks, that would take the financial benefit to burn the planet to the roots and toss it to the wind. If AI costs nothing, then it can't be monopolized, nor hoarded.

megalu.bsky.social•31 days ago

📌

scotthoots.bsky.social•32 days ago

Scaling means that companies like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Oracle, HPE, Dell, etc. keep the money flowing.

brockhenry.au•32 days ago

They need to hire some of the people who made demos back in the 80s. They're probably available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

brainrockets.bsky.social•32 days ago

I grew up with a lot of engineers and one of the things the folks I knew bemoaned A LOT was code bloat. Like in the sense that there weren't incentives to write code efficiently especially in tandem with the power available increasing. So it's not surprising that they aren't being efficient.

belcuore.bsky.social•31 days ago

📌

wilfordp.bsky.social•31 days ago

Thanks for teaching us the challenges of AI and the dangers to our environment they present.

Can you also report on blockchain cryptocurrency data mining?

So many stand alone facilities masquerading as "data centers".

alianaqvipro.bsky.social•32 days ago

📌

caitscheverst.bsky.social•32 days ago

I can't be the only one seeing deep seated similarities with religious Rapture fixation? 'everything will get worse and we don't need to make any effort to reduce the badness because at the end of it all the worthy will be rewarded by a magical good'

writeups.org•31 days ago

Yes, this is often summarised as TESCREAL ideology - from a Gebru/Torres paper.

ehoelsch.bsky.social•32 days ago

Hey great thread. Could you please just clarify what the acronym "AGI" means? I followed most of what you were saying throughout your broader thread but struggle with figuring out industry specific acronyms. Thanks! 😀

karencwilson.me•32 days ago

Artificial general intelligence

onen.bsky.social•32 days ago

Large Language Models, what we call "AI" now due to marketing, is not actually intelligent, not even artificially. There's no understanding or reasoning involved whatsoever. AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, is what is used now to refer to what we used to understand as AI before

justafrenchcat.bsky.social•31 days ago

Well if their model "learnt" from other models, didn't someone have to scale in the first place?

dibble555.bsky.social•32 days ago

📌

gchance60.bsky.social•31 days ago

This is a game changer. Maybe not total reset, but close. (Thanks for the thread!)

chuckedahl.bsky.social•32 days ago

This is incorrect. DeepSeek's ability is predicated on training on an LLM. It leverages the power-and-water-expensive AI. It can't exist on its own.

If you want DeepSeek to perform better, you need a better LLM and you're back to wasting water, greenhousing the atmosphere, and using tons of power.

bento-bongos.bsky.social•32 days ago

That requires basic elementary on economics. Which you also need to get [gasp, shock, horror] a grasp on politics. The other, dirtier side of the economic coin.

Which people refuse to do.

sysplayer.bsky.social•32 days ago

Except that its claims are exaggerated - they left out all of their GPU training - 50K of them.

Great lesson in efficiency, but this is just overblown.

charleyinma.bsky.social•31 days ago

👀

suntoadcowboy.bsky.social•31 days ago

📌

detoxponcho.bsky.social•31 days ago

📌

jimclausen.bsky.social•30 days ago

For reference to what $500B does, the Francis Scott Key Bridge replacement (1.2 miles 2 lanes plus right shoulder in each direction) is estimated at $1.9 Billion.
So, easily 250 of those bridges, with change left over, on a No-Bid, single source contract to a political crony.

simondux.bsky.social•32 days ago

Exactly. They are $400bn short and the total spend is something like 3x the 2025 capex of all the hyperscalers put together.

kayzy.bsky.social•32 days ago

😳🤦‍♀️

kayzy.bsky.social•32 days ago

☹️

rjnerddad.bsky.social•32 days ago

Imagine what we could do if they invested this much money in something useful.

sheilahayman.bsky.social•32 days ago

'More Compute' is NEVER going to get to 'AGI' (whatever that means) - but it will fry us all first.

sheilahayman.bsky.social•32 days ago

As Yann LeCun himself admits, a cat or a spider has a basic understanding that the biggest LLM can never have. And it makes us massively more energy efficient (think 1,000,00x - on totally renewable energy, plus we don't need two breakfasts to learn new things)

sheilahayman.bsky.social•32 days ago

I've been making films and writing about humans and tech for decades, and seven years ago while at the MIT Media Lab I began 'Senseless', a project with the basic but fundamental idea that our intelligence is inseparable from biology, evolution, adaptation and life in the world.

bluetrue2024.bsky.social•30 days ago

Better or worse with quantum computing?

drewsolo.bsky.social•31 days ago

So like the big thinking computer in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

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