> “The biggest issue is a belief that AI should be how we solve everything, while ignoring the resources that it costs. This culture is omnipresent across tech.”
Well said. It reminds me of the peak of crypto hype, but worse and more pervasive. There's this attitude that no matter what the problem is, the solution MUST be LLMs.
Here in Reno the city council imposed a similar moratorium, buckling under a deluge of NIMBY pressure, citing talking points that are obvious bullshit to anyone who's actually set foot in any of the dozen or so existing local datacenters. All that it accomplishes is a guarantee that future projects and their tax revenue will move to the next county over — and then we'll be wondering why we're still stuck with crumbling infrastructure woefully undersized for our population and an economy dominated by a dying tourism industry.
If I was more tin-foil-hat inclined, I'd hypothesize that this wave of anti-datacenter activism is an astroturfing campaign pushed by the CCP to make sure the US deliberately refuses to compete with China in the technology sector. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by incumbent tech companies to block competition via regulatory capture and grandfathering. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by the agricultural sector (and/or companies like Nestlé) to deflect attention from their multiple-orders-of-magnitude greater water consumption. The reality's probably a lot less exciting, though: just a bunch of people who mean well and are rightfully opposed to Big Tech capitalism, but have been misled (probably by some or all of the above) into throwing out the babies with their bathwater.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] threadWell said. It reminds me of the peak of crypto hype, but worse and more pervasive. There's this attitude that no matter what the problem is, the solution MUST be LLMs.
If I was more tin-foil-hat inclined, I'd hypothesize that this wave of anti-datacenter activism is an astroturfing campaign pushed by the CCP to make sure the US deliberately refuses to compete with China in the technology sector. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by incumbent tech companies to block competition via regulatory capture and grandfathering. Or it's an astroturfing campaign by the agricultural sector (and/or companies like Nestlé) to deflect attention from their multiple-orders-of-magnitude greater water consumption. The reality's probably a lot less exciting, though: just a bunch of people who mean well and are rightfully opposed to Big Tech capitalism, but have been misled (probably by some or all of the above) into throwing out the babies with their bathwater.