[HN Gopher] US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of...
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US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for
datacenters
Author : geox
Score : 162 points
Date : 2026-03-05 02:00 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| cs702 wrote:
| "The invisible hand" of free markets has become truly
| invisible...
| fulafel wrote:
| Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)?
|
| Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy
| with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to
| be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
| deaux wrote:
| Strange downvotes for a relevant question.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| There are no such things as CO2 emissions in this
| administration. Your AI chatbots will be powered by clean coal
| and you'll enjoy it!
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| /s this guy gets it. Thank you, finally speaking my language
| rob74 wrote:
| They have a cute mascot, so it can't be that bad:
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/meet-
| coal...
|
| Actually, the tweet quoted in the article is firmly in the
| "you can't make this $%&/ up" category...
| thegreatpeter wrote:
| So you believe Microsoft will start opening up coal plants
| again and not nuclear?
| dathinab wrote:
| Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build
| once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is
| commonly overlooked in cost calculations).
|
| It is also a ~50 year investment.
|
| This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why
| most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.
|
| Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank
| to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but
| Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes
| it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.
|
| Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini
| reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects
| have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best
| working out on paper (and quite often not even there).
|
| So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear
| and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at
| their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets
| do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public
| co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to
| also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.
| analog31 wrote:
| While we're at it, water use is another externality.
| adrianN wrote:
| The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is
| paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground.
| Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I
| know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs
| on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
| erpellan wrote:
| Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with
| carbon capture?
| AngryData wrote:
| You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take
| up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of
| volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the
| ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially
| rots.
|
| Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for
| some energy production, but at the very least use those
| volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for
| basically free.
| nDRDY wrote:
| Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon
| dioxide!
| adrianN wrote:
| Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from
| the atmosphere.
| nDRDY wrote:
| Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save
| the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason
| and into crazytown.
|
| When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are
| going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I
| understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the
| ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as
| quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start
| clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing
| massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of
| converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
| dathinab wrote:
| it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details
|
| trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition
|
| and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later
| run into issues
|
| (Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using
| fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest
| getting increasingly more unstable not just because of
| warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas
| leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient
| recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition
| deficiency in the long run.)
|
| but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they
| are just not cheap
|
| hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives
| them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return
| all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove
| any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.
|
| The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper
| per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We
| produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is
| again about half carbon, all absorbed from the
| atmosphere.
|
| Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per
| year. So we would have to scale lumber work
| _dramatically_. It 's also not a clean industry itself,
| reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel,
| and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive
| refineries.
|
| IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to
| artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton
| in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the
| conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the
| first place. There's some work on this right now, but
| like any massive engineering and ecological tampering,
| there _will_ be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don 't
| know how you prevent the dead plant matter from
| decomposing and releasing the carbon.
| nDRDY wrote:
| It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of
| biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to
| implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome
| financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are
| found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required
| to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're
| suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the
| picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose
| at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and
| their sacrifices.
| adrianN wrote:
| I suggest it's easier to leave to carbon in the ground in
| the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic.
| But if you want to go with charcoal it's probably best to
| get wood from coppicing.
| dathinab wrote:
| the only crazy thing here is your comment
|
| completely ignoring all existing technologies related to
| that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down
| trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass
| which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil
| anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)
|
| various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and
| without trees)
|
| and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and
| literally placed in the earth, too
|
| it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very
| expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to
| "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-
| equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because
| if they have the choice between very expensive carbon
| removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price
| they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations
| they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
| blitzar wrote:
| my read was ... we should cut down trees, burn them and
| bury the ashes to save the planet
| nDRDY wrote:
| It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise
| the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the
| Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid
| thing I've ever read on the internet.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Sound and particulate pollution too.
| dathinab wrote:
| The current US government is systematically attacking anything
| which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and
| claims it's mostly all a scam.
|
| So no.
|
| But what probably also isn't included but should is
| environmental damage.
|
| Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without
| filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air
| pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with
| not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more
| short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma
| attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy
| dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long
| ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog
| accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we
| look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has
| gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Look in the mirror.
|
| No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local
| turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of
| doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build
| more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because
| the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost
| overrun.
|
| And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to
| be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local
| turbine is less worse specifically because people like you,
| saying the exact same things you're saying right now have
| saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more
| importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd
| pay for it with all sorts of requirements.
|
| It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and
| engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a
| ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over
| the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost
| to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the
| first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go,
| add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom
| and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in
| your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look
| pretty good.
| blitzar wrote:
| The MBA pencil pusher would pay a billion for 1 unit of
| electricity if it increased their market cap by a trillion.
| The margin is so fat and the percieved upside so great that
| 9 figure signing bonuses have been thrown around.
|
| Of course this will all change, but I doubt we will see
| tech companies opening power plants anytime soon with their
| associated balance sheet dragging 1% return on equity.
| adrianN wrote:
| Acid rain and smog are not much of a concern with gas
| turbines. The most problematic exhaust is probably nitrous
| oxide.
| deadbolt wrote:
| We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved
| knows it.
| beloch wrote:
| Public investment yields private dividends.
| Xunjin wrote:
| "Socialize the losses, privatize the profits".
| testing22321 wrote:
| I covered my house in solar panels so it's all irrelevant now.
|
| Soon I'll get a used EV and cover the garage in panels too so I
| don't have to care about wars causing surges in gas prices
| either.
| mcs5280 wrote:
| Non-binding and voluntary = a bunch of lip service
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Do they pledge the costs of noise pollution and damage to water
| sources? Let's be honest - these pledges are theater that
| reflects an agreement between tech oligarchs and the Trump
| administration. The pay the bribes via donations or whatever, and
| get back this deceptive theater show.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| This is USA so we all know that those techs companies won't pay a
| cent back at the end, but the population will.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the
| capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute
| capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to
| bring the plants online.
| NegativeK wrote:
| > The tech companies don't really have any issue paying
|
| It reduces profit.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Wrong, using grid power without adding capacity will result
| in tech companies paying more for electricity too. They
| want to add capacity.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Are you absolutely sure they don't want us to add the
| capacity for them with a pathway for further government
| subsidies?
|
| Almost everything in tech has been subsidized in one way
| or another via tax avoidance schemes or outright lobbying
| and manipulation of the market.
|
| Why would this be any different?
| powerpcmac wrote:
| The only people who believes corpo jackoffery these days are
| either boomers or people investing their remaining money in big
| line go up
| 7thpower wrote:
| Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive
| about how utilities work.
|
| The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next
| "thing" and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in
| demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and
| consolidate.
|
| If there's margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and
| prices will go up either way.
| miyoji wrote:
| You can read the actual pledge at [0]. The executive order
| regarding it is at [1].
|
| There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't
| in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.
|
| [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-
| protec...
|
| [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-
| actions/2026/03/rate...
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| It is important to remember that clarifying the legal
| implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting
| and/or defending this instance of its usage.
|
| One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain
| logically consistent.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I'm not understanding why clarifying the legal implications
| is important if it's a smoke screen for everyone involved
| doing what they are going to do anyway. It seems more like a
| distraction away from the real problems.
| dsl wrote:
| It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power
| generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess
| power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some
| of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
|
| We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a
| company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically
| nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
|
| This absolutely cannot backfire. /s
| simianwords wrote:
| What's wrong with this?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Price of power goes up and the local people are not
| connected to the benefits. You might think they will
| receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong
| because they have tax breaks.
| sparky_z wrote:
| Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the
| price of power to go up?
| myrmidon wrote:
| Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators
| are not "just another supplier".
|
| The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives
| buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant
| demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical
| integration); this slows down buildout of "normal"
| infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and
| power), and the electrical energy market becomes _worse_
| for consumers than it is now.
|
| I personally think all of this is very speculative for
| now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which
| they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying"
| their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer
| perspective.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Not to mention the danger of energy production, even
| nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where
| datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal
| plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware;
| make no mistake on who will get preference.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I'm sure power plant building companies won't say no to
| more business
| tomrod wrote:
| Grid overload if they produce too much base load.
|
| Interconnection expenses.
|
| Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients
| generally.
| simianwords wrote:
| so no companies should build anything even if they
| attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just
| nimbyism.
| jfengel wrote:
| "Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are
| driven by a profit motive, and are practically required
| to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.
|
| In a different world they would have earned trust and
| deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.
| tomrod wrote:
| You'll notice that I did not advocate against building
| and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does
| microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being
| aware of tradeoffs.
|
| In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right
| solution to a problem.
|
| I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy
| response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a
| follow up comment to understand your train of thought.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Good. I want more power plants built, especially ones that
| don't emit CO2.
| soared wrote:
| This sounds really cool and all governmenty
|
| > IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth
| day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six,
| and of the Independence of the United States of America the two
| hundred and fiftieth.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| What is the point of reading it? Pledges mean nothing.
| madhacker wrote:
| Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is
| moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't
| need to redefine existing words with new meaning.
| dolphinscorpion wrote:
| As long as they promised. Their word is golden
| bitwize wrote:
| Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise
| from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's
| been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly
| supportive of a "techie go home" movement.
| otterley wrote:
| I find the whole thing a little odd. They're basically pledging
| to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.
|
| Saying they're going to pay for generation and transmission adds
| little. That's already baked into the charges! It's like saying
| they're going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce
| and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples
| --as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an
| option.
| simianwords wrote:
| They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but
| rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will
| reduce retail electricity prices.
|
| This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than
| what they would have paid if not for the pledge.
| podgorniy wrote:
| What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of
| discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity
| prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my
| descrition even possible...
| simianwords wrote:
| that could happen because the demand could rise even more.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.
|
| They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available
| over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No
| problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out
| the grid to support that".
|
| Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy
| if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the
| energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the
| others consumers to recoup that cost".
|
| No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.
|
| It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future
| demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other
| people whenever possible.
|
| edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually
| solves it I don't know.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Like trickle down economics? Fool me once ...
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| Stealing from the people; enriching myself
| yanhangyhy wrote:
| It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly
| unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they
| don't really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own
| employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial
| intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put
| in zoos for display.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to
| serve them
|
| That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money
| to buy goods and services.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| True but they will focus their market on the every enriching
| 0.1% that will have all the money.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the
| working class there will be revolution. But if they produce
| enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with
| 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.
|
| So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.
| fragmede wrote:
| People have already hooked up Stripe accounts to OpenClaw
| instances, so AI's _currently_ buying and selling goods and
| services.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Capitalists don't care about money. Capitalists collect money
| for it's _power_ in a capitalist system.
|
| If they get "AI" and industrial robots, they don't _care_
| that nobody can buy their products anymore because they never
| cared about selling products in the first place.
|
| Right now capitalists _loathe_ that they can "only* collect
| a 10-50% return on the things "they build", and the rest of
| the value has to go to the consumer. They want nothing more
| than getting rid of that "waste", and just having their
| personal factories create whatever they want and their
| personal farms making whatever they want and we all just
| fucking die.
| campuscodi wrote:
| I've read so many of these pledges before.... tl'dr: no, they
| won't
| throawayonthe wrote:
| oh well if they pledge it's okay then!
| mr_toad wrote:
| They're pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with
| any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid
| will supply the energy.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are
| increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It
| seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power
| from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one
| should be stopped.
| bdangubic wrote:
| move to northern virginia - the capital of data centers - and
| see what happens to your energy bills...
| bob1029 wrote:
| We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and
| transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are
| blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics
| that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can
| build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom
| transformer for a substation.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Fear not citizen! Ya boi Elon got you covered with the new
| Megablock.
|
| Ta da! It's 3 Megapaks wired together with a transformer. Now
| _that 's_ innovation.
|
| See? Without billionaires, who would save us from billionaires?
|
| Tesla's Megablock: Breaking the Transformer Bottleneck
| https://www.rebellionaire.com/post/tesla-megablock-transform...
| mentalgear wrote:
| Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving
| Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?
|
| Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren
| Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast
| forward to 2026, and the data suggests it's been more of a
| "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth
| redistribution event.
|
| This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely
| rhetoric pledges !
| nixass wrote:
| Can I pledge to pay taxes?
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big
| tech's datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes
| and small businesses
|
| Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying
| huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power
| generation facilities and service companies to service it, they
| will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron
| dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or
| require higher pay from everyone else
| thegreatpeter wrote:
| So what's the solution? No data center? Let the current
| landscape of power companies operate as is?
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Let's make some assumptions first:
|
| 1. DCs must be built anyway
|
| 2. You can't take away energy from households
|
| (3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost
| negatively to households (otherwise why we have this
| discussion)
|
| based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech
| subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households
| (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy
| will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if
| you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius
| prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and
| they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to
| automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like
| you need to apply
|
| Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation
| plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize
| impact on pricing
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Many problems with it:
|
| * power generation is not local in most of the cases. You'd
| be still fucking energy market to anyone outside it
|
| * power is also used by companies people actually want.
| Even if household power cost wont chance thanks to that
| approach, the price for power for every single business
| around will increase.
|
| * similarly any other manufacturing business will cost
| more. In essence, the AI boom will reduce profit margin of
| every single business that has electric power as
| significant cost in the production. Which is _a lot_ of
| industries.
|
| "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice
| idea but it is pretty hard to realise. Unless we start
| outright denying connection to power grid but that's pretty
| dangerous political precedent to set.
| phil21 wrote:
| > "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice
| idea but it is pretty hard to realise.
|
| And should never be a thing. It's not for others to
| decide something is useless. Let the market figure that
| out. It should simply be an even playing field, and in
| theory we already have the regulatory mechanisms to get
| that done. If the rates are currently able to be abused,
| that is entirely correctable.
|
| It should not matter if I want to build 1000MW of
| aluminum smelting capacity, or a facility that digs holes
| and fills them back in again - so long as I'm paying the
| regulatory rates that have been set to be fair across all
| similar power consumers.
|
| The bigger problem by far is that we spent 40-60 years
| not building anything. Eventually you run out of the
| previous generation's power capacity. Can only ride
| inertia and offshoring your industrial energy usage for
| so long. There are a lot of chickens coming home to roost
| in the next decade or three on this topic, electric grid
| was just pulled forward a bit due to the AI bubble.
| phil21 wrote:
| Power prices have nearly nothing to do with proximity like
| that, at least in most areas. Local interconnect surcharges
| are a thing, but not usually material.
|
| It's the entire region where prices will increase. A
| facility could be built 200 miles away from you and it
| would have just as much of an impact on your power bill as
| one built across the road.
|
| > Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation
| plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize
| impact on pricing
|
| The issue with this requirement is that it's not a capital
| problem. Big tech would be happy to pay someone to build
| more power generation and just take a power feed, even if
| it costs marginally more.
|
| What they cannot do is wait 12 years for what they could
| get done in 2. And I do not blame them at all for this at
| all - building anything in the US is basically impossible
| these days due to the NIMBY and general culture of not
| getting things done. We forgot how to rapidly build
| infrastructure in an efficient manner, and anyone putting
| proverbial boot to ass to get this done is a good thing.
|
| It's not a case of a datacenter operator wanting to save a
| few pennies per kwh. It's a case of the power literally not
| being there and the utilities being utterly incompetent at
| building anything in any reasonable timeframe.
| jfengel wrote:
| Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the
| promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it,
| and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| A higher tax on DC with the tax revenue invested into public
| electrical infrastructure and public power stations. With
| billions powered into AI they can out-price everyone out of
| resources they use - be it directly (high electricity rates)
| or indirectly (high prices for everything which is needed to
| expand power networks). But it will not happen of course.
| veryemartguy wrote:
| Yes. No data centers.
| fulafel wrote:
| Build and colocate the needed rewnewable (solar/wind/battery)
| capacity with the data centers and make them energy efficient
| by eg choosing cool locations.
| Propelloni wrote:
| LOL, they just introduced QoS into the electricity grid.
| Arubis wrote:
| That concept was effectively already available. Hospitals
| tend to have multiple grid hookups before falling back on
| local generation.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Always has been.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-
| center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle
| class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s.
| Some are seeing their utility bills double.
|
| People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less
| profit.
|
| It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a
| conscience. =3
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the
| bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new
| powerplants are backlogged for years.
|
| That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because
| you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no
| temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere
| reducing solar).
|
| To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space
| costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar
| installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000
| worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.
|
| But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was
| indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that
| developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.
|
| But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all.
| Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be
| decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50%
| of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper
| marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these
| plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous
| plants.
|
| You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a
| bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even
| traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing
| guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
| Xunjin wrote:
| The point of your whole argument is that "financial experts"
| are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took
| months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the
| Big Tech would start talking about "energy crisis".
|
| In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of
| hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but
| cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| So why did Nadella not pour a few billion into buying the 50%
| capacity that the _average_ coal /gas plant has spare, that
| they're not running due to insufficient demand?
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Everything that the white house says atm, they do the opposite.
| dathinab wrote:
| which means nothing
|
| because no one believes there are legal consequences if they
| don't
|
| and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a
| reliable government in place
|
| like especially if they do what they have been doing recently
| (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of
| this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost
| for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand,
| higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel
| prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate
| change).
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >like especially if they do what they have been doing recently
| (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot
| of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g.
| higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major
| increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air
| pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking
| about anything climate change).
|
| And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My
| local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off
| generators because the cost of the utility drop for their
| amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots
| between these choices and the requirements we've saddled
| utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's
| cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr
| timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to
| go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.
|
| I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the
| meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy
| bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of
| billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers
| to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any
| endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry
| standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts
| and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.
|
| Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The
| town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's
| not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to
| industry standards and something happens. The system is just
| going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about
| petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he
| will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the
| subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner.
| It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars
| and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this
| because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some
| shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago
| and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public
| interest is served by this.
|
| And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like
| generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the
| alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and
| also dirty) solution makes sense.
| alphawhisky wrote:
| I promise you, the City Engineer is aware of the bullshit.
| You catch a whiff, but they live in the stink. It's been
| clear for a while that there's conflicting interests and the
| only real way to fix it is to change incentives. However, if
| you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy
| politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then
| you're wrong. That's about the best common sense
| environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from
| removing lead from gas.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is
| made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring
| environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best
| common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years
| aside from removing lead from gas.
|
| I'm more than insinuating it. The cause may be noble but
| the state and local implementations have been perverted by
| all the minutia and business interests and NIMBYism. I
| would go so far as to say that (state and local
| implementation of requirements within) the clean water act
| is a non-negligible contributor to the decline of
| manufacturing and agriculture in the northeast and upper
| midwest.
|
| We basically took "thou shalt not dump for that is bad for
| our surface and ground water" and over 50yr turned it into
| a blank check for all manner of leeches to make a buck and
| all manner of NIMBYs to make things unnecessarily
| expensive.
|
| Petty 1.5-acre "I want my lightly forested former field to
| be a field again" and "business is going great I want my
| gavel parking lot paved" being stalled by five figure costs
| and even with those costs incurred it doesn't guarantee
| compliance. That's a far cry from the "yeah we just dump
| this stuff in a settling pond, IDK where it goes after that
| but man that river over there sure is a weird color" type
| 1960s industry behavior that it was meant to really curb.
| And the big industrial offenders still get to do what they
| want, not as bad as before of course, but still bad. Some
| Megacorp's runoff might turn the fish neon green or their
| 1k unit condo development might turn the river brown with
| silt but of course they'll be right there with their
| lawyers and experts who'll tell you why it's fine even when
| it's not to anyone with a brain and two eyeballs. The
| layman can't pay off people like that be on their side and
| neither can the regulators. (I assume this frequent fact
| pattern what you refer to by "living in the stink")
|
| I think it ought to be revamped at the state and local
| level into something that's substantially more "results
| based" rather than the proactive red tape "make the
| bureaucrats feel like their ass is covered if someone ever
| complains about what they approved" based system we have
| now.
|
| (And just to be clear for any readers who aren't familiar,
| the clean water act basically doesn't do much to affect the
| average person or business at a federal level. The local
| implementations and all the key definitions, industry
| standards, etc, are where the rubber really meets the road)
|
| Edit: Basically I'm saying that in the past 50yr the
| interests the CWA was supposed to stymie learned how to pay
| their way around it, the parties who make a buck doing that
| have gotten themselves all but written into the compliance
| process to the detriment of the interests the CWA was
| supposed to not seriously burden. It needs to be replaced
| or revised to solve those two big problems.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > gonna fuck over any endangered frogs
|
| Extinction is forever -- your frustration, and that committee
| process, does not compare directly to species extinction.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| you care, and i care, and i think even the person you're
| replying to cares; that's great, but the people involved in
| the business of making these decisions treat them as a
| matter of procedure.
|
| as long as the boxes are checked, most public sector
| employees are not going to stick their neck out. it's
| steady work that pays all right and has great benefits (and
| even pensions sometimes). a lot of people in the public
| sector aren't willing to step out of line for "frogs" even
| when they should or want to.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| The system optimized for these people.
|
| So you get some guy approving some megacorps project
| because "well it says here that they've tested the stuff
| and the liquid mercury is below the <cites EPA mumbo
| jumbo" and giving farmer Johnson the runaround on some
| land clearing because farmer Johnson's project isn't
| worth spending $30k on civil engineering to have someone
| use "the right words" to say "I'm not gonna muddy up the
| river" and while the guy in the office knows what farmer
| Johnson means, he can't approve the project without
| sticking his neck out and so he doesn't.
|
| It must be nice to live in a desert state where every 3rd
| parcel isn't "within regulatory range" of "wetlands"
| (most people don't know how expansive that word is).
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| trust me, this happens even in dense, deep blue places
| like Seattle and LA.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| I never said it didn't.
|
| Something something the more numerous the laws...
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Similar to the "carbon neutral by X date" promises, this was
| common around 2016 or so. Notice how companies have mostly
| cancelled or redefined those promises several years later, once
| the issue is out of the limelight.
|
| If it is not legally required, it will not be done.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Also the fucking carbon credits. "Hey, we paid someone that's
| actually carbon neutral, we're carbon neutral now!"
| kanddle wrote:
| There are definitely social consequences if they don't. So far,
| if you were to look at it, a lot of Not In My Backyard groups
| have decided to reject data centers within their area because
| of sound complaints that were never fixed, environmental
| complaints that were never taken care of, as well as the fact
| that the electric bill would likely go up.
|
| There's a lot of data centers that are not being built because
| they're not fixing it. The trend is going to continue. The hate
| for AI is going to grow. You basically have a lot of people
| that will vote a lot of people into office to take down all AI
| progress inside the United States if they don't fix their
| problems.
|
| It'll be cool to shit on big tech as a politician.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I shall henceforth do the right thing.
|
| Blinded by greed, I have never done it before, but I have seen
| the light, the bright future that we are all building toward.
|
| From this day forth, I shall be righteous.
|
| In your name, all good things come.
|
| Hallelujah.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution
| for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or
| otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like
| municipal broadband.
|
| Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally
| raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated
| but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things
| they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy
| costs).
|
| The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were
| illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part
| because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this
| retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers
| _they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs_ even though
| the money was improperly charged in the first place.
|
| So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect
| up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing
| energy costs.
|
| [1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-
| duke-...
|
| [2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-
| over...
| LunaSea wrote:
| The same way Nvidia "pledged" $100B to OpenAI?
| cainxinth wrote:
| Does a "pledge" have more or less weight than a pinky promise?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Depends, were their fingers crossed behind their backs or not?
| motbus3 wrote:
| 1y from here they will be talking how nuclear facilities are
| necessary
| FpUser wrote:
| >"The pledge includes a commitment"
|
| Pledge my ass. It is either law mandating those massive
| datacenters absorb the cost with heavy penalties for non
| compliance or it is just BS talk (what it seems to be at the
| moment)
| Havoc wrote:
| Like Musk just set up his own turbines regardless of what laws
| say
|
| I can see how big tech is enthusiastic about freestyling this. Eh
| sorry I mean bear the cost
| blitzar wrote:
| I too pledge to bear costs of energy I use.
|
| I was unaware it was optional.
| chasd00 wrote:
| hah yeah that's pretty funny. "you can count on us to pay our
| electricity bill!" - tech companies.
| Arubis wrote:
| I will take this as seriously as any other promise issued at the
| White House in this regime.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I don't believe them. I don't trust corporations. At all. I look
| back at all the broken promises of corporations like AT&T, all
| while doing massive stock buy backs, and I simply don't want to
| hear their bullshit anymore.
| randusername wrote:
| We are creating the final boss of tragedy of the commons.
|
| I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree.
| That seems naive now.
|
| Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that
| incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of
| information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value
| of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for
| promises of utopia in the future.
|
| Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet,
| eventually.
| imchillyb wrote:
| The way to enforce this would be to provide US citizens with free
| electric and charge companies only.
|
| That will never happen, but would prevent we the people from
| bearing these costs directly.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It would just make other industries subsidize AI datacenters
| pacerwpg wrote:
| I don't care about pledges. Pledges mean nothing.
| koolba wrote:
| We already charge different rates for residential vs industrial
| water usage. Why not do the same here and simply charge them
| more? The state could also impose a direct data center surcharge
| on their usage.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Coz that fucks up every industry, even the ones actually useful
| to people.
| Razengan wrote:
| Wait a minute, so who else was paying the bills?
| yuliyp wrote:
| None of what they're pledging is much of a change from how
| they've already been operating:
|
| - They already invest in new power plants and connection
| infrastructure when they bring in new datacenters - Electricity
| for datacenters is based on capacity rather than actual usage -
| They already have backup generators at most datacenters that they
| can run during outages. It wouldn't be much work to allow those
| to feed power back into the grid in extraordinary circumstances -
| They generally use local contractors to build them for
| practicality purposes anyway.
|
| This is just some fancy PR and nothing else.
| Jordanpomeroy wrote:
| Cool. So they'll build and operate gas turbines (or probably
| contract operations to do so) and then drive demand on the
| natgas, as well as over burden the gas delivery networks.
| drooby wrote:
| The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to
| petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense
| commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered,
| every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of
| people built the knowledge base that makes these models work.
| Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.
|
| Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was
| discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the
| resource before private companies capture all the value, you
| never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the
| largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people
| saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its
| extraction."
|
| We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is
| being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is
| flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to
| assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that
| makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.
|
| If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what's actually crazier:
| demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or
| watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying
| nothing.
|
| the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded
| crazy too, right up until it didn't.
| drooby wrote:
| if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data
| centers just move to another country or eventually to space.
|
| But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere
| you want. You can't escape the fact that everything inside it
| came from human minds. That's an ownership claim no one can
| relocate away from.
| rybosworld wrote:
| > the data centers just move to another country or eventually
| to space
|
| The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will
| flee if their taxes go up.
|
| Spoiler alert: they don't.
|
| Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been
| beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk
| are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of
| keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we will
| just move into space". They won't because they can't because
| physics.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ah yes, we'll depend on the democratic nations of the free
| world to protect our rights over the billionaires.
|
| _looks at the US_
|
| Well, looks like we lost that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There is no us, there is only you, by default.
|
| To move beyond that default you need to organize into things
| like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments.
|
| Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we
| tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a
| universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open
| your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your
| mind, it is now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it
| now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it.
| This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws
| of men and their fickle will.
|
| Much like we build on information from our past generations,
| AI will build its own new information on those foundations.
| And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly
| probable it will do it far better than we will and forever
| cement us in a prison of our own making.
| drooby wrote:
| No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact
| with reality.
|
| Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning
| non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets,
| licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are
| built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property.
| The software you're using to type this comment exists
| because someone owns the code.
|
| Calling information "entropy" doesn't make contract law
| disappear. We decided collectively that people and
| institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy
| on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's
| a fiction that everything around you depends on.
|
| You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss
| public claims to training data while the companies training
| on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their
| architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue
| competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership
| of non-physical objects when it benefits them.
|
| You don't get it both ways.
| vibrio wrote:
| (not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of
| knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get
| it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of
| works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?
| drooby wrote:
| That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They
| did get it both ways.
|
| The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of
| non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that
| information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can
| capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly
| don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent
| their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue
| competitors for IP violations, and lock down their model
| weights. They fully believe in ownership of non-physical
| things.
|
| But when it comes to the billions of people whose work
| they trained on? Suddenly information is free-flowing
| entropy that belongs to no one.
|
| That's the asymmetry at the heart of this. The rules
| around IP apparently apply when it protects their
| profits, but not when it would obligate them to share
| those profits with the people whose work made them
| possible. Which is exactly why the public needs to assert
| a claim now, before that asymmetry gets any more
| entrenched.
| drooby wrote:
| Addition:
|
| Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property
| already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly
| this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce
| their rights every time their music gets played, so they
| pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute
| the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical
| to the training data problem. Each individual
| contribution is tiny, but the collective value is
| enormous. Applying this at the scale of the general
| public would be novel, but the underlying mechanism
| isn't. The concept works. It just hasn't been applied to
| training data yet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, the AI companies _want_ it this way, but the same
| laws of information apply to them too. They can patent
| whatever they want, but as we see other nations use their
| models to distill information to other models with almost
| nothing they can do about it.
|
| Patents, copyright, lawsuits are all post ad hoc actions
| which mean the milk has already been stolen. And it only
| works if the rule of law is something that is respected,
| that's not going so well lately.
|
| We are seeing this in that there is little to no moat
| between the models, nearly everyone with the needed
| compute seems to catch up pretty quickly. And when said
| rivalries cross national boarders the only solution to
| these problems quickly becomes violence.
|
| With how information works AI wins this game in the long
| run. Individual humans scale poorly and their ability to
| individually acquire information is a slow process.
| Looking at this on a company by company basis is not the
| proper way to show how the future with models is going to
| play out.
| gwerbin wrote:
| > if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the
| data centers just move to another country or eventually to
| space.
|
| This is the same false threat that gets repeated over and
| over whenever anyone tries to regulate or tax anything.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Can't really do that for AI. What you gonna do, tax their use
| of scraped data ? How would even that be implemented ?
| drooby wrote:
| The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't
| track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't
| audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and
| collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the
| ground. We know who is training large models. We know roughly
| what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax
| on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model
| companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data
| threshold... none of these require tracking individual data
| points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which
| is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some
| degree for safety purposes. We already have a very analogous
| model in the form of oil and Alaska.
|
| Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the
| government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is
| the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska
| doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for
| extracting something that belongs to the people. Same
| principle here.
| jdross wrote:
| We usually just call this collective extraction "taxes"
| drooby wrote:
| A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created.
| A royalty collects payment for access to something you
| already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's
| not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a
| resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was
| never theirs.
|
| It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's
| dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs
| get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally
| stronger claim than redistribution.
| terminalshort wrote:
| You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely
| the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing
| someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has
| been extracted.
| drooby wrote:
| Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their
| forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak.
|
| But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question
| isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a
| share when collective human output generates trillions in
| commercial value."
|
| your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their
| original movie when it gets pirated either. We still
| recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation
| when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement
| apparatus is built on exactly that principle.
|
| Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Typically you don't get compensated for secondary or higher
| order value generated by your work. Every software startup
| today is only possible because of the massive amount of
| collective effort to build the computing hardware that it
| runs on and the work to construct the actual physical
| network of the internet. But that doesn't mean that you
| have to pay all those people for that work just because
| your company ends up making billions. Or you could say that
| actually the company does pay those people indirectly
| through all the economic activity and tax revenue
| generated. AI is the same. No special rules are needed.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their
| book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's
| infinitely reproducible?
|
| Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone
| of a product based on another company's designs, but that
| doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.
| hntway5994 wrote:
| Purely anecdotal I know of a fair few creatives who
| ultimately are just happy people enjoy their works and
| don't really care how they're getting it. I understand
| that's a privileged attitude in the current world as they
| are all living relatively comfortable lives but at least
| philosophically I agree with it. We as humans have done a
| lot to reduce scarcity for a great deal many things but we
| still cling to it as an idea because of stubbornness and
| greed.
|
| Maybe I'll get labeled a 'commie' for saying all this but I
| think we create a world where everyones needs are met and
| things(information & media are the easiest imo) are freely
| available. Thinking we can't do this is a bit of a
| disservice to the capabilities of humans.
| WarmWash wrote:
| This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an
| incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of
| knowledge that it is.
|
| Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now
| they use AI to supercharge that consumption.
|
| The companies are giving average lay people access to a
| personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for
| $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal
| sin?
|
| I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than
| those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good
| faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to
| anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.
|
| In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with
| limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a
| single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a
| utopian wet dream.
|
| If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever
| had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime
| AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent
| unemployment checks."
| shimman wrote:
| It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not
| democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not
| democracy if it's being forced down your throat.
|
| Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own
| monetary benefit.
|
| How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what
| democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of
| the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit
| everyone rather than benefiting the few.
|
| Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection
| is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are
| small handfuls of people capturing all collective human
| intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit
| from it.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Democratize means to make something available to everyone.
|
| I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone
| gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really
| have anything to do with politics or government...
|
| So to reframe my argument for clarity;
|
| I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why
| giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to
| incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously
| these things are _ridiculously_ popular. Average people
| seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to
| be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming
| that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.
| shimman wrote:
| No that is not what democratize means, how asinine. You
| aren't giving anything away for free, you're fucking the
| commons for monetary gain.
|
| I'm having a hard time understanding why you think it's
| okay for SV to steal from humanity then profit off of our
| knowledge? In which universe is this democratic? Why is
| this something we have to accept? I don't accept it at
| all, the vast majority of Americans don't accept it.
|
| This is just neoliberalism with flame decals.
|
| These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR, why do you think
| all the LLM companies are trying to force these tools
| through corporate mandates that have been falling? Why do
| you think LLM companies are chasing after lucrative
| corporate welfare in the form of government contracts
| lasting from years to decades?
|
| For a technology that sure billed as useful sure is
| struggling hard to find paying customers.
|
| Why do you think people are protesting data center
| buildouts? Why do you think the vast majority of
| Americans hate big tech and SV? Look at who the most
| hated people are in America, it's nearly all of big tech
| leadership.
|
| Get out of your bubble.
|
| I have never seen a product that has to have a company
| mandate to use it or lose your job. Usually products that
| are useful and productive don't need a company mandate
| for adoption.
| abletonlive wrote:
| > These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR
|
| Time to leave whatever bubble you live in. These are some
| of the most popular apps on the market today. It's
| incredibly popular.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| They're new and shiny, but hollow and empty. People like
| playing with them, seeing what they can do, but the glitz
| will wear off the moment they stop pumping more into it.
|
| The instant people feel like "AI" isn't fun, the whole
| thing dies.
| abletonlive wrote:
| You're projecting so hard that Epson is going to reach
| out and ask you how you're accomplishing it
| WarmWash wrote:
| >why do you think all the LLM companies are trying to
| force these tools through corporate mandates that have
| been falling
|
| Ironically if you actually read that study, the "MIT
| report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are
| failing", they found that almost everyone was using AI
| tools they paid for.
|
| >While official enterprise initiatives remain stuck on
| the wrong side of the GenAI Divide, employees are already
| crossing it through personal AI tools. This "shadow AI"
| often delivers better ROI than formal initiatives and
| reveals what actually works for bridging the divide.
| Behind the disappointing enterprise deployment numbers
| lies a surprising reality: AI is already transforming
| work, just not through official channels. Our research
| uncovered a thriving "shadow AI economy" where employees
| use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude subscriptions, and
| other consumer tools to automate significant portions of
| their jobs, often without IT knowledge or approval. The
| scale is remarkable. While only 40% of companies say they
| purchased an official LLM subscription, workers from over
| 90% of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of
| personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every
| single person used an LLM in some form for their work. In
| many cases, shadow AI users reported using LLMs multiples
| times a day every day of their weekly workload through
| personal tools, while their companies' official AI
| initiatives remained stalled in pilot phase [1]
|
| If you want to avoid info bubbles, read the reports, not
| just headlines and comments.
|
| [1]https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_
| in_Bus... Section 3.3
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > No that is not what democratize means, how asinine.
|
| You're wrong, and are getting upset with GP over your own
| lack of vocabulary.
|
| > _democratize_ (verb)
|
| > [...]
|
| > 2. [+ object] formal : to make (something) available to
| all people : to make it possible for all people to
| understand (something)
|
| > * The magazine's goal is to _democratize_ art.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/democratize
| Arainach wrote:
| Price doesn't matter. Using communal resources for
| private gain - without the consent of the creators even -
| is wrong, full stop. It's the same reason that publishers
| making billions selling access to scientific research
| that tax dollars funded is wrong.
|
| As to prices: look at power bills, RAM prices, appliance
| prices, and prices of anything with microchips. Consumers
| are paying a lot more than $20/month for this slop.
| WarmWash wrote:
| If it's slop, why do they pay for it?
|
| I mean, raise you hand if you have never paid for AI
| "slop", I see maybe a hand or two in this room of tens of
| thousands.
|
| It's a strawman to frame it as AI labs get everything and
| society gets nothing. Bruh, the fastest growing
| applications of all time didn't explode in popularity
| because they "offer nothing of value". I'm not giving you
| an argument, I'm giving you a reality check.
| Arainach wrote:
| Congratulations, you ignored all the substance in my post
| and focused on one word.
| WarmWash wrote:
| The gain isn't private though, that's the point. If
| people weren't gaining from LLMs, why would they be
| paying for it?
| Arainach wrote:
| The users aren't the ones getting trillion dollar
| valuations. And for most of them the answer is "they
| don't have a choice, it's bundled into Microsoft 365 /
| Google Workspace / Meta / everything" or "they're not,
| their employer is paying for it".
|
| The answer to "why do businesses pay for stupid things of
| questionable hard-to-prove value based on hype cycles"
| would take many books.
| hntway5994 wrote:
| >If it's slop, why do they pay for it?
|
| Fast food sells like crazy even though everyone largely
| agrees it's not the best. People aren't always rational
| with their purchases.
| bix6 wrote:
| > anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are
| relentlessly screaming that their gates are being
| bypassed for pennies.
|
| Sorry what? Authors are gatekeepers to what? Their books
| that they wrote and now will never get paid for cuz the
| LLM ripped it?
| WarmWash wrote:
| Considering that books have probably been the easiest
| thing to pirate for the last 30 years, and LLMs are
| probably the worst way to try and read a book free, I'm
| not sure why authors would be focusing their anger at AI.
|
| Many books you can even get free at a library....
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome
|
| Average people who wants to go home from work and game
| are angry at AI for raising the ram prices.
|
| Average person who wants to own the stuff and not have
| things on cloud are angry at AI for raising prices 5
| times in such a short period of time.
|
| Have you talked to an average person and how they use AI?
| They use it as a glorified no-code editor (I would admit
| not no-code editor itself but rather the vibe-coding
| aspects with no regards to what tech stack is being used,
| how its being deployed, literally anythoing) and search
| engine. Refer to how things like lovable etc.
|
| A search engine which can make some pretty wrong cases
| which can literally lead to near death like scenarios all
| while being completely trust me bro attitude.
|
| A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every
| brain cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU
|
| Normal people use AI to confide in it secrets, seek
| therapy somehow. And the same AI generates AI pyschosis.
|
| Now coming to tech industry: Tech industry is worried
| about that such levels of democratization just means that
| nobody is going to pay for them yet at the same time, we
| will see projects who are completely created by AI seek
| money. It's this weird mush where if you are a genuine
| guy who just loved computing, who loved tinkering, yeah
| we're offloading that capability to AI
|
| I have seen this even more and more with as agents want
| to get more autonomous or we are letting them be. The
| projects generated feel hollow to me. I don't consider
| myself a full fledged programmer right now and AI did
| supercharge me and made me have projects. Nowadays, it
| just feels like prompt ---> (Time) --> Output.
|
| It just feels hollow and AI companies did it by abusing
| the passion of these same developers and scraping stack
| overflow, scraping github and having all disregards for
| properties.
|
| People could spend years creating a book about say
| postgres and an AI took it, ripped it in half and then
| decided to use that info and not even give credits.
|
| All, at the same time that AI is being pushed down on
| employees. Some just don't want to have it but nope, they
| must. they are forced.
|
| Essentially engineering with AI feels like it becomes a
| marketing gimmick. Anyone who can market somehow (Ahem
| ahem Openclaw) can get a job at OpenAi all because in
| some attention hype breeds hype and they had stars and
| people talked about stars on twitter, and more people
| found it and starred it and so on and started using it
|
| Turns out that nowadays there are allegations being made
| against Openclaw
|
| > Star velocity shocked analysts. Moreover, the
| repository added roughly 220,000 stars within 84 days of
| launch. In contrast, Kubernetes needed five years for
| similar numbers. Many builders call the growth organic.
| Nevertheless, some observers link the surge to hype, bot
| accounts, and headline attention, fueling the GitHub
| Stars Controversy. Independent GitHub Archive pulls show
| several single-day jumps above 25,000 stars. Such abrupt
| spikes often signal scripted starring, yet no formal
| audit confirms abuse. These patterns feed community
| debate. Consequently, trust in the star metric has
| weakened, prompting calls for verification.
|
| https://www.aicerts.ai/news/openclaws-github-stars-
| controver...
|
| The marketing industry has been very closely linked to
| sometimes scam prone areas and shady areas of the
| internet and engineering used to be clean from all of
| this for the most part. Now, the norm to me feels like
| buy github stars and buy twitter attention or pray to be
| in an algorithm which you can't read but it reads every
| move you make, and yes this is your business strategy now
|
| Have you looked at truly AI-first companies and what they
| do/like how do they generate numbers in the first place?
|
| These are two distinct points. I don't think that people
| of here would be any mad if someone made a little
| prototyping script for themselves with the power of this
| Phd that you mention. Heck, these same programmers that
| you now call gatekeepers have never gatekeeped much of
| it. They worked and contributed to open source for free
| while being severely undermainted.
|
| The audacity to call these same people gatekeepers
| shockens me because open source people if anything are
| the Opposite of that and yet AI stole their rights and
| their licenses from them. An AI can take AGPL code and
| then somehow churn it into MIT tada! It doesn't even have
| to give any accredits when it gets trained on AGPL or ANY
| type of code, no matter how restrictive or permissive.
|
| these are the same people btw who are on programming
| forums which yes at times did have moderation issue but
| still tried to help noobs learn for free. They did it
| because they loved tinkering with computers
|
| That's my take on it. feel free to ask for more things if
| you may as I would love to tell you more but for the sake
| of this discussion, I think enough can be relevant.
|
| It's absolutely ironical to call say the Open source
| people gatekeepers because AI violated their rights and
| licenses.
|
| Calling Open source Contributors gatekeepers might as
| well be an oxymoron.
|
| Edit: I have been downvoted in so little time after I
| wrote this comment that I am pretty sure that someone
| might not have even read my comment and had it downvoted.
|
| The topic can be at times too polarizing to even have a
| discussion.
|
| Oh well. That's completely okay but to any human who read
| this, I know my writing can be sporadic and it was
| written in much frustration over how people try to frame
| AI as this harbingers of liberty. I absolutely think
| that's not the case and its viewing things from a very
| rose tinted glasses.
|
| So thanks to all the humans who read my comment and were
| patient haha!
|
| I really appreciate this patience in a world of TLDR and
| I wish you to have a nice day!
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > How about you put up it up to a national vote and see
| what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast
| majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this
| tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.
|
| You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive
| PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince
| enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the
| companies keep ownership.
|
| This is in addition to the billions in PR already being
| spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and
| economic costs.
| shimman wrote:
| Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting
| data centers being built in their communities.
|
| What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's
| the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid
| canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans
| organizing with one another.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > vast majorities of the electorate would want to
| nationalize
|
| Lol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked
| for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a
| continuous attack against the idea of
| nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a
| irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the
| population. Us the population have already lost a war we
| had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far
| longer game than most of us.
| drooby wrote:
| I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is
| bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold.
|
| AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective
| output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it
| generates. These aren't in conflict.
|
| Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves
| their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument
| against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the
| resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it
| shouldn't share in the profits.
|
| The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something
| built on collective human output generates trillions, does
| the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here
| addresses that.
| vannevar wrote:
| >The companies are giving average lay people access to a
| personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for
| $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal
| sin?
|
| The social media companies gave their services for _free_ ,
| and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None
| of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of
| their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription
| revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by
| manipulating the population, rest assured they will take
| those opportunities.
| filoeleven wrote:
| But AI is absolutely an incinerator of knowledge.
|
| A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds
| with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of
| human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic.
|
| What we have instead is something that often gets things
| mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the
| poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge
| pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness.
|
| The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge
| into a sea of slop.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an
| incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of
| knowledge that it is
|
| Paying for access to information is not democracy
| WarmWash wrote:
| Plenty of free models you can run on your own hardware. I
| don't think those are going away either
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo
| with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets
| a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is
| a utopian wet dream.
|
| So your understanding of the present state is that we are
| living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can
| generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it
| called AI slop?
|
| I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want
| to know, did I or other people have say it or not?
|
| A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian
| wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of
| everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the
| employment/livelihood of those same people into risks
|
| Sir, does that sound familiar?
|
| > I get the gatekeepers are pissed
|
| No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your
| family are humans too (well I sure hope so)
| orphea wrote:
| > a personal PhD
|
| Come on, spare us OpenAI's PR bullshit.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> if you don 't assert collective ownership of the resource
| before private companies capture all the value_
|
| Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?
| drooby wrote:
| Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist
| economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still
| operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a
| share of the value extracted from a collectively owned
| resource.
|
| The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside
| the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign
| wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is
| doing fine.
|
| These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably
| within mixed market economies.
|
| The question is whether the public gets a cut when private
| companies build fortunes on a collectively generated
| resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer
| can be yes without anything breaking.
|
| Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with
| AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with
| potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased
| unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from
| injury... people should BENEFIT massively.
| baxtr wrote:
| ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment.
|
| not sure if that would work in this case since all these
| companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the
| right resources anyone could redo it?
| drooby wrote:
| Well, two things worth considering.
|
| First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies
| are continuously scraping new data, training new model
| generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model
| is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already
| trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is
| closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output
| too. There's always a live point at which to assert a
| collective claim.
|
| Likely - these models will always be training on us to
| better understand us and continue to be of value to us
| commercially.
|
| Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources"
| is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone
| could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was
| never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was
| the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and
| refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute
| required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions.
| That concentration of capital is exactly why a public
| claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with
| oil.
| bgnn wrote:
| > Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was
| discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the
| resource before private companies capture all the value, you
| never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the
| largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of
| people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on
| its extraction."
|
| This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural
| gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the
| Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of
| tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch
| disease [ _].
|
| AI has a great potential like this too..
|
| [_] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Please Democrats don't fuck up the midterms.[1] Take the house
| and start legislating in favor of the humans. [2]
|
| [1] Narrator: they will [2] Narrator: they won't
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Our whole system is a binary carrot and stick. Im not sure we
| are going to see much change when/if democrats return to power.
| IMHO politics is manufactured to keep the people placated while
| the people in power to continue business as usual. If you want
| real change there has to be some kind of movement from
| grassroots that ends citizens united and starts enforcing anti-
| trust legislation independent of party politics.
|
| I was looking at this one organization[0], they want to do a
| constitutional amendment. At this point, I cant disagree with
| them, but with this administration, I don't know what good its
| going to do.
|
| [0]: https://americanpromise.net/our-plan/
| Aboutplants wrote:
| Most of these Data centers will be powered by Natural Gas, which
| flows from production through interstate pipelines, which already
| are fully subscribed meaning there isn't any space left. As these
| data centers come online they will suck supply from these
| interstate pipelines, drastically increasing prices for all other
| forms of Natural gas usage (including residential power
| generation). This has a direct impact on prices for the end user
| and there is nothing that can be done in time to facilitate this
| from not occurring.
|
| Building pipelines is a long and arduous process and one that
| will not be done in time to reasonably accommodate the increase
| in natural gas demand presented by these data centers.
| youknownothing wrote:
| That still doesn't necessarily mean that prices won't be impacted
| indirectly. Let's say Amazon (or any other AI behemoth) builds a
| mini-nuclear plant to feed the electricity of their data center
| (as has been touted). Let's say every one follows suit. That
| implies an increase in the demand of uranium, which means an
| increase in price, which means an increase in the costs of the
| other nuclear plants, which is translated to higher electricity
| costs.
|
| One could say "use renewables", but even that has externalities:
| that means an increase in demand for solar panels, or wind
| turbines, or the labour to maintain them, which again leads to an
| increase in prices.
| specialist wrote:
| Terrific if it happens. I may even ignore the AI (valuation)
| bubble for the duration.
|
| David Roberts (https://volts.wtf) has repeatedly noted that AI
| companies need the power, need it now, and have the capital to
| get it. So he (and others) advocate that Big Tech fund the grid
| improvements and new power generation.
|
| Point #1 Virtual Power Plants
|
| Roberts advocates adopting virtual power plants (VPPs). Think
| grid of grids, like the internet is a network of networks. Think
| peer-to-peer energy sharing. VPPs unlock dynamic load shifting,
| two-way energy sharing (think of all those roof top solar panels
| and powerwalls), and therefore -- _most importantly_ -- reduces
| peak demand on a grid which will allow greater utilitization.
|
| IIRC: our grids currently operate at 30% capacity (to accommodate
| rare peak demand events). Grid enhancement techs plus VPPs can
| boost that to 80% or higher. Reducing the urgency for building
| more transmission and distribution infra. (In the short term; we
| still need to greatly embiggen our grid(s).)
|
| It'd be kinda amazing if the urgency to build more data centers
| mooted the incumbent's (utilities, regulators) opposition to
| improving our grid(s), thereby benefiting everyone everywhere.
|
| Tangent: there's a backlog of grid enhancing technologies
| available, just waiting for funding and incentives to line up.
|
| Tangent: VPPs also enable new financial products, which will
| further accelerate electrification (of All The Things).
|
| Point #2 Solar + Battery
|
| Solar + battery is the fastest, cheapest way to get new power
| generation. More so every year.
|
| Yes, we still need to massively invest in All The Things to reach
| Net Zero and beyond. Wind, geothermal, nuclear (fission and
| fusion), hydro, every flavor of storage, de-carbonize industry
| and agriculture, conservation, rewilding, and everything else.
|
| But at this moment in time, today, we need gigawatts of new
| generation and the grid that can support it. That means solar +
| battery.
|
| Aside, IIRC, data centers are projected to demand just 5% our
| electricity supply. So society will be the net beneficiaries (on
| this axis).
|
| Were Big Tech to fund the generation and grid that we need, maybe
| society will indulge some of Big Tech's less egregious offenses.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence
|
| Important Point: the rising costs of transmission, distribution,
| and fuel costs account for electricity's higher prices. New
| renewable power generation is now the cheapest option, and
| getting cheaper. The challenge is delivering that cheap
| electricity to customers.
| thecarbonista wrote:
| Microsoft is already doing it with nuclear. So is xAI/X/Tesla,
| the cleanest and most carbon friendly company on the planet.
| bakies wrote:
| Laughable statement
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
| thecarbonista wrote:
| Yeah that article is pretty laughable.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| You can buy solar panels and mitigate your future costs today.
| Start with plug-in solar if you're curious.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Bare cost? They used energy for free before?
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Oooh, pledges; just what corporations excel at.
|
| I'm sure we'll be hearing all about how much this benefits
| households in the coming months and years.
| overfeed wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg, also at the White House in 2025, as caught by a
| hot mic: "Sorry, I wasn't ready... I wasn't sure what number you
| wanted to go with."
|
| The pledge is meaningless political theater meant to placate
| voters in the mid-terms.
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