Thread

Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use

216 points · 199 comments · Thom2503

petcat · 1790770542 · focus · HN ↗
EU is in such a weird position. They are realizing that software, robotics, and generally automation through AI is the industrial future, but they seem to be paralyzed to actually start the build-up that will feed that frontier industry and economy.
1. cbg0 · 1790771925 · focus · HN ↗
  Assuming you are right, the "build-up" of more physical datacenters isn't really the difficult part, training frontier models is. The open-weight Chinese models are several months behind frontier models at this stage and as long as you're not interested in burning cash to stay in the lead you can just wait it out. Many signs (upcoming ridiculous IPO figures and benchmarks) point to the current LLM paradigm reaching a plateau.
  I think that currently the EU is focusing on strengthening itself from a military perspective due to US policy shifts, so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people, thus prioritizing safety and perhaps energy production, as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China. If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
  1. dansquizsoft · 1790774486 · focus · HN ↗
    > so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people
    The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
    > as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
    Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
    > If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
    Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
    petcat · 1790775053 · focus · HN ↗
    > just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons
    China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
    This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.
    dansquizsoft · 1790775294 · focus · HN ↗
    Yer this is one such 'reason' for China stopping the release of open weight models in the future, there are many others...
    cbg0 · 1790775658 · focus · HN ↗
    > The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
    There isn't a lot of VC funding available in Europe compared to the US, so without government intervention catching up will be very tricky.
    dansquizsoft · 1790776505 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I'm sure that EU doing its best to ignore building any technology frontier capabilities in its population will lead to a good solution for this lack of VC funding... ;-)
    No shortage of visionaries in EU leadership these days :-)
    petcat · 1790776516 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is that EU has no money. France is virtually broke. Germany and eastern/central Europe is hemorrhaging its most valuable industries to cheaper Chinese competition. The whole bloc is carving out $100 billion military aid packages for Ukraine basically every year with no end in sight. And now EU is getting into a trade war with China despite having little leverage. Energy costs were bad even before the Ukraine war and Iran, and now they're at the boiling point.
    It's why the USA and Chinese vultures are swarming. It's a bad situation.
    cbg0 · 1790778781 · focus · HN ↗
    France isn't "broke", its debt-to-GDP ratio is actually lower than the US right now and it's not in a situation where it can't pay its loans.
    There is currently no real trade war EU-China; Chinese EVs are streaming into the EU while the US is blocking them completely for one example.
    While Germany and more specifically Volkswagen is having some issues, EU industrial production actually had growth last year.
    The $100 billion aid packages to Ukraine are also a bit overblown based on public figures <a href="https://www.kielinstitut.de/media/news/ukraine-support-tracker-military-aid-holds-steady-as-focus-shifts-to-drones" rel="nofollow">https://www.kielinstitut.de/media/news/ukraine-support-track....
    I feel like your comment pulls on some real threads, then blows things out of proportion.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.