we considered attacking you, but couldn’t think of a way to ruín anything worse than you already had. Every idea we came up with, you had already done, but worse. Fuck you, i liked this job. I went to college for this shit. You have ruined ne. What the fuck am i gonna do now?
-some chinese saboteur
The first country to adopt LLMs for everything is the one that will collapse first. This is a race where the winners never start and at best stop before they reach the end.
AI will move past LLMs
How so?
Other algorithms and combination architectures will be invented/rediscovered.
Now AI has relationships between tokens. AGI needs concepts to be related, amongst other things.
I doubt that for the foreseeable future. Llms aren’t new at all the scientific space is old it’s just now popping up because they can do a lot with enormous data sets
Maybe. Could also be that humans never invent anything that comes close to a biological brain. Either because we simply aren’t smart enough, or because civilization regresses before we get there. And there’s several trends going on currently which could cause civilization to regress. For example, climate change and declining birth rates (While we could set up an economic system that can deal with a shrinking and aging population, our current one cannot).
Fasciam and religion are bigger threats than ‘declining birth rate’, that one’s just billionaire propaganda. Stop repeating it.
So, why are declining birth rates not a problem?
Why are they? Fewer people, fewer mouths to feed, more value on labor, more natural resources and real estate for the rest of us.
We cant grow forever. Dropping total population in the most ethical way then keeping things steady seems like the most nonviolent cool way to do this.
Tor fucks sake there’s like ten billion people we could keep everything we need going, easily, with half that.
Anf imagibe if we actually valuee people instead of treating them like disposable garbage to throw away in poverty and wars! Wouldn’t that be cool?
Yeah, but my point was that our current economic system can’t deal with, not that we can’t deal with it in general. Migrating away from the current system would require the powerful to give up their power, which they won’t do willingly, even as the walls are closing in. (In fact, when it comes to global warming, the walls are closing in).
Because the big rationale for it being a problem is that GDP declines as population declines. But GDP is an aggregate measure that’s dependent on population, so that’s not a problem, it’s a tautology.
Wait, since when population is shrinking? And since when it’s a bad thing too?
Technically there should be a ratio of young to old to take care of all of the elderly, but IMO fuck’em it wasn’t the young’s choice to be born and suffer for the sake of the old.
Lower population will make resource allocation easier and improve quality of life, and obviously is necessary to prevent further environmental damage. There will be momentary suffering for a brighter future.
Technically there should be a ratio of young to old to take care of all of the elderly
That’s a rule of thumb that assumes a lot of things about elderly people’s need for care, how much that’s funded by the young, productivity in how that care is provided, and a huge number of other variables.
Lower population will make resource allocation easier and improve quality of life, and obviously is necessary to prevent further environmental damage.
The environmental damage is more to do with bad choices about the mix of technology currently used to power the economy, and the poor ratio of GDP per unit of energy consumed. So I dispute that “obviously.”
It’s not shrinking yet, the birth rate is declining, and the world population is projected to start declining 2050.
I don’t think it is shrinking globally, yet. But, some countries (e.g. South Korea) are in dire situations due to shrinking and aging population already.
in dire situations
That’s just repeating the assumption that’s being questioned.
Might be bad now but it leads to a better future. Infinite growth was always impossible, this is just the result of decades of mismanagement.
The future for S. Korea looks bleak, not better.
I agree that infinite growth was always impossible, but in some countries birth rate is well below replacement rate (if they matched, population would be stable, not growing), and in many birth rate + immigration rate is also below replacement rate – we are failing not at growth, but “mere” stability.
Idgaf about replacement rate. I don’t want the old to be replaced. I want the economy to get smaller and for the wealth to be better distributed.
But it’s mostly caused by social issues, imo it is nowhere near being a real problem
I agree with your premise, but I don’t think it implies your conclusion, which I disagree with.
That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids
Yeah, capitalism will resolve everything by being greedy. Electricity is not and will never be a merchandise. It’s a basic human need and a natural state monopoly.
Need?
AFAIK in USA it is pretty common to build the power infra structure as part of the AI data-centers that need it.
This has already been pretty common for normal data-centers for years.
USA never really had good public service infra structure for it. While for instance in Denmark many companies build data-centers because Denmark both has good infrastructure, and also can supply data-centers with relatively cheap energy from renewable sources, without the company having to foot a giant bill to invest in that too.The American model is of course inferior, but it’s not like it doesn’t work at all.
For some. But Alabama power has raised rates AGAIN to build another 2 gas plants because of data centers. My power bill has increased by 50% in the last 6 years.
OK so Alabama push the bill to consumers for expanding power to data centers in that situation. Meaning the American AI industry has absolutely nothing to be envious about China for in that situation. Which was kind of my point, contrary to the claims of the article.
It just seems to me that we should require data centers to pay for new capacity on the grid using 100% renewable energy.
That would keep regular citizens for having to pay for the grid expansion, would help clean up the grid and move it forward, and all that investment in wind and solar would help bring the cost of renewables down. It would be a win for everyone.
I agree, but Trumps MAGA America does not, MAGA wants to fuck you over every way they can, until the rich have it all.
The likes of Trump Republicans will not be happy until average Americans are reduced to slaves to the rich.
I have stocked up on so much popcorn you probably wouldn’t believe it, to see if there will be another presidential election.
It’s insane that USA used to be the envy and a role model for much of the world, now it’s become the opposite, a warning of what not to become.
Turns out stubborn contrarianism and anti-science bias are not viable philosophical foundations for progress; what a surprise.
But knowing what’s real and what’s bullshit is an absolutely essential prerequisite for progress.
But for a few fleeting moments we did create a lot of value for the shareholders. Totally worth it to flush it all down the drain.
can’t use power to make everyone use electric cars need power for “AI”
Nice job you jabroonies you did it you lost everything. This is the slow descent of America and it the boomers fault.
My father in law is convinced theres some guy in a garage that’s gonna invent the next big invention, but hey guess what it takes MONEY that regular joe schmoes dont have!!
Anyone who is working on the next big project in his garage is just signing his own death certificate. That’s the truth about the American energy industry and capitalism’s free markets make “healthy competition economy” myth. Traditional American capitalism is long dead.
I’m not fully disagreeing with you, but blaming past generations is quite precisely how the boomers goofed as severely as they did. They played the blame game to the same tune we are currently, the only difference is they didn’t LARP and play pretend about it as shallowly as we do. If we want to be truly better we must first ensure that we don’t become exactly like the selfish demons we must vanquish. Otherwise evil persists merely in a different form.
It’s got to stop here with us–we are the last generation, all of us. Identifying core issues is critical–but the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets even to themselves.
We grow as a society when the old plant trees for shade they won’t see
Yeah. Kind of amazing that for all of their America first bullshit rhetoric, Republicans have consistently and routinely neglected our infrastructure to focus time and money on gays, immigrants, and giving out blowies to billionaires
Look at other corrupt governments and you can see some even more startlingly disfunctional infrastructure.
to purposefully distract with gays, immigrants so they could keep giving out blowies to billionaires
Everything China has us cooked in every sector
Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.
For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.
Aha. I see the angle they’re going for. “we need more energy to
compete against the baddiesundercut the working class”
renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, [Rui Ma]
Is the person they’re talking about who is “stunned” at how super double awesome China is at powering AI.
Ffffffffffffffuck this.
I like how Americans propaganda themselves - china doesnt even have to anything as Americans will gladly put them on a pedestal to spite themselves.
Crazy how apparent this is on TikTok especially. People with LGTBQ flags are salivating about China while their flags are literally censored there
Anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
Eastern European born American guy who is living at eastern Europe right now.
I don’t know about china, but a lot of things in the country of my birth are a lot better than USA. Energy grid and energy pricing is one of those.
I got back to country of my birth because my parent got dementia. I’m seriously considering permanently staying here. It has its drawbacks. But a lot of things are also a lot better.
Sorry to hear about the health reasons. Stay connected with people local, you’ll need help, as that’s super hard. Best wishes and be nice to yourself.
Don’t worry. They’ll just ask AI about the grid and it will tell them how great it is.
Just like next quarter’s finance numbers for USA will coincidentally just all the great stuff Trump has achieved!
“good catch! That’s a very astute observation. Here’s a bunch of paragraphs explaining (incorrectly) how you’re wrong!”
The race to have the magic box that tells you lies that you want to hear while also consuming incredible amounts of resources…why is this a race again?
Because it was a race for simulating more deadly nukes till now. But that got silly, so they need something new to compare their pp.
The telling lies part is not good, but I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems. Cure for cancer, sure that will be $10k a pill. Eternal life? Sure that will be 1 million dollars a years for all eternity. Robot army to protect you? Top of the list.
Question I have is, is the AI we see the same AI the teck bros see? Is there a public interface that is made to appear a little buffoonish so the masses can laugh it off, but the real interface is much much better?Those things are being solved by other forms of AI, not LLMs. AlphaFold is about the most useful thing AI has done so far and it’s not a chatbot.
We get access to entertainment AI, but there could be different forms of AI in use in medical science that have nothing to do with image or text generation.
AlphaFold’s success seems to be largely linked to its use of attention-based architecture, similar to GPT, i.e. the architecture used by LLMs. Beyond that, they are both building on work in machine learning and statistics, so I don’t think they are nearly as independent as you are making out.
Yeah, but LLM innovation now is not in more clever architectures, but rather larger and larger models with more training data.
I don’t hate the existence of LLMs but rather how they’re being shoehorned everywhere and how much power is being spent for just a little bit better results.
The only answer I need from an AI is 42.
I really don’t understand this perspective. I truly don’t.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Like. Do you honestly think this is the one technology that researchers are just going to say “it’s fine as-is, let’s just stop improving it”?
You don’t understand the first thing about how it works but people like you are SO certain that the way it is now is how it will always be, and that because there are flaws developing it further is pointless.
I just don’t get it.
Feelings don’t care about logic. It’s that easy.
I’ve actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I’ve built RAG architecture backends for self hosted FOSS LLMs, i’ve fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I’ve even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research). I also enjoy TTS and STT use cases and have FOSS models for those on most of my devices.
I’ll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It’s like saying you study medicine, it’s a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it’s being marketed for to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.
This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more or less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between capitalism and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.
There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.
The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that’s cool. But we don’t need AI to make improvements to them right now.
I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.
the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in
Even more, it’s being used to milk the taxpayers for more subisidies that get translated (in a very lossy way) into more executive bonuses.
Appreciate you expanding on the earlier comment. All fair points.
Right. You don’t get it. You hear people talk about a new technology but actually they haven’t talked about anything, they are trying to sell you snake oil, but you convince yourself that you understand what they mean, and that it’s somehow meaningful.
We could talk about the history of AI in software development, you know it goes back decades, and there are legitimate areas of research. But the bubble that people are riding right now, they are throwing LLMs at the general public and pretending those LLMs are good enough to replace large swaths of the current workforce, but that’s not going to happen because it won’t work, because that’s not how those models are designed. And then the snake oil salesman, they do classic bait and switch, and they start talking about expert systems and minor improvements to them, as if that is something new.
But even if my prediction is wrong, what that actually means is that people shouldn’t need to work full-time jobs anymore.
To be fair, if your argument is that some day AI research will be legitimate and no longer snake oil, then you could easily be right. But there’s no good reason to think that day is going to be in the next few years, rather than the next few decades or even the next few centuries.
There’s a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It’s taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI’s new model is a regression (I don’t know, I haven’t really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of “eureka” moments which can’t be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It’s possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Say you start with a prototype for a perpetual-motion machine. Then those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
It is intrinsic in some technologies tthat they’re a dead end. That doesn’t mean all of them are, but some are just worthless crap and throwing more good money after bad isn’t going to change that.
Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to throw coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?
No. I don’t think that either Trump’s idiots, nor the CCP, know more than I do.
Governments fail to implement incredibly obvious, easy, and proven solutions all the time so yeh they can be pretty dumb. Not to mention historical examples of governments (paricularly the UK when it was a world superpower) investing their entire economies in nigerian prince tier scams.
Governments are people, and people are stupid.
Yeah. But then i remembered some history facts and how lobbying and vulture capital works and decided it unlikely.
You think venture capital dictates to the politburo what its priorities are in China?
Maybe Trump can Make Ampères Great Again.
Archived Link and Generated Summary below:
Alt. Link: https://archive.ph/rD2R4
Generated Summary:
A 600-word bullet point summary focusing on statistics, comparing China and the US’s energy infrastructure readiness for AI development.
- China views energy availability for AI development as a “solved problem,” unlike the US where it’s a major bottleneck.
- McKinsey projects a $6.7 trillion investment in new data center capacity globally (2025-2030) to meet AI’s energy demands.
- US data center development is limited by power grid stress; some companies build their own power plants. Ohio households face at least a $15/month electricity bill increase due to data centers.
- Goldman Sachs highlights AI’s power demand outpacing grid development cycles.
- China annually adds more electricity demand than Germany’s total annual consumption. One Chinese province matches India’s total electricity supply.
- China maintains an 80-100% reserve margin, meaning it has at least twice the needed capacity, allowing it to absorb AI data center demand.
- The US typically operates with a 15% reserve margin or less, leading to warnings about grid strain during peak demand.
- China’s energy planning is coordinated through long-term, technocratic policy, anticipating demand. The US relies heavily on private investment with shorter-term return expectations (3-5 years), unsuitable for long-term power projects (decade-long build and payoff).
- China directs state funding to strategic sectors, accepting some project failures to ensure capacity when needed. The US lacks this public financing for long-term energy projects.
- China’s pragmatic approach to renewables and coal use, focusing on efficiency and results, contrasts with the US’s politically charged debates.
- Without significant changes in US energy infrastructure funding and development, China’s lead will widen.
So, a few monthe ago China launched Deepseek and the narrqtive was all “the fact they didn’t have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper”.
Now the US is getting behind on “AI wars” because China has more energy for huge data centers?
How about the US get creativve and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?
china has also been investing in solar for decades since the us gave up on it and became the leader
To be fair in 2024, China’s electricity supply was primarily based on coal and renewable energy sources, with coal accounting for the largest share at approximately 57.77 percent. Renewable energy, including hydropower, contributed around 20.27 percent. Nuclear energy played a relatively minor role at about 4.47 percent. So it’s mostly coal power plants in used for AI in China.
Percentage dont make sense when the OP posted a out solar leadership. Raw numbers is where it’s at.
The OP did not show where AI and solar intersect, because in power supply they do not. AI power infra is mostly reliant on hydro and coal
53.2% coal, ~20% renewables. Not disagreeing, just adding context.
Yeah but in defense of the US, solar makes big oil sad
/s
