Energy Costs Will Decide Which Countries Win the AI Race, Microsoft's Nadella Says (cnbc.com) 60
Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology's promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that "GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated" to the cost of energy in using AI.
He pointed to a new global commodity in "tokens" -- basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing them to run tasks. "The job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better."
"I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors," Nadella said.
He pointed to a new global commodity in "tokens" -- basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing them to run tasks. "The job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better."
"I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors," Nadella said.
Bold take (Score:5, Interesting)
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Fossil fuels have a scalability problem. If we want to utilize advanced future tech, we're going to need something with higher overall density and output than what we can get from coal and natgas. Which basically means nukes of some kind.
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And is there an AI race? It's more like a playground for grown-ups, my orange spade is better than your blue spade.
In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
"It will be better for you if you don't resist."
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Greenland has a population of about 50,000 and no nukes. China has a population of about 1,500,000,000 and a few hundred nukes.
So letting China win the "AI race" and then stealing their country probably won't work.
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Greenland has a population of about 50,000 and no nukes. China has a population of about 1,500,000,000 and a few hundred nukes.
So letting China win the "AI race" and then stealing their country probably won't work.
Nobody said steal the country. The GP said steal the technology. Corporate espionage, etc.
AI doesn't put food on the table (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is irrelevant. It will not feed you. It will not make your life easier. And it will not make most of us rich.
Re:AI doesn't put food on the table (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's all you care about, you have a limited view.
AI has the potential to help is solve previously intractable problems in science, engineering, medicine and maybe even politics.
It's not all slop.
Unfortunately, there is so much slop that much of the general public believes that's all there is.
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Science, manufacturing design maybe. These are items that are based in facts and knowledge which can be fed to the AI. Interacting with people though is not going to get much better without a lot of predefined scenarios fed into it. As a logic tool it might be usable, but it's like throwing darts at a board using a random number generator - eventually one might hit dead center if you happen to stumble into that magic number.
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"Science, manufacturing design maybe. These are items that are based in facts and knowledge which can be fed to the AI. "
I think you are forgetting creativity. Last we checked, that was not something you could feed to AI. Your phrasing is something that would only please the C-Suite.
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Re:AI doesn't put food on the table (Score:4, Insightful)
They're not building all the data centers for the AI that could solve engineering and scientific problems. Nobody cares much about those except small groups of scientists and engineers. It's all done for LLMs and and maybe a bit for image/video slop generation.
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AI slop is human slop. Slop was invented by humans to stuff social network feeds to grab attention and traffic. We are the original slop makers, and the irony is that we were prompted by an AI. A lesser AI, just the feed recommendation Algorithm or Google's ranking Algorithm, they prompted humans to produce slop. Then AI models were trained on it so they can naturally make slop.
In fact the slop comes
Re:AI doesn't put food on the table (Score:5, Insightful)
An LLM isn't going to accomplish the things you listed. It's not worth the power, GPUs, and RAM we are throwing into it.
For the most part it is going to be used to for advertising and marketing purposes. Which is insane of course, because watching the consumer economy collapse while cranking up investment in what amounts to elaborate and very expensive marketing is a kind of tulip bulb economics.
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For the most part it is going to be used to for advertising and marketing purposes.
AI will be used by governments to create social scores for its citizens using all of that data that Edward Snowden warned us was being collected. Sure, a HUMAN is not permitted by law to look at that data, but there are no laws stopping an AI from trolling through the data.
That is why AI is so desirable: instant slavery.
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ICE and CBP already use facial recognition. You'd be surprised how quickly they identity someone that refuses to show id.
But pretty much all technology can be used to support a police state, it's not a problem unique to AI.
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AI will make it faster. Just like it will do for the profiling/ad generating industry that powers the internet. It will also create dynamic pricing while you shop so everyone will pay a uniquely profit optimized price based on their personal attributes.
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So that the question can be seen with fresh eyes, perhaps we could all drop the term AI and just call it pattern processing at machine scale.
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AI will not be used this way. It will be used to profile you more efficiently and generate ads in real time for more crap you don't need, monitor your habits to dynamically adjust pricing so you pay as much as possible, and by law enforcement/governments to more efficiently engage in mass surveillance (so called predictive policing). If you believe that its primary use will be anything else, you are extremely naive at best. Why else would companies be spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure- its not
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We can argue whether that is "AI" but I say yes because it reduced the skill of flying an aircraft to the level that my nephew learned to do the human part, and automated imagery analysis is obviously cheaper than paying an army of imagery analysts to study crop photos.
Only with the current model (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, given the current land grab, brute force is being used to "win" and demanding unsustainable demands on power generation. The real winner is going to be the country/company that figures out how to get an "AI" solution that works reasonably well while finding a significantly more power efficient solution to the problem.
What's the over/under bet on when there's an efficiency inflection point and there are suddenly thousands (tens of thousands?) of expensive datacenters that are no longer needed?
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What's the over/under bet on when there's an efficiency inflection point and there are suddenly thousands (tens of thousands?) of expensive datacenters that are no longer needed?
No bet. We don't need them now. Throwing more computing power and storage at AI isn't going to make it better or somehow magically make people want to pay for AI. Sure, there will be some incremental quality improvements, but AI (at least the LLM AI) doesn't live up to the hype; and getting to the next huge jump likely will not use these datacetners at all, particularly with chips made in the last few years.
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I call it a bubble because it is easy for people to understand the end result, but in reality it will be a softer demise as some of what is being made will serve a purpose. Still there is going to be a lot of money
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
We want our energy to be paid for by the people we are going to send to the unemployment line, not ourselves.
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Gonna be a long cold winter... (Score:2)
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Solar (Score:1)
I have it on good authority that the cheapest electricity comes from solar. This means China wins, end of story.
Wrong focus (Score:2)
AI is too important to be controlled by the winner of a "race"
It needs to be available to all
What is the finish line, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a race. What's the finish line? What happens when some company wins 1st place? What happens when the 2nd place finisher crosses the line?
America "won" the space race and yet at least 4 countries have landed on the moon, made space stations, etc. Nobody but historians really care about the winner of that one nowadays.
Re:What is the finish line, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA only "won" the space race if you arbitrarily define winning in terms of something they did first, like a manned moon landing, moon sample return, or successful Mars lander. USSR "won" in terms of first artificial satellite, first man in space, first manned orbit, first woman in space, first EVA, first long-term manned space station, first successful Venus lander, etc. Treating it as a "race" at all was just a dick waving contest.
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I suspect that was his point: Proffering AI as a race is just more dick waving.
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It's called a race to reduce scrutiny of the benefits and costs of the technology - a false sense of urgency. Consider how this will be used to profile you, manipulate you, and charge you more money/extract more rent. The US economy is rapidly turning into one based on rent extraction, not production. Just look at how social media companies make all their money - what supports these valuations?
So why not invest in cheap renewables? (Score:2)
This points to the stupidity of these AI companies.
Instead on installing the cheapest form of energy (solar, wind, batteries), they are doing stupid things like opening coal, gas, and nuclear plants.
Or... are they just looking for subsidies from the government taxpayers and ratepayers?
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Maybe "stupid things" like coal, gas, and nuclear actually work better for their purposes. 24/7 reliability, smaller land footprint, etc.
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Solar, wind and batteries are much cheaper and more reliable than big power plants.
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We should be passing laws that new data centers are required to invest in new, not existing, clean power generation that 100% offset their power usage and can only draw power from the grid as that new generation actually comes online.
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Ireland just did this.
New data centers have to bring their own power.
Energy - Trump's oil and gas then? (Score:2)
There is no winning here (Score:1)
This only exists to benefit about 3,000 people on the planet who are sick and fucking tired of paying you and having to suck up to consumers in order to make sales and get the money they want.
It's the most bizarre way for capitalism to end. Just going back to feudal Kings only without the peasantry.
There will still be
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Does that mean they'll stop paying you to post here? rsilvergunbot wen???
Correction (Score:3)
Energy efficiency will be the determining factor* of who wins. Chinese AI requires fewer energy tokens per processing token. China wins.
*Capital efficiency comes in second. China still wins.
the (Score:3)
they're hoarding the RAM and GPUs and storage now, in a few more years they're hogging the electricity and the water
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Electricity and water usage is a whole other can of worms.
Really, Satya? (Score:3)
...we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors...
Gee - the last time I checked, you, your company, and the rest of your parasite class were utterly ignoring the very concept of "social permission". Y'all seem to be doing everything you can to subvert, game, and propagandize us into being your vassals.
The phrase "social permission" does not strike me as something you care about beyond its value as propagandistic sane-washing. Unless, of course, you also use it to hoodwink yourself just enough to assuage what little bit of conscience you may possess.
I suspect Nadella is trying (Score:5, Insightful)
...to scare away power regulations that hampers MS's data center construction and/or access to power. It's the template of: "We'll lose the war/space-race on fill-in-the-blank if you regulate us".
Time For A – (Score:2)
Volcano AI Lair.
Only way to be sure.
even dumber.. (Score:2)
The CEO of Microsoft is even dumber than the CEO of Nvidia, neither can fool even an average technical person into thinking they know what they are talking about. How embarrassing. At least Musk is good at THAT.
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Musk gets a lot of flack for his politics, but at least the guy knows his engineering and isn't some finance bro who failed up.
It will be demand and useful application (Score:1)
For there to be success with AI, there needs to first be demand and useful application.
Worry about scaling up once you actually have something that can be implemented reliably and consistently. This important part hasn't even been managed yet.
The peasants are revolting... (Score:1)
...so give me what I want or it'll cost you your country, or whatever.
every blind man (Score:2)
Every blind man gives his theory of the elephant.
There are no winners (Score:2)
There are only losers in the "AI race". Feeding a bubble serves only to destroy capital.
Those countries who will lose less are the ones who stay away from AI, and who transition away from using Microslop products the quickest.