Comment by EmilStenstrom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EmilStenstrom | Hacker News Reader

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Summary of the concrete actions:

1. Early 2025: Identify Federal sites for AI data centers, clean energy facilities, and geothermal zones. Streamline permitting processes and draft reporting requirements for AI infrastructure. Develop a plan for global collaboration on trusted AI infrastructure.

2. By Mid-2025: Issue solicitations for AI infrastructure projects on Federal sites. Select winning proposals and announce plans for site preparation. Plan grid upgrades and set energy efficiency targets for AI data centers.

3. By Late 2025: Finalize all permits and complete environmental reviews. Begin construction of AI infrastructure and prioritize grid enhancements.

4. By 2027: Ensure AI data centers are operational, utilizing clean energy to meet power demands.

5. Ongoing: Advance research on energy efficiency and supply chain resilience. Report on AI infrastructure impacts and collaborate internationally on clean energy and trusted AI development.

Provided all this centralized governement owned and run infra somehow gets built, what it would be actually doing to warrant the expense ?

I am quite skeptical in this regard. :P

Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. :p

I have some sympathy for certain domestic capabilities (e.g. chip fabrication) but this "AI" bubble cross-infecting government policy is frustrating to watch.

It's hard to know how much this effort is about the government's belief in AI, and how much of it is about supporting the technology sector while using AI as a convenient buzzword.

I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here.

One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.

We are one of the world's premier destinations for highly educated, highly skilled people from other countries. Their loss, our gain.

There are of course myriad other countries where they could go, many of them more attractive than the US in various ways. Every country in the world is in a sense competing for this talent.

> * One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.*

I think the brain drain has peaked. Many people here in Europe don't think much of the US anymore, while 20-30 years ago it was THE place to go.

I'm sure many countries like India and China, for whom the US still might be somewhat attractive, are going to go the way of Europeans.

As of this year, the US employment-based green card backlog for citizens of India is such that they're currently still processing applications filed in 2019 for the top EB-1 category (that's "Extraordinary People, Outstanding Researchers and Professors, and Multinational Executives and Managers"), and 2012 for mere PhDs. So the numbers would have to go down a lot for US to even notice.

Speaking as an immigrant myself, so long as there's still noticeable wealth disparity, people will make the jump. The other aspect that makes US specifically especially attractive compared to some others is its family immigration policy - people generally want their family to join them eventually, and US has an unusually large allotment for that compared to many other countries.

It’d be worth comparing your opinion to data, so you aren’t stuck with an unverified opinion.

Regardless of how the US ranks in terms of brain drain, and how that rank is trending, it's clearly an area where the government wants to compete.

zero sum thinking has already infected public policy. turns out liberals can be just as "they took our jobs" as the redneck conservative.

the real fear should be that people wouldnt want to come. already chinese intl students are break even when considering US vs going back to china. who wants to deal with all the bureaucracy and hatred when they could just go back and work for deepseek.

>> Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies.

Yeah it sounded like a gift to nVidia.

My prediction was that nVidia would ride the quantum wave by offering systems to simulate quantum computers with huge classical ones. They would do that by asking the government to fund such systems for "quantum algorithm research" since nobody really knows what to use QC for yet.

This move primes that relationship using the current AI hype boom.

So look for their quantum simulation-optimized chips in the near future.

GPU, gpgpu, crypto, ray tracing, AI, quantum. nvidia is a master at milking dollars from tech fads.

They'll be scouring the internet for signs of thoughtcrime and jamming the sources they find. Also, automating those sectors that tend to produce whistleblowers.

Because if they don't do the bad thing first, some bogeyman might become better at it than they are. Same logic that gave us the Manhattan project.

All that illegal wiretapping has to be analyzed somehow!

How else will we uncover what we could expose torified too so they flip out and lose their job so agent jackson can take their jerb by reading their hackernews comments and knowing all of the media they've been exposed too during the day?

Or try to make them have a heart attack by making a digital twin of them which synchronizes their sentiment, smart watch health data, and man-in-the-middling all of their digital conversations with creepy GenAI? Our adversaries might be doing it, so line up some fresh specimens. Come on bruh it's the future, you gotta think bigger.

It's not government owned and operated. It's just on government land.

I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity.

"I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each successive; and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful superintelligence, qualitatively far surpassing all human intelligence.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Belief in a coming technological singularity is completely unscientific and based on zero hard evidence. It is essentially a secular religion with computers cast as deities to either usher in a new utopia or exterminate us all. Surely I am coming quickly, sayeth the Lord.

> I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity.

We are in the race for a better LLM*, deliberately disguised as a race to the singularity, because that's what gets investor-dollars and fame.

* And anything else close enough to ride on their hype-coattails

Is there any reason whatsoever that I should think that I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965 corresponds to reality?

When I step through the logic in my mind, seems likely.

Lets make the leap of faith that we can improve our AIs to actually understand code that it's reading and can suggest improvements. Current LLMs can't do it, but perhaps another approach can. I don't think this is a big leap. Might be 10 years, might be 100.

It's not unreasonable to think there is a lot of cruft and optimization to be had in our current tech stacks allowing for significant improvement. The AI can start looking at every source file from the lowest driver all the way up to the UI.

It can also start looking at hardware designs and build chips dedicated to the functions it needs to perform.

You only need to be as smart as a human to achieve this. You can rely on a "quantitative" approach because even human level AI brains don't need to sleep or eat or live. They just work on your problems 24/7 and can you have have as many as you can manufacture and power.

I think having "qualitatively" superiority is a little easier actually because with a large enough database the AI has perfect recall and all of the worlds data at its fingertips. No human can do that.

Let's say all of that happens. Is there any reason to believe that will lead to "a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each successive; and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful superintelligence, qualitatively far surpassing all human intelligence"?

Or is it more reasonable to suppose that 1) all those improvements might get us a factor of 10 in efficiency, but they won't get us an intelligence that can get us another factor of 10 in efficiency, 2) each doubling of ability will take much more than doubling of the number of CPU cycles and RAM, and 3) growth will asymptotically approach some upper limit?

A lot of tech improvements are s-curves or waves of s-curves, not exponentials. For a given problem domain you will still have s-curves, but for overall intelligence/progress it might be exponential in some overall sense.

Yeah sure, there are physical limits, and doing things like mining, manufacturing, and logistics are really slow compared to just thinking. But that's just time and money. I don't see why it wouldn't happen. You build a machine to make machines. First you have 1, then 2, then 4, then 8, then 16 etc.

Then when the earth is used up, you look at space. Space travel is a lot easier because you don't need to keep a meat bag alive.

I for one am not worried about this. We still have trouble building robots that can wash dishes autonomously, let alone build nuclear power plants autonomously. The key word here being autonomously i.e. without human intervention, which is what a superintelligent machine would require to grow into this singularity.

I'm not "worried" about it. Just observing that the race is on. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing as long as the tech is in the hands of "the good guys".

I think as soon as you can get an AI to break a task down into smaller tasks, and make itself a todo list, you have the autonomy. You just kick it all off by asking it to improve itself. I doesn't have to "want" anything, it just needs to work.

I think you missed my point. I think we're a long ways away from it being a race against humanity.

If it's for the government.. Bureaucratic processes?

What would the cost be of not undertaking these actions?

In the micro, nothing. We'd have a bunch of extra cash we can spend on other stuff.

In the macro?

The overall goal is keeping the US competitive in technology. Both in terms of producing/controlling IP as well as (perhaps even more crucially) remaining a premier destination for technologists from all over the world. The cost of not achieving that goal is... incalculable, but large.

Whether or not this is a good way to achieve that goal is of course up for debate.

It's not just the economic cost that is a consideration here. The military applications of AI are potentially staggering (as are the associated ethical concerns - but, as with any military tech, once someone does it and the advantages become clear, others will inevitably follow). No major power player is going to want to risk getting drastically outpaced by its primary competitors.

Note that this isn't a hypothetical, either. Israel is already using AI to pick targets. Ukraine is already using AI-controlled drones to beat jamming. There's no indication that either one intends to stop anytime soon, which tells the others that the tech is working for this purpose.

We have no extra cash. We are so far in debt as it is we'll never get out.

Building Skynet of course.

There is already AI flying F-16's.

AI targeting systems.

AI surveillance

I mean, sky's the limit.

corporate handouts.

With the incoming admin I can't imagine anything other than huge nat gas plants being built to power these data centers...

UN confirmed that we zoomed passed the 1.5°C mark in 2024. It feels like we're in the "learn how to grow food for you and your community" stage

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158891

It doesn't matter what the incoming admin thinks, it just matters what makes the most economic sense. If interconnection queues are backed up and the grid is lacking the electricity required, offgrid might be the way to go: https://www.offgridai.us/

People assume gas plants are the fastest and easiest to build and power but you have to get the natural gas to the plant. Nat gas pipelines take years to build and also there are gas turbine supply issues. Offgrid solar + battery solves all of these.

The EO talks a lot about prioritizing clean power.

It's an executive order, not a law. The next president is free to issue his own and rescind it in part or in whole.

Somehow, I don't think the incoming executive cares about that.

That's actually a wildly short timeframe for a large political plan like this. Going from idea to breaking ground on a massive infrastructure project in a calendar year? It'll be interesting to see if this turns into a political/legal quagmire or not, since it's ostensibly aligned with both parties (donors) interests.

Agreed, it seems wildly optimistic to me. I was working at a military installation command last year and it would often take 6 months just to survey some existing buildings for renovation + repurposing and trying to get those plans approved. Stuff like "repaint these walls, mitigate mold, and install sub-divided chain-link fence in this warehouse" was busting our timelines. I'm assuming that just getting the paperwork right for a Federal government construction project is an equally-huge lift.

The contracts will go to Google and Amazon who can lay down a Data center in months

Depends on the implementation details.

If you could identify, say, a defunct aluminium smelting plant?

It'll probably have access to 30 megawatts of power. You'd have to give nvidia quite a lot of money get enough GPUs to consume that.

This is pretty ridiculous. US is already an undisputed world leader in building data centers. Our companies are great at building data centers already at their own initiative, and they don’t need government’s subsidies to do that. This just seems like a subsidy to “clean energy” industry, disguised as industrial strategy.

Why in reading that do I only see "enact police state"

That schedule is impossible. Given the amount of power data centers take, and the fact that the government is new to building them, the environmental review process and lawsuits will take years.

I agree in general, but equipment mainly due to lead times and not permit/etc times.

Remember it's federal land, so they can't be held to state permitting or building codes, etc, only what they choose to (IE if their agency adopted it explicitly)

Having seen lots of datacenters constructed over the years - it's tractable in terms of the bureaucracy parts if they want it to be - because they can mostly ignore them.

So for me it breaks down like:

Building construction, it could be done.

Power provision - hard to say without knowing the sites. some would be clear yes, some would be clear no. Probably more nos than yeses.

Filling it with AI related anything at a useful scale - no, the chips don't exist unless you steal them from someoene else, or you are putting older surplus stuff in.

I’m not an environmental lawyer, but you don’t think these will be subject to NEPA? It sounds like they’re trying to piggy-back off land that was made available for solar projects under an existing EIS, but it sounds that those decisions could be litigated.

Automobile manufacturers can bring a plant from foundation to production in under a year, it’s not that far-fetched. A datacenter is orders of magnitude less complex.

My understanding is that it's not the data center that's the problem, it's the energy required to run them. This is especially demanding with us rubbing AI over everything and using insane amounts of energy in the process.

Ie: making a new data center is easy. Making new power plants quickly - not so much. But hey, at least there's some renewed political will, better than nothing.

I don’t have sources to back it up, but am reasonably sure these factories consume even more energy than a datacenter, possibly in the GW range. Powering robots, welders, and all kinds of mechanical systems in addition to electronics is very power intensive.

As another data point, Apple has been doing 100% renewables for their DCs since 2014. A wind farm can definitely be built in months, and energy companies will always follow the money. Site selection will definitely take energy availability into account as well.

The EO proposes to use federal land, so that ought to facilitate shortcutting some of the process.

The EO also has quite some provisions for fast tracking permits. The whole thing is worth a read

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