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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

Public perception is another big one.

But I think with the way AI is slated to grow exponentially it's going to hit electricity limits very soon.

Big tech can build a huge data center in 5 years but scaling up the electrical infrastructure is mired in red tape and can take on the order of decades.

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Someone will likely come up with some clever way to make AI use less electricity.

There's probably something in how you design the models or chips or some other thing that will be figured out over the next 5 - 10 years to make these use dramatically less electricity.

True, but maybe they can use 50% less power or something. Maybe 90% if we're really lucky.

But the growth in the scope and usage of AI is poised to grow exponentially, assuming this isn't a bubble.

I dunno, why is 90% the limit? Maybe they can set something up in the chips to use 1/10th the power and set something up in the model design to use 1/10th the power and so we use 99% less power than today.

After all GPUs were not really designed with AI efficiency in mind, and current AI architecture was not really designed with efficiency in mind, so there's probably some things that can be done. Over 5-10 years, who knows how much more efficient things could get?

Without pressure, the release valves will never be invented. Electricity, datacenter, and DRAM demand outstripping supply sounds like an opportunity - if we can only find a way to divert funding from the current gpu/ai funnel. Maybe jack up corporate tax rates like the 1970s, then every corporate office park will have a research lab :).

How did modernization get subsumed into scaling up. The us power grid has been outdated tech for decades

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