> The EU AI Act negotiations ended.
One contentious issue was the regulation of foundation models, particularly open source ones.
> Kudos to the French, German, and Italian governments for not giving up on open source models.
> Juicy part:
"The legislation ultimately included restrictions for foundation models but gave broad exemptions to “open-source models,” which are developed using code that’s freely available for developers to alter for their own products and tools. The move could benefit open-source AI companies in Europe that lobbied against the law, including France’s Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha, as well as Meta, which released the open-source model LLaMA."
While this part is inaccurate, the open-source stipulations of the regulation is something I applaud too, as it would be too easy to have regulatory capture by the big companies such that only they could afford the licenses necessary to create AI and thereby have onerous influence over our lives. More software, especially of the critical variety like AI, should be open source.
> No one knows how it works. Researchers simulate a weird type of pseudo-neural-tissue, “reward” it a little every time it becomes a little more like the AI they want, and eventually it becomes the AI they want.
There is a distinction to be made in "knowing how it works" on architecture vs weights themselves.
Arguendo, assume Facebook lobbied for it. If only one market player doesn't follow an industry standard on public interest (consensus which prevents industry regulation), of course other players should lobby to get the player out.
I could believe Facebook is a good player in terms of “public interest” or “social harmony” or whatnot if they weren’t credibly accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar, which is a larger country in roughly the same region as Nepal.
The accusations are only credible if you limit yourself to only looking at stuff on Facebook. If you see posts on Facebook calling for Muslims to be killed and then sometime later you see posts on Facebook of Muslims actually getting killed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the former posts caused the latter posts, and if only Facebook had taken down the former, the latter would never have happened.
But it turns out the posts calling for Muslims to be killed were made by the military's propaganda wing and the killings were perpetrated by the military's armed wing. So the causal chain actually flows through the military, and Facebook was merely a place where you could observe it happen without being there in person.
Blaming Facebook for the genocide seems to be an instance of activists focusing on something they can see and try to influence (Facebook moderation policy) over something they cannot (guys with guns shooting people).
Regardlessly of whether you believe Facebook played a role in amplifying genocidal messages, the fact that Facebook allowed the very clear calls for violence on their platform for years is orders of magnitude more serious than sexually suggestive content (I assume that’s what “indecent material” refers to here) or “kids doing dumb things” which I hear every so often about TikTok.
But the bigger problem with the article IMO is the fact that this is degrowth. Why is the electricity consumption important? Carbon is the real metric. Big server operators (meta, aws, azure, gcp) already either are 100% zero-carbon powered or on track to be.
Regardless, if grid needs to add capacity for EVs, heat pumps, other electrification goals, why are servers (probably low impact) important?
Electricity is fungible, so when big operators buy wind-only power from the market, the rest of the demand uses the non-green power left in the pool.
(It still potentially increases wind buildout so it can have indirect positive impact especially if wind is not competitive at the same prices with fossils)
Also the accounting is "we bought as many MWh of wind power as we used" over some time window, so in reality they are using fossil power in peaks, competing with everyone else and placing pressure to expand fossil based capacity.
These are also the reasons it's probably better to talk about the electricity used instead of trying to translate it to emissions by proxy, which is prone to being gamed due to abovementioned reasons.
(Also the number is high rather than low if you consider that all the individual slices of the emisison pie at this subdivision granularity are pretty small)
Electricity is a little less fungible than folks make it out to be.
Iceland, for example, has abundant energy from various sources such as geothermal. However, that energy is not easy to send across the ocean to consumers. So, Iceland instead smelts a lot of aluminum, which takes a lot of energy, and is far easier to export cost-effectively.
So a kWh produced in Iceland is not exactly the same as a kWh produced in Germany; it's not truly fungible.
In that vein, datacenters are often placed in such areas. One at Microsoft for example is in Wyoming, near a hydro dam that is far from any dense population.
Yeah. There are lot of such “feel good”, technically true, but not logically expected reporting. The solar panels on my roof generate a lot of electricity while I’m not home, and not really using it, but I feed into the grid, and pull when I need it(when the sun is not shining). I can’t boast that my energy is so renewable that I can start mining bitcoins at home - that’d be stupid.
To quantify this to put it in perspective, the research I've seen puts waste heat is in the very low single digit percentage points (I can't remember exact numbers but I think it was something like one or two percent) of climate impact - and our biggest sources of waste heat by a large margin would likely be thermal power plants, where for a coal plant for instance you dispose of more energy in waste heat than using all the electricity generated for resistive (100% efficient) heating, and that's before thinking about all the carbon and the other pollutants (and then have to deal with huge amounts of fly ash left over). After thermal power plants, the next largest sources of waste heat would likely be industrial processes.
So the more renewable you can make your energy mix, the less waste heat you have from thermal power generation, and then the waste heat from electricity use is probably pretty negligible after that.
Going to have to define “waste heat” in this context, the crowd that needs to read this currently believes “energy use I don't like is generating waste”
Also, what about consideration for how much other energy is displayed by automated processes doing things in the cloud? Without the datacenter and the cloud applications, how much carbon would be created through more manual processes?
yes but some of this 2% require massive amount of potable wáter as cooling and this (zero-carbon initiative) only account of direct electricity use not indirect use
yes you need ,sorry for being late too the the part, you don't use salt water and contaminated water source because they damage the machine faster , the only example in function was a showcase from Microsoft few years back when the put few servers running, but it was most expensive than consume the clean water from the same source we do so mostly a stunt, maybe a preview.
You don’t, but I’m assuming that many companies which either sell or does water cooling may still use municipal treated water because doing it differently requires quite a lot of corporation.
What we try to do here in Denmark, which is a small country and why we do this, is that we try to use the water cooling for both cooling and heating. I’m not completely sure if the correct English term is district heating, but it’s where you cook the data centres with water that is then cooled down in a long circuit where it’s used to heat nearby homes. It’s basically what we do with excess heat from fossil fuel plants and garbage burners as well (we also use the heat to generate electricity in some cities). I believe some of the data centres build by companies like Facebook and Microsoft are working on this with the local cities, but it’s mainly done because of regulation and political demands and not so much because the companies themselves want to do it by default.
They only care about computing power consumption when it is not in their control.
You mining crypto on solar for world peace: Evil pollution demon.
They burning 2% of all power on nuclear powered banking, military, and NSA spy rigs: The bestest environmentalists evar.
> The EU AI Act negotiations ended. One contentious issue was the regulation of foundation models, particularly open source ones.
> Kudos to the French, German, and Italian governments for not giving up on open source models.
> Juicy part: "The legislation ultimately included restrictions for foundation models but gave broad exemptions to “open-source models,” which are developed using code that’s freely available for developers to alter for their own products and tools. The move could benefit open-source AI companies in Europe that lobbied against the law, including France’s Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha, as well as Meta, which released the open-source model LLaMA."