The term "Data Centre" conjures up the image of racks and racks of storage filled with data. Its normal for anyone who think of this to wonder "Why do we need to store so much data?" and the answer to the worried mind comes quickly "Oh my God, its the surveillance state (as if we didnt live in one already for decades) and they will store all my data and thats why they need thousands of data centres"
It just clicked to me while talking to a friend about data centres and I realised that its probably the most unfortunate misnomer, because data centers are not about data at all. Sure they will have some modest data storage for accessing working data set, but data centers are really about Computational Power, specifically for AI work load.
Its basically racks and racks of servers running high power GPUs, and large amounts of VRAMs that will be used to train LLMs ("AI" if you like) and to run inference against these LLMs - when billions of people want to "talk" to AI, but more importantly when billions of people use LLMs as a day to day tool to do all sorts of things.
Not sure if this helps anyone, but I thought I should put this out there after realising many might be operating under wrong assumptions.
Thats all good, I still want them desyroyed
I advise everyone to look up the brilliant fellow Ed Zitron and give a listen. The whole AI / data center thing is essentially a ponzi scheme for big tech to "number go up" forever. The cracks are beginning to show
https://youtu.be/TXiOO-nKqpw?si=-U7n5okbyShd3Q2p
Thanks for this clarification on "data centers". You cleared up my misconceptions, although I still have concerns about the possibilities of more nefarious uses in the future.
Everything and anything has a possible "nefarious use." Please stop obsessing over ill-understood technology and pay attention to the actors and their actions.
They are trying to solve a huge problem with brute force methods. Which are likely to be superseded by the next step in massive parallel processing. Meanwhile, they are in a race to remove Mt. Everest one teaspoon at a time. (They are betting that A.I. can be made to think. All it knows how to do is plagiarize and paste things together.)
Also this.
Obsession of the negative possibilities will just make the AI hate us once it gains consciousness anyway.
Technology is close to a breakthrough. New processing modes, new methods of intermachine communication and interaction.
Once the breakthrough hits, most tech companies that can't afford it immediately will go out of business. That's why they are desperately pouring so much money into AI. It's expensive but also highly rewarding to run AI.
Well, I'm not quite as alarmist about this, having survived the "Future Shock" of 1970. So many things that people thought were just around the corner never came to pass. Other things, unimagined, have come to pass. We jump on them like starved lovers (e.g., social media addiction).
The centers are trying to establish very large neural networks, with each neuron entailing what in the 70s would have been called a computer center. Each neuron has to be "trained" (fed gazillabits of data) and interconnected with others. It is almost impossible to fathom how huge this is...and yet it is understandable why they require so much resource of driving power. I just look at this monstrous effort and realize, though it may be the only way we can conceive, it is surely not the way to produce a good result. Thus, my quip about moving Mt. Everest by the teaspoon.
I suspect a different path of development. Other methods of parallel processing will be found and developed, to supersede the neural networks...to a useful extent. It will become less onerous to perform the work. The big centers will discover they are pricing themselves out of business, and will turn on a dime. Big scurry to find uses for large neural networks. I suspect quantum computing will figure in this, but I don't understand it well enough to say more than that. I don't expect A.I. (as we know it) to ever attain consciousness. I've pondered this for decades and have come to the pretty firm conclusion that consciousness can only arise when there is a closure of the loop between sensation and action, which will require robot hosting of the processing. The beginning of consciousness is the ability to separate self from environment, or discriminate between what is "me" and what is "everything else." Otherwise, there is no answer to the question, "Conscious of what?" ("Conscious of oneself," is not an answer. It is functionally identical to dreaming. Big problems when we try to interact with the world when we are dreaming---sleepwalking.) It's a big puzzle to ponder.
And anyone who does not install a physical "kill switch" should be shot! If we are going to play God and create artificially conscious beings, we should also create artificially guaranteed death.
This. The amount of storage is mind-boggling (1 rack couple have 100 PBs of storage) but most of the storage is just for storing context for the AI.
That's why RAM is through the roof but hard drives aren't. Nobody care about storage like RAM and GPUs.
Partially true.
There will be plenty of storage in those data centers. You need somewhere to store the large amounts of data AI LLMs will be generating as they work.
Yes, there will be racks and racks of compute resources but there will be plenty of data storage as well.
BTW - compute resources use far more power than storage resources do, especially when it comes to SSD storage.
Yeah there will be data storage for the LLMs work, but not for the storage needed for the "surveillance state"
Data
It should concern Americans that Israel has subterranean data centers with data about every single person and transaction in our country and connections with which to exploit us and worse. We are so oblivious to various realities. There is an absolute monster of an AI center in Utah already. There was talk, but did it stop the process of building it? No. Secrets secrets secrets. When I saw the planned extent of the data center CITY being built in Arizona it became quite obvious that all of us little ants do not have shit to say about it. The fucking futurescape is here.
Would you happen to have some sauce for this fren?