This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So, a few months ago China launched Deepseek and the narrative on US media was all "the fact they didn't have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper".
Now the US is getting behind on "AI wars" because China has more energy for huge data centers?
How about the US get creative and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?
china has also been investing in solar for decades since the us gave up on it and became the leader
To be fair in 2024, China's electricity supply was primarily based on coal and renewable energy sources, with coal accounting for the largest share at approximately 57.77 percent. Renewable energy, including hydropower, contributed around 20.27 percent. Nuclear energy played a relatively minor role at about 4.47 percent. So it's mostly coal power plants in used for AI in China.
Percentage dont make sense when the OP posted a out solar leadership. Raw numbers is where it's at.
The OP did not show where AI and solar intersect, because in power supply they do not. AI power infra is mostly reliant on hydro and coal
The race to have the magic box that tells you lies that you want to hear while also consuming incredible amounts of resources...why is this a race again?
The telling lies part is not good, but I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems. Cure for cancer, sure that will be $10k a pill. Eternal life? Sure that will be 1 million dollars a years for all eternity. Robot army to protect you? Top of the list.
Question I have is, is the AI we see the same AI the teck bros see? Is there a public interface that is made to appear a little buffoonish so the masses can laugh it off, but the real interface is much much better?
Those things are being solved by other forms of AI, not LLMs. AlphaFold is about the most useful thing AI has done so far and it's not a chatbot.
We get access to entertainment AI, but there could be different forms of AI in use in medical science that have nothing to do with image or text generation.
The only answer I need from an AI is 42.
I really don't understand this perspective. I truly don't.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Like. Do you honestly think this is the one technology that researchers are just going to say "it's fine as-is, let's just stop improving it"?
You don't understand the first thing about how it works but people like you are SO certain that the way it is now is how it will always be, and that because there are flaws developing it further is pointless.
I just don't get it.
I've actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I've built RAG architecture backends for self hosted FOSS LLMs, i've fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I've even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research). I also enjoy TTS and STT use cases and have FOSS models for those on most of my devices.
I'll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It's like saying you study medicine, it's a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it's being marketed for to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.
This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more or less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between proprietary and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.
There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.
The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that's cool. But we don't need AI to make improvements to them right now.
I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.
Appreciate you expanding on the earlier comment. All fair points.
enough talk already i wish the us empire would just hurry up and actually collapse.
Blessed be the Temu empire
Good, let the Chinese have this demonic technology currently only good for mass surveillance.
Gotta hand it to the fossil fuels industry, they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked.
And now Americans have a janky grid, slower / more expensive transportation, and bigger power bills.
Capitalism doesn't solve for society, it solves for capital.
There is no profit in making the world a better place.
At least we are free*
*Terms and conditions apply
6 is the “one of the good ones” clause
The lasts ones the one that matters most but their supporters can’t read a list that long in one sitting.
Don’t worry. They’ll just ask AI about the grid and it will tell them how great it is.
Edit: or it’ll say FEED ME MORE!
"good catch! That's a very astute observation. Here's a bunch of paragraphs explaining (incorrectly) how you're wrong!"
Just like next quarter's finance numbers for USA will coincidentally just all the great stuff Trump has achieved!
renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, [Rui Ma]
Is the person they’re talking about who is “stunned” at how super double awesome China is at powering AI.
Ffffffffffffffuck this.
Yeah. Kind of amazing that for all of their America first bullshit rhetoric, Republicans have consistently and routinely neglected our infrastructure to focus time and money on gays, immigrants, and giving out blowies to billionaires
Look at other corrupt governments and you can see some even more startlingly disfunctional infrastructure.
Conservatism is collapsing into irrelevance as a long term commitment.
Close. Conservatism is collapsing the United States of America into irrelevance.
Maybe Trump can Make Ampères Great Again.
That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids
Yeah, capitalism will resolve everything by being greedy. Electricity is not and will never be a merchandise. It's a basic human need and a natural state monopoly.
can't use power to make everyone use electric cars need power for "AI"
Nice job you jabroonies you did it you lost everything. This is the slow descent of America and it the boomers fault.
My father in law is convinced theres some guy in a garage that's gonna invent the next big invention, but hey guess what it takes MONEY that regular joe schmoes dont have!!
the race to the bottom may already be over
