TechTakes

This is comparable to the amount of water used by cherry farmers near Google's site in The Dalles, who (according to my napkin) use somewhere between 2-8x what Google uses. This isn't that much water for the Columbia River though; on an average day, it has enough flow in less than a minute to provide for both the cherry farmers and Google all day. However, it would be a big problem for a smaller river. (Interestingly, while fresh water is essential for datacenters, Google originally desired that site because it was cheap land next to cheap hydroelectric power.)

Genuine questions borne of ignorance:

When they say "using" water, is this water that has to be actively removed from the supply each day, or does this number just say how much water is circulating in the center? I'm assuming it doesn't all disappear, or does a lot of it end up released as steam or piped away as contaminated water or something?

The data center nearest to me uses sea-water, but I have no idea how much. And it doesn't seem to put out steam or dump bad water back into the sea (not that I could tell if they were doing that).

I totally understand the electricity resource issue for data centers but the water usage thing confuses me, because I assumed it would be for cooling and therefore mostly contained and recirculated. With the exception of predictable maintenance issues like leaks and waste from mineral scale or algae, I don't understand why this water would need to disappear, or why they would need to use potable water from the outset.

Admittedly my mental model is based on consumer CPU water-cooling setups at an imagined industrial scale. What am I missing?

while OpenAI deserves every bit of flack they get, it's comical to see people who criticise OpenAI for creating a 'war machine' turn around and praise Anthropic when they were-by their own admission no less!-the first people to start using AI for military purposes

“We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy,” he wrote. “Good learning experience for me as we face higher-stakes decisions in the future.”

Yes of course this is just a learning opportunity... higher stakes decisions in the future...

Cuz making deals with the biggest military in the western world that involve autonomous use of weapons and possible escalation to all out nuclear war sounds pretty low stakes. /s

Fucking muppet

Altman claimed that the company would “amend our deal” to add the prohibition of “deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of US persons or nationals.”

...so the original statement was a lie then? the CEO who is notorious for being a liar lied? I am very surprised about this information.

animals are like sentient beings y'know, a clanker is a… matrix or a bunch of matrices or something