Because solar on the roof won't even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.
It's just that somehow if they get to go to space, they decide they suddenly just need like two servers in a 'datacenter' instead of thousands. And they need to go to space because Elon says (checks notes) that it's too hard to make more natural gas turbine parts....
Fun fact, over half of the S&P 500 have market caps over 10x revenue.
This has not ended well for companies in the past.
Why would that be making excuses for the USA? It's not that one must be ok and one must be bad, both can be absolutely doing things wrong.
Don't have to view China positively, just view USA as worse in the moment. Which is fair. USA is the one violently disrupting the global economy directly with military operation in Iran and supporting whole heartedly the Israeli offensive against essentially unarmed populations.
China is not significantly violently intervening beyond it's borders in this time in history, preferring the much more broadly acceptable economic dominance. It is providing disheartening support to Russia in its offensive into Ukraine, but grading on a curve Ukraine at least is armed and supported by others while Gaza and Lebanon are just being victimized in a one-sided conflict. Both are unacceptable offensives, but one is more horrific than the other. It's horrible to compare in any way that might be seen as diminishing the horrors of Ukraine, but it's the unfortunate reality when we are deciding which 'bad guys' we think are the 'worse guys'.
The biggest China issues that are ongoing and not past or potential future are largely within their borders. As far as potential future misbehavior that may be indicated, the hypothetical is outweighed by the USA's actual behavior.
Fair critique of the US, but replace white with Han and you can say the same of China.
Well that description of a car is actually fairly close to the fundamentals, add an engine or motor and a steering wheel, and you've got it. Yes, a lot of engineering goes into the best possible realization of those basics, efficiency, suspension, safety, maintenance, and just a ton of more stuff, and it is a very valued execution above and beyond what, say, the Model T delivered. Automotive engineers have done hard and valuable work and complicated work, but no one is surprised that Model T led to faster, more comfortable, safer, more convenient vehicles that move around. It is a bit more surprising that LLM architecture works as well as it does while always focusing on the next token without ability to go further, best case running through and messing up and regenerating until you have operator appropriate output.
The 'seahorse emoji' was a pretty fun example of this at work, as it didn't have a seahorse emoji, but since it wasn't trying to generate the emoji, it started by building up the words to confirm and introduce the emoji since obviously there will be one, then putting up a wrong thing, then the words that would go after the wrong thing, but the weight still suggested there should be a correct answer and to start generating words for another try, and so on. "Reasoning" does the job of incurring this hit out of sight a lot of the time. Looking at the reasoning chains you'll see this behavior a fair amount, that the model suggests words that build toward an answer but fails on the key word and retries until something tests right or it models that it tried enough and it can't find the key word that would have been expected. It can of course digest it's own output and summarize the result without showing the operator spinning out, but it at all times is operating on the fundamental principle of model+very cleverly managed context influencing an answer one token at a time and ideally discarding the first run.
Monster3D... I was so freaking amazed when I got one... Nothing like the monitor flashing as that pass through switched the active graphics card....
lacks the ability to form a distinct new idea.
Yeah, but it's got that in common with a frighteningly large number of people...
See management, marketing, streaming, social media, etc.....
Actually, it's better at programming if you don't know how to program.
For example, someone who didn't know how to program sent me a patch to my code to 'fix' a problem they encountered. It was changed to silently swallow the error that really really would have needed to be fixed, but they were so enthusiastic that the problem looked to go away that they wouldn't let me know actually actionable debug information and just whined that I wouldn't take Claude's perfectly good fix for it. It is much better at satisfying folks that don't know how to look for better.
To satisfy my standards, I would have had to extract more debugging info, probably construct a test case tickling that exact situation making an expected error to ensure it won't just throw it away, and add it to the suite and then ask it to spin until the test case passed.
But alas, I'm neck deep in merge requests from folks that were formerly intimidated by coding and are now complaining that I'm not accepting more of their changes and more quickly because "all" I have to do is review the code which is obviously so much easier than writing it... It's like the "I have an app idea, all I need is for you to do it", but on steriods....
Particularly software development with very good and very quick tests allow rerolling and that is very appealing in those scenarios. Problems being that very good tests are rarer than people like to think and sometimes it just gets stuck in a loop. At work the other week someone set it at the task of fixing a bunch of build warnings that had accumulated over the years. It succeeded after burning through tokens to take 30 tries at it. It's solution after all that hard thinking? It put // @ts-nocheck at the top of every file and called it a day.
But superficially, someone handed it a chore and didn't have to think about it, and if no one looked deeper, then it was able to get to the desired behavior simply by rerunning the given task over and over without human intervention until it worked. Which is also broadly relatable as there's a lot of humans in the industry acting broadly the same, but I've always been frustrated by those folks anyway.
But that context is a mix of model output and other sources. The model output portion was generated token by token, and is combined in interesting ways with things like human response, search results, software output. It's still a backward looking mechanism, rather than having established a concept as a goal and then trying to build the words to reach that concept like we do.
Size and strategy for managing the context has been critical for improved subjective results, but it still doesn't exhibit the behavior of the words as a tool to address some concept, everything about the model is about the words themselves. So we end up with something very good at generating what seems right and there's a super high chance of what seems to be right actually being right. Especially when the software can automatically execute commands and the good or bad results reach into the context window, enabling it to effectively get automatically second guessed. The potential for automatic verification in some scenarios automatically feeding the context window is what makes it particularly appealing for software folks, though not universal.
I guess the point would be what does the local area get in exchange for losing their forest?
A lot of other developments at least provide the local populace some service or jobs. These are just "give me your land, your power, and water and we will use it to advance our business interests and do nothing for the locals", oh and btw, give us a tax break for the privilege of having us build a datacenter in your area.
Now I'm being bombarded by ads saying 'um, actually datacenters give you tons of permanent jobs and makes power cheaper', so they are just flat out lying instead of actually doing anything to make it worth the local community. Well, except key people on local town councils who somehow end up with NDAs forbidding them from disclosing what conversations they are having with these developers...