[pizzuh]

Energy use is going to continue to climb.

I'm worried about the environmental impacts of this, but from everything I've seen society values model output more. Curious to watch this over the rest of the decade.

[jes5199]

solar and battery costs are falling so fast that emissions are likely to go down, even with growth in energy use

[edhelas]

Sure sure, you did the maths ?

How many batteries do you need to power-up a datacenter at night ?

[Filligree]

Not that many, if you pair it with offshore wind, a large grid (which covers multiple time zones), and ideally nuclear.

The conditions for that don’t exist everywhere, but we don’t need these datacentres everywhere. LLMs aren’t latency-sensitive.

[p_j_w]

>if you pair it with offshore wind

Unfortunately the current government of the US is entirely beholden to fossil fuel interests so they're actively hostile to offshore wind.

[jes5199]

Tony Seba did the maths: https://www.rethinkx.com/publications/understandingstellaren...

[pizzuh]

Great point. Assuming we can adopt them at the correct pace and on a global scale, then energy doesn't have to be a limiting factor