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[–] -5 points 2 months ago* (8 children)

"produce almost nothing useful" is a naive take on this situation.

Clearly they're producing something useful, otherwise the paid revenue for these companies wouldn't still be increasing so rapidly despite the price increases they're pushing out. Their revenue may not be near the investment at this point, but Amazon lost money for a decade while it got established too. Even if the big companies all stopped training new models tomorrow and laid off all their researchers, there would still be demand for running those existing models.

Besides, what's the loss to Canada if we build a few massive datacenters and then the companies that are using them go belly up? It's not the government building the datacenters, the companies would take a loss and sell them off to someone else to use at a discount. That's happened before, and sparked entirely new innovation due to a glut of cheap specialized resources becoming available.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Clearly they’re producing something useful, otherwise the paid revenue for these companies wouldn’t still be increasing so rapidly despite the price increases they’re pushing out.

    I disagree. It's an economic bubble: The value of these companies is being vastly inflated by a collective delusion. Those tulip bulbs were worth one heck of a lot . . . until suddenly they weren't.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    he paid revenue for these companies wouldn’t still be increasing so rapidly

    Is that why they're all sucking up to Trump and asking for so much subsidies to survive?

    Example 1

    Example 2

    Americans are effectively subsidizing these companies via their tax dollars by the billions.

    These companies are also losing billions. So I don't where where you got that idea.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    That first example specifically refers to how fast revenue is increasing.

    Companies are going to try to lobby to save money any time they can, that's how business and lobbying works. If they don't get it, they aren't going to stop, they will just use the next best option.

    If you don't want your government to subsidize industries that don't actually need it, maybe you shouldn't have voted in Trump.

    That isn't the technology that's at fault.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    The problem is the massive environmental impact of running these centres, not who runs them.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    It's just not that massive, see my other comments. People keep failing to consider the scope of the world when seeing big numbers. The world is huge, industry in general is huge, and AI is a small fish in a very large pond when it comes to resource consumption.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    It’s just not that massive, see my other comments.

    your other comments are wrong and have been corrected by others. Sorry bud, not buying your bullshit here.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Not a single person has posted evidence that AI uses up a massive amount of resources in the global or industrial context. Even the person who suggested that all currently proposed AI datacenters for all of Canada could use up to 8% of current electricity just proved that it is in fact a small number compared to our total energy use.

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