Building the next social media platform
Acworth, GA
Joined July 2015
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Here's a fun analogy: If you've just had your leg blown off, but you also have a paper cut on your finger, which do you think you should deal with first?
where US daily water actually goes (322B gal/day):
• power plant cooling: 41%
• agriculture: 37%
• municipal/public supply: 12%
• direct industry: 5%
• data centers: ~0.04% on-site (~0.5% if you include the electricity running them)
Nationally, agriculture uses more water in FOUR HOURS than all U.S. data centers combined consume in a YEAR.
This is not the issue you think it is. There is no industry in the world that optimizes resource consumption like computing. If every other person and industry on earth optimized the way data centers do, we'd eliminate global warming overnight.
If you want to spend your time in the most effective way, I suggest directing your energy towards agriculture practices that allow major corporations to consume billions of gallons per day using horribly inefficient practices because fixing them would disrupt profits in the short term.
The problem with posts like these is they massively underestimate the volume of talent that will follow the work. About 2/3 of the US elite AI talent is foreign born. If it moved elsewhere, many would leave with it.
We wouldn't slowly fall behind attrition style; the entire frontier would move abroad wherever they could find funding, taking all the RSI knowledge with them to pick up right where they left off.
Basically, it underestimates how quickly the impacts will happen and how significant they will be.
I urge you to read this post.
Let's play it out. Let's pause American AI. Let's ban RSI. Put a moratorium on all the data centers. America's progress will severely slow down. China's will inevitably keep going. They don't care about your American moratorium. They will continue to build RSI anyway, (this is guaranteed) and they will most likely keep open-sourcing models like they already do.
Now what? In two to three years' time, you're going to have every American company and every small business secretly downloading open-source AGI. And if you say you're going to ban Fortune 500 companies from using Chinese models, you still can't stop the weights from spreading. What are you going to do, ban math?
So the job loss happens anyway. I have my own small business, and I also work for a major company. The side teams are going to use it like they already do, I'm going to use it, and people in other small businesses are going to use it to replace editors, gig workers, programmers, and software engineers who might have done small projects here and there.
Even with the YouTube teams I work with, they already plan on replacing all of their editors in one years time. - they will just simply switch to Chinese models.
The job loss is going to happen regardless: the editing, the assistants, customer service, and a huge chunk of gig work will all be done by free open-source models from China. And unless you're banning self-driving cars too, the majority of rideshare will eventually go with it.
Except now, the upside is no longer in America. The labs, the chips, and the tax revenue are all going to go to China. And with the data center moratorium, even running those models happens on someone else's servers. We get the unemployment and no growth to pay for UBI. You're going to completely fuck over every single American, whether they like it or not.
If you think advanced AI is dangerous, you still have to explain how an American pause protects us from systems developed abroad and whether it leaves us less able to defend ourselves. I've spoken to a plethora of Chinese researchers at a myriad of companies, gathering my consensus, and I am confident that they will not stop development. No matter how America tries to come to the table, they will continue pressing forward to AGI.
We've had hundreds of cyberattacks from Chinese state hackers that have exposed critical vulnerabilities. Not only are you going to ramp that up, but you're going to do it in tandem with looming job loss.
