There are many examples of people being charged with crimes as a result of writing software, [0][1] are two. OpenAI is a bit different because they have enough political influence, and money, to openly subvert justice.
In a way, this task is perfectly suited for LLMs. To even understand the problem statement, much less the proof or Lean, is an extremely specialized skill. The overwhelming majority of people who are aware of this news simply don't have the capacity to call BS. Maybe there are a few thousand people in the world who could, and it seems they haven't yet, but indeed it's only been a few weeks.
The more familiar analogy was when I look at the code that Claude spews for my partner. They take it at face value and hope it works. I usually find it very problematic, but only because I knew what to look for.
Is there any question the person who was baselessly charged with CSAM, then terrorism when they realized it was so obviously untenable, as a pretense to detain him would've been treated differently if he were on a different "side"?
>the person who was baselessly charged with CSAM, then terrorism
Source? Are we still talking about Samuel Tunick? The article doesn't mention it, and so far as I can tell he was only charged at the border crossing for obstruction.
Not "charged" as in indicted but the search was based on an accusation that he had CSAM on the device. But his political proclivities make it pretty transparent that CSAM was an invented excuse to investigate and punish a political dissident.
I can't remember right now where from, but I do remember some 10ish years ago listening to an NPR spot from some philosopher who claimed there was an existential crisis in the field of philosophy. The premise that I do remember was that our technology, our policy, and our society has all outpaced our ethics and our philosophy. The person was making the argument that we as a society would struggle to cope with the continued development of technology when we could barely cope with personal loss and structural inequality.
At the time it felt prescient; now it just feels too late.
To take a different perspective than ownership as "right to re-sell" or ownership as "the right to use in perpetuity," I think there is also value in considering ownership as responsibility to maintain those rights.
When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.
Worse, the burden [generating energy] increasingly falls on the buyer [data center developers]
I don't believe this is worse, but appropriate. The grid is a shared resource, used by enterprise and individuals. If some class of consumers demand an outsized share of that resource, they should pay an outsized share of its maintenance and development. I don't see that happening.
It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.
When the first wave of these datacenter stories came out, the utilities complained that they couldn't finance the work because the data centers refused to commit to paying for them over the longer term, leaving other ratepayers on the hook for the investment.
This seems to further confirm that, though now the data centers are being portrayed as the victims in this.
The sentence immediately following your quote:
> securing grid-connected power now often requires developers to post substantial letters of credit, security deposits, or sign take-or-pay commitments to fund the generation built to serve their load.
The question is, if they couldn't commit to paying the utility, how can they finance building their own independant grid equivalent? Did they find some other sucker to take on the risk?
In the past major industrial electricity consumption facilities (like aluminum smelters) have been build near big power plants. Or dedicated power plants have been build to power major industrial electricity consumption facilities.
For example:
PS5 Combined Cycle Power Plant for Aluminium Bahrain (ALBA)
> It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.
Funnily, that's precisely what happened to America's rail network. Enterprise demanded unlimited right of way to the point that it's laughable to even consider transit by rail these days.
It's going exactly as well as you'd imagine. I expect our power infrastructure is going to be treated exactly the same as our rail infrastructure: legacy public assets to be exploited indefinitely[0] for free[1] profit, and never invested in until failure becomes an existential threat[2]
It's not "worse" per-say in that the buyer is crunching the numbers and deciding to go with on-prem generation for a lot of their jiggling electrons.
But holy shit is something broken if that sort of approach is more economically effective (middle of nowhere Alaska not withstanding) than having the people who not only specialize in pipes for jiggling electrons, but have all sorts of preferable treatment from regulators and expertise in financing these sorts of things, just enlarge the size of the pipe to your door.
Furthermore, the grid wants to be as big as it can for basically all the same inflow/outflow smoothy reasons a bank or an insurer wants to be. Something is very, very broken here if big, highly financed corporate interests are saying "no I'm not gonna get all my power from the grid" and the grid is saying "actually this is fine". They should be jumping at the chance to essentially have someone else at least partly subsidize their improvements.
Everyone wants to whine about future volatility, will the data centers be around to pay for what they ordered, etc, etc. But the energy industry has a long, long, long track record of financing this risk away. Oil and related energy infra has been boom and busting for over a century.
30yr ago it would have been unfathomable that anyone without an extremely niche case would go where the energy is rather than just ordering up power from the grid.
Not sure how you calibrate your "niche" scale, but foundries and aluminium smelting plants have commonly been sited near generators in Britain. I suppose that transmission losses matter at the GW scale; and also that a national grid is a complex system, with phase slump being a cause of failure even with sufficient generation capacity.
Every DC I've visited - probably ten - has on-site generators, for redundancy. To a certain type of mind, that's capital going to waste. I can imagine a bean-counter desire to sweat that plant.
I agree that today's economics is very broken, but co-siting generation and consumption is probably not a symptom.
Aside: Language is whatever people use, but, "per se" is Latin for "in itself". "Per-say" is an eggcorn.
>, but foundries and aluminium smelting plants have commonly been sited near generators in Britain.
IDK about Britain, especially historically when you would have been building aluminum smelters. It's not normal in the US more or less since the advent of the grid. I'm sure people will be along shortly to construe exceptions or special cases where the fossil fuels were extra cheap as the norm or heat was what they also needed and it was cheaper to capture that locally and make some electricity too.
>Every DC I've visited - probably ten - has on-site generators, for redundancy. To a certain type of mind, that's capital going to waste. I can imagine a bean-counter desire to sweat that plant.
But they don't use those for any semblance of "normal" load. Those are strictly for redundancy not "ah it's 3pm, power's getting expensive better fire up the genset for 4hr". At least that's normally how it is. It's not normal for it to be possible to out compete the utility even after fixed costs are amortized in. Bigger generation is more efficient, if you're buying fossil fuels then buying them in bulk is more efficient. Etc. etc. It should be cheaper to have the people who benefit from all that string you a wire.
In most places aluminum smelters have been located near power plants, because aluminum smelters have large electricity demand and transporting large amounts of electricity over large distances is expensive (high capacity power lines are expensive).
Electricity costs are between 40% - 50% of costs of the finished aluminum.
Also, reliability.
"Due to the nature of the process, power outages have the potential to cause damage to production cells as the molten liquids could solidify in absence of adequate current. For this reason, production facilities need to be near secure and reliable sources of energy."
Like in all these historical cases there's been some sort of high voltage transmission in between. Sure, not a hundred mile line through god knows how many jurisdictions, but still plenty, a far cry from the "this won't pencil out if we have go farther than across the street" that we're currently seeing.
Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.
> Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.
Isn't the problem that the grid operators/generators have been asking for them to commit part of this huge pile of cash before they start the expensive buildout process but the DCs are refusing to do so?
I don't think it says anything about having a rough time, the grid would expand if those requesting major expansions would commit paying for them. Instead the grid is being told "we need it, build it, and we will pay after" which for the kind of massive investment necessary to push extra dozens of GW is absurdly risky. If the grid starts major expansion and AI investments crumbles in 3-5 years then it's both a waste of resources while also requiring grid operators to charge more the current consumers to bridge the gap left by the AI DCs.
The only thing I can see showing a very rough time is the entitlement of these companies, just because they are surfing a humongous phase of investments they feel they don't need to play by the rules that always existed: if you need something massive you gotta pay for it.
> a far cry from the "this won't pencil out if we have go farther than across the street" that we're currently seeing.
I'm not sure what crying has to do with it but the losses across two streets are double those "across the street", across 4 streets - 4x loss, etc.
Public utilities minimize losses over a wider area with many customers, connecting a GW datacenter to the public grid isn't as simple or as safe as connecting another house, the best solution here is to keep large consumers separate to avoid grid instabilities.
> Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.
It's not true that they "can't expand the grid", they don't want to. They were eager to leach on the public grid but when asked to pay their fair share to be properly integrated by the public utilities, they got worried that some minuscule share of their "infinite piles of cash" may benefit the public - nope, you can't have that under any circumstances.
> The grid is a shared resource, used by enterprise and individuals. If some class of consumers demand an outsized share of that resource, they should pay an outsized share of its maintenance and development. I don't see that happening.
That makes sense up until you realize that the data centers aren't just burning watts for fun. They're providing a service that is in extremely high demand to a very high amount of those other electricity customers.
> It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.
And those trucks are delivering products to the stores those commuters shop at.
And we have a perfect instrument to express this relationship: money. If the service is really important to people they will pay money for it, and the companies can pay some of that money to utility providers. The economy works as intended, everyone is happy. Absolutely no need to invent subsidies or move the burden onto consumers
The problem is that the datacenters need grid investments. And if the utility makes those debt-backed investments but then the DC goes bankrupt, households are on the hook for the debt servicing.
Utilities requiring ten year of prepayment from the DCs makes sense.
This is very "war on drugs" coded, but to extend the metaphor a bit:
Meta here is the heroin cartel. They're a publicly traded company, have offices all over the country, and have mountains of evidence sitting in moderately well secured cabinets. Why should the government go after users when it could more easily go after the producers?
In many states, children under some age are prohibited from using firearms. There is substantial evidence to show that firearms pose a real and present harm to individual children and large groups.
An excellent rider to the KIDS act would be to mandate the installation of age (that is, identity) verification to all firearms in order to disable the safety.
It is hard to tell if this is a joke based on the username. There are people with this perspective though I assume. Thus I will respond to it.
It's worth noting OP's proposed technology is impossibly far from existing in practice. Importantly, there are at least half a billion citizen-owned firearms in the USA without this theoretical technology, already. Therefore we should focus on something more effective. Such as better mental health treatment, bullying prevention, gang prevention, or any other precursors to violent behavior.
Yeah the suggestion is mostly facetious and I realize impracticable. As the other commenter mentioned -- it's a poison pill. If such a rider were added to the KIDS Act it would be dead in the water, without a doubt.
Though I think it's worth noting that age verification _without_ identity verification is basically as impracticable, and arguably more dangerous.
That is indeed a fun fact. One of those things I didn't realize, but immediately believe. Most of the gun owners I know have at least one or two antiques which predate modern notions like "safety" by quite a bit. They are fascinating technology, and they make for incredible family heirlooms.
To stay consistent with my point though, if we mandate that everyone must ID verify to access the internet, I think it's just as reasonable we mandate that all such antiques be forcibly modernized with some sort of 5G-connected ID scanner. For the children of course.
From the Claremore City Council minutes [0] it does show the person mentioned in the article was a speaker, among a group of some 20 other members of the community. They also include the incredible claim
Claremore Data Center will house the backbone of the internet and supports all the functions that occur on the internet.
The minutes mention that many of the council members were accused of not caring, but they do not mention the arrest. I'm not suggesting the story is false as much as highlighting that the city's minutes omit it.
> Claremore Data Center will house the backbone of the internet and supports all the functions that occur on the internet.
That's not incredible; many facilities do that. It doesn't say 'the entire backbone'; there are many pieces in many places, and if it does contain significant transit then it probably does support approximately "all the functions that occur on the internet."
If it's hosting systems building LLMs, than obviously the statement is false.
I'm increasingly convinced that these kind of leaks are the only effective resistance to this surveillance society we're entering. Meta will keep doing this, and other employers will probably follow, and then of course governments will use "appropriate legal processes" to add the data to their dossiers, etc. We are watching in real time the expansion of surveillance cameras, chat control, deanonymization, etc.
Leaks of this data make it obvious to everyone how much a liability it is. Meta Execs have their data in this pile as well; soldiers and congresspeople are in Flock's database. How many senators do you think PornHub has an accurate taste profile for?
Of course there's harm that comes with leaking this data. But is the harm really greater than everyone being surveilled by everyone, everywhere?
The harm may be greater when it's not leaked. In other words, it can be used to blackmail people in power. They may not even be doing anything particularly illegal - just making a controversial statement or having an unusual sexual preference - and there you go. Or of course illegal stuff, you know. Or ultimately if nothing illegal, enough to assemble a parallel construction case.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutchins
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash
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