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I'm not actually sure they are widely useful. So far the primary use case for them is coding, right? But not very many people are coders, it's a niche field, and as Freddie has argued (disclaimer: I do not wholly agree with him), very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
But even if we grant that LLMs are very useful in the handful of niche fields where they are currently used, the problems remain that 1) most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses, and 2) most members of the public do not think those uses are worth the costs they are being asked to bear.
If software is a niche field, then the US is a niche economy. And, although the public might think math and software is pointless stuff for nerds, they do care about cratering the economy.
There are 1.84 million software developers in the U.S., so roughly half a percent of the population. I suspect most of these are heavily concentrated on the coasts, rather than scattered throughout the areas of the country most of these data centers are going.
Joe Six-Pack probably knows umpteen different welders, heavy equipment operators, machinists, and he certainly knows plenty of people who drive cars. He's probably never met a software developer, nor does he see any reason to. In his mind (and many others), AI might as well be fictitious.
Joe Sixpack may not know any software developers, but he uses the Internet, including some kind of search engine... which probably includes AI prominently now. If he doesn't live near Detroit or one of the few other centers of car manufacture, he probably doesn't know any automotive engineers either, but he damn sure knows about automobiles.
If there's an enormous car factory in his town, he either works at it or knows scores of people who do. It's easy to see the benefit.
The benefit to an enormous loud data center that employs next to no one, and potentially triples your electric bill? Yeah obviously that's not gonna go over as well.
Enough with the CCP propaganda; data centers don't triple your electric bill. In fact, if they're "loud", it certainly means they're on independent power.
Independent power or not, the fuel source has to come from somewhere, and these things have enormous power requirements; like, potentially more than your entire state currently generates. Given the laws of supply and demand, there is no earthly way they won't increase energy costs for consumers (barring government intervention).
They're industrial facilities. Yes, they use a lot of power. Though not more than "my entire state"; Google Lenoir, for instance, is estimated to have the capacity to use 133MW, compared to North Carolina's generating capacity of 36,000MW. This is about the same as a single line at an aluminum smelter. The Texas numbers you linked for are the total for 1800 separate projects.
The aggregate demand is what affects prices and impact; one single facility is irrelevant.
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