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Long time listener, first time caller.
The war on AI datacenters (and normal ones as a bit of collateral damage) has been going on for a little while now, with those opposed fiercely fighting a lot of these projects pretty much wherever, whenever. It seems to be one of the most bipartisan issues facing the country right now and those who are pro-datacenter have been effectively politically slaughtered. As of a few days ago though, there seems to have been a small little flash point in the thing. I haven't really seen a thread here about this (although definitely could have missed one), and I'm actually a little surprised at it since I do think this is probably one of the biggest culture wars in America of this year. Anyway, curious thoughts on this, etc
From what I can tell, the flashpoint was yesterday when Axios reported (and later posted) a letter from the Ohio RNC to AI companies effectively calling being pro-datacenter politically radioactive. It kinda exploded at this point over Twitter and later Greg Abbott put a thing out about it yesterday after enacting a pause earlier this month. Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country
The reaction to these things are incredibly understandable. Their argument effectively goes "they use our water and electricity, provide a service to enhance the surveillance state and the interests of Big Tech, their proponents openly admit that they're gonna take your job, they bully communities, and they don't even pay taxes either, all the while poisoning the communities they leech on with pollution and noise." Personally, I'm honestly quite surprised that political radioactivity is the biggest thing that has happened so far. This seems to be an issue that unites people regardless of political party or affiliation...
...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods. Polling against datacenter construction is incredibly poor, arguably being worse than coal or nuclear power plants (yeah I know, different surveys). I think this, if I were to pin a spark on this (there are many), it's the story of the Memphis xAI datacenter and also the lawsuits against Solon Township to effectively bully them into allowing the project. Communities, seeing what happened there and politically, have somewhat backtracked quite a bit where before they were much more open to it. Some of those that haven't are proactively enacting outright bans
If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.
Both Altman and Amodei screwed up public perception big time, although I don't think it's 100% their fault. I imagine though this is basically because they're put in a double bind. If it isn't absolutely economy ending for every other company, the trillions pumped into their valuation will vaporize faster than you can say "AGI," but people tend to believe (correctly so) when someone threatens them (and have especially checkered pasts as both these guys do), that their threats are genuine, so when those PR puff pieces trickle down to the public at large.
The All In guys have tried to pin this on Amodei in particular, but I think some people just see that as them talking their book
They've tried to label the opposition as "China," but that clearly doesn't make much sense given that the problems are genuine. Cremieux has tried to take up the mantle on the issue, but I think people see his arguments are seen as specious and as relying on theoreticals that don't match observations on the ground, and this has I think backfired
Expect to see more bans and moratoriums happening across the country. Will be interesting to watch. Thoughts?
America is a big country, inhabited by few Americans (in most of its territory). Datacenters are, all told, pretty small things, these aren't wheat fields or even airports. The politics of early singularity is interesting: people refuse the maximalist AGI and human replacement framing for assorted cultural reasons, and instead latch on to any adjacent smear – from the inane water use stuff to semi-legitimate surveillance and energy costs concerns to "they don't create jobs". The outcome is overdetermined. AI is already the main engine of economic growth, and the success at AI development and broad diffusion (at this level of utility, just scaling inference capacity) is deemed a matter of national survival. The popular resistance will be overcome, persuaded to relent, bribed in select locales, or routed around. Maybe Anthropic will finetune a Mythos 2 version specifically for propaganda.
The biggest practical consequence may be the increase in returns to Musk's idea with orbital compute, and of course his ownership of SpaceX. There are no NIMBYs in space. Without all this, it'd have taken maybe 2-3 more years until viability; now, it starts working pretty much after they manage the first Starship land-and-reuse after an orbital insertion.
This is probably because you or they won't see AGI or human replacement in your lifetimes, but they will see higher water bills, a surveillance state, higher electricity bills, and job loss. I am not sure what makes you so blasé about predicting bizarre outcomes like «singularity», but it is really odd and out-there, especially given nobody has ever predicted anything properly in the AI space. The systems are too random. Nobody knew GPT 3 would come out and expand in 2022, particularly not you. Nobody knew Opus 5 would be doing what it's doing now in 2026, you have literally no idea what 2030 or 2034 will look like. None.
I don't know why you assume "particularly not you" would have predicted GPT-3. GPT-3 follows from GPT-2 follows from Vaswani et al. Why do you think plenty of intelligent people, including Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever, got so agitated when that paper came out and started scrambling for commercialization? Do you believe they were that into machine translation as a business? Of course folks like Hinton, Sutskever's teacher, were running multi-decade research programs premised on connectionism being enough for intelligence in general, not just for some particular capability demo. I was pretty AGI-pilled all of my conscious life, admittedly mostly for shallow sci-fi reasons, and got convinced of inevitable singularity once I saw (and later launched) DeepDream. That degree of quasi-creative flexibility was an unambiguous proof, for me, that we have really grasped the sufficient basic primitive of universal learning. That's the biggest piece that biological life needed to go from insects to humans, and hardware&software cycles are inherently absurdly faster plus capital can grow exponentially, so what exactly could the counterargument even be?
In my opinion, this is "out there" on purely rhetorical grounds – skepticism is a product of incomplete information available in the popular discourse, and skeptics who profess to have some principled objections are continuously humbled and forced into retreat (like Chollet or LeCun, the French are annoying in this way; or hey, remember when Hlynka tried to burst my/others bubble here with some prose about mathematical Truth versus wordcel nonsense? I wonder how he feels about the recent math results from OAI/Ant). The coarse-grained logic is settled since Samuel Butler, the timelines and mechanisms were getting constantly refined, now we have a good idea of the necessary mechanisms and a thicket of more or less cheap ways to compensate for any particular – and still temporary – technological block.
Vernor Vinge, 1993:
Shane Legg, 2009:
Shane Legg, 2011:
Kurzweil, according to Google's AI, “predicts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will arrive by 2029. He first made this prediction in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, and has maintained it through subsequent books like The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer.”
and in 1988, “pioneering Carnegie Mellon University roboticist Hans Moravec predicted that hardware matching the computing power of the human brain would arrive by the late 2020s, enabling human-level artificial intelligence. He argued that processing capacity, driven by hardware scaling, would naturally unlock general machine intelligence.’’
While nowhere close to these giants, largely on account of my age, I believe I have a pretty decent prediction track record in this field (I have plenty of receipts here, such as talking about DeepSeek when their V1 Coder and LLM came out in late 2023; since then their architecture and much else became the default paradigm in the industry).
What about Opus 5? It's been programmed since o1-preview at least. Of course the specific product name, timing, costs, benchmark numbers and downstream capability priorities are all unpredictable but trivial. Anthropic surviving and remaining well-resourced enough to compete was very likely, the substance of the rest follows necessarily.
That's fair, that's the predictable part, as Vinge has predicted. But then again, as Yud said, you don't know how specifically a superhuman AI will beat you in chess; you can just safely bet on it doing so. I have a pretty clear idea that at this rate we will have AI doing wildly superhuman knowledge work by 2030. This is the most salient and important part, unlike the specious water use trolling. And thus the real problem people should have with AI, I believe, is still the same I outlined 3 years ago.
I strongly believe there are no remaining valid objections to this big picture. You're welcome to make some.
Seems like we are still missing a few of these bullets, even if we add his 50%?
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