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Comment Power companies have been doing this for decades (Score 2) 59

Back in the 20th century some power companies would put your hot water heater on a "controllable" meter that could be turned off during periods of high demand. The rate on that meter was lower than the rate for the rest of the house.

Industrial customers who are willing to be "turned off" can also get cheaper rates from many utility companies.

Comment Re:This is a good use case for AI, BUT... (Score 1) 61

The use case I envisioned is experts who COULD do the work by hand use AI as a tool to be more efficient. This assumes they are expert-enough that will recognize if their AI of choice is giving a false-positive rate that makes their work harder, not easier. It also assumes that since they are being paid for their time (but perhaps only a pittance or not at all if they are students), they will be paid by their employers or funders as much for reviewing the AI's output as they are for the other parts of their research.

Comment This is a good use case for AI, BUT... (Score 1) 61

... the usual caveats apply: An expert human, or team of humans, needs to look at what the AI is suggesting, understand what it is suggesting, test it with the same or more rigor they would give to the same suggestion if a human had come up with it, and not "sign off" on it until they are satisfied that it is what they say it is.

It's the humans who are putting their professional reputation and, in some cases, their professional licenses on the line if they get it wrong. The AI is incapable of caring if it's correct or not.

Comment Uhh... (Score 3, Insightful) 78

However, Meta said it couldn't identify anyone who "formally" made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus,

I am going to make a dangerous assumption and assume that does not mean "we think we should use the written word to train our LLM" as that isn't actually anything that requires consensus. So presumably, the "team" discussion was about how to acquire said books. That the "consensus" answer was "through shadow libraries" sounds an awful lot like "conspiracy to commit commercial copyright infringement" and appears to be a rather shortsighted argument to be making.

Comment Re: "Fun" fact (Score 1) 132

The only truly unique thing associated with Musk is Starship. That piece of tech is important for our species and everyone else is a solid 20 years behind

Wait, "some other company" can replace Falcon in "a few years" but everyone is "20 years behind" a design that has only been under active development since late 2018? Your math ain't mathing, dude.

Comment Re:Also known as Enshittification (Score 2) 53

I remember the old days when you had to setup TCP on machines just to access an internet with no pictures.

You are young. I remember the older days when you had to set up an external modem to connect to a university mainframe that MIGHT have internet. With no pictures.

No ftp or telnet from your actual home computer. If you wanted to download files, kermit, xmodem, and the mainframe's equivalent of 'cat' were your friend.

Comment In the abstract, this could be a good thing (Score 1) 53

An AI that can parse my query and give me a useful result faster than me reading through several pages of documentation is a good thing. But this means the AI and its training data have to be suited for the task. There also needs to be two "escape hatches" - one to give me the pre-AI way of doing things and another that will get me to a human being, at least during business hours.

As for how Google runs its support pages, I don't have enough experience to comment. If the existing documentation is poor, I wouldn't expect better from an AI.

Comment On-site power (Score 1) 45

In the long term - 5+ years down the road - big projects like these will want on-site or near-site power or at least on-site battery storage so they can buy power when it's the cheapest.

On-site power should also be attractive to investors: If the data center flops, you still have a power plant that can sell power back to the grid.

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By the mid-'30s, on-site base-load power may mean small nuclear plants. There are logistical, regulatory, and political/NIMBY reasons why that's not a good solution for the 2020s.

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