Technology

77307 readers

2797 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

L4s@hackingne.ws

518

ChatGPT is down worldwide, conversations disappeared for users (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 2 days ago by TheBat@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

220 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Australia isn't the greatest spot to run a data centre in general in terms of heat, but I do understand the need for sovereign data centres, so this obviously can't work everywhere.

What makes you think $3.5 million can't be profitable? A mid sized hospitals heating bill can get into the many hundreds of thousands or into the millions even. Especially if it's in a colder environment. A 5-6 year payback on that wouldn't be terrible and would be worth an upfront investment. Even a 10 year payback isn't terrible.

These colder locations are the ideal locations for the data centres in the first place because they generally want a cooler climate to begin with, so they will gravitate to them when possible.

Edit: And if you build a data centre with this ability to recoup heat, you could start building further commercial things in the area and keep the heat redistribution very close. You don't need to travel very long distances. You do need to put some thought into where they go through and whats around or will be built around.

[–] redwattlebird@lemmings.world 2 points 1 day ago

Ok. We're deviating off the point of LLM profitability here and have driven this conversation off into the weeds. So I'll make this one last comment, and then I'm done. This debate has been interesting but exhausting.

Final counterpoints:

$3.5mil is the cost of the connection footed by the energy provider and tax payer, and provides no ROI to investors like NVIDIA, hence no profit to LLM and "AI" in general.
As far as I can tell, the biggest method of external income for LLM companies are subscriptions and there is simply not enough uptake in subscriptions to get ROI, so they try to force consumers to use it which ends up pushing away your customer base since you're taking away their power of choice.
For them to obtain ROI, literally the entire planet needs to use it which isn't feasible because, as a consumer, you need income to consume and the larger driver of investment into LLMs is to reduce the cost of labour.

LLMs have long since gone beyond the scope of interesting science project to something driven by pure parasitic greed.