Folks who are in Hong Kong for Siggraph Asia: join for some coffee, hear from some awesome women researchers, make new friends, etc :)
Also follow us on bsky >> @wigraph.bsky.social
www.wigraph.org/events/2025-...
GOOSEFISH
This picture has been making the rounds again, and is being misidentified again.
This is a GOOSEFISH.
This is NOT a tasselled wobbegong shark.
It’s a great pic. I get why people are very excited about it. But it’s as easy to give it the right name as the wrong one.
fullfact.org/online/tasse...
Who here wants a hug
Also llms in many ways will lead to more sensible work arrangements, the generative video models are going enable dopamine hijacking apps like we can’t even begin to imagine (but will also be useful for training and control of robots)
key environmental culprit will likely end up being generative video models that will demand huge amounts of memory and storage in addition to being very resource intensive, and it is less likely that breakthroughs significantly reduce the energy footprint of diffusion models relative to llms, imo
Also i think the reasonable assumption is that most of the marginal increase in compute in the next 5 years will largely be attributable to AI.
I think the conclusion of “can we live with ai” is yes, but there are a few things here that are quite… optimistic?
Caterpillar doubling gas turbine production means that these turbines are going to power data centers and will be burning gas likely for decades after they are deployed.
So coming back to this, if currently there is about 415 TWh of demand, the and the projections are that the tech industry will build about 32GW more, this is 280320 GWh or 280 TWh, expansion in next 5 years.
E.g. not quite doubling all compute on earth, but more than 50% increase.
People don’t always win…
What you are seeing now is all the tech companies are making big contracts with “neocloud” providers which are people who have spent last 5 years setting up build bitcoin mining operations, that are switching over to running ai workloads cause it pays better.
Sorry just to be clear, this will almost certainly be more than a doubling of *compute* but less than a doubling of energy draw
The primary trouble is that a shit ton of this is going to be gas, nuclear on this scale i guess is a decade out at least, and places like Google have already spent the last decade trying to find all the good renewable sources to collocate with, so the pickins already a bit slim
So coming back to this, if currently there is about 415 TWh of demand, the and the projections are that the tech industry will build about 32GW more, this is 280320 GWh or 280 TWh, expansion in next 5 years.
E.g. not quite doubling all compute on earth, but more than 50% increase.
Like oops we decided to roll in generators on containers that pollute a bunch cause it’s fast and convenient but the neighbors hate it.
www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...
One trouble is i guess they want to have reliable uptime. Unless we figure this out super fast, they going to buy a shit ton of gas generators which is going to cause a fracking boom
Just remember sir. You can count on coal.
www.countoncoal.org/2025/07/the-...
If you think AI is a bubble, you haven’t seen nothing yet. Casino will continue for minimum 6 months, almost certainly till the midterms. Likely longer than this….
If only we were so lucky
Hmm thanks. This doesn’t sound right. I think here they are reporting total number of megawatt hours used per year, whereas, e.g. Rick Perry kicking off the construction of a 6GW power plant in Texas is going to output 6GW per hour??? E.g. 2x as the energy from the hydro station at Niagara Falls
It’s satya nadella’s fault to no small degree. Google will obviously win the race, but openAI pushed them to release too early and kicked off this unconscionable arms race. He even bragged “remember who made them dance”. I hope people do when the fracking and tar sands start popping off.
What is the right way to think about 30GW of energy???
Maybe it’s like well take a billion people (so like 1/10 people on earth), and have a 30 watt light on over their head that’s glowing all the time.
This is the near term projected energy load of these AI infrastructure projects
It feels meaningfully different than 2008 and perhaps more akin to the ghost cities that they built in china where they put up a bunch of skyscrapers and infrastructure in hopes of people moving in, and created financial collapse when they didn’t?
Ooops, will not do anything….
The next few years of this madness seem to already be locked in. Many of these projects have broken ground
Everyone here needs to read this to understand the scale of the madness that just got kicked off www.citriniresearch.com/p/stargate-a...
The amount of growth in energy demand that is about to take place is unconscionable and individual boycott will do anything to stop it. Please strategies. Tyty
A sign on a store shelf reading "'Proplifting' is picking up fallen succulent leaves (or any other plant leaf) off the floors of garden centers or pinching off leaves and taking them home to propagate - IT IS THEFT! PLEASE DO NOT DO IT."
YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A PLANT
I took 367 benedryl to find out the Batman wears fedoras
Deep insights from Eugene, OR
‘Erasure of years of work’: outcry as White House moves to open Arctic reserve to oil and gas drilling www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
snel
Woven bunny
PhD defended. Putting some finishing touches on her highness
Social media company that publishes public feeds of peoples conversations with ais that’s like rap genius meets Bluesky. Like I just click a button to publish an LLM conversation, and then people can link to posts in Bluesky
