Comment by scottcha

Isn't that kind of a non-sequitur? The claim made was that renewable energy would still be a finite resource to some degree. It's possible that the available energy surplus will be too big for any decisions about usage to matter, but that's a strong claim and you're doing nothing to make it here.

A lot of people believe in a higher power. If trusting in this supposed "market" brings you comfort and clarity in a complicated world, I do not begrudge you it. But invoking it doesn't address the claim it's answering

It's also clear that "the market" does not care enough about environmental impact to even do stuff like remove the current significant fossil fuel subsidies present in most government budgets, nor stop individuals or organizations from consuming or selling said fuels, natural gas, or plastic products at massive scales, so it's unclear why it would allocate energy in a way that didn't deprive crucial priorities.

Like the theodicy on the invisible hand's problem of environmental collapse ain't lookin' good is all I'm saying

I kind of agree with this sentiment , though we haven't reached 100% renewable ...

The issue is that when you have a high local usage your grid loses the ability to respond to peaks since that capacity is now always in use. Essentially it raises the baseline use which means your elasticity is pretty much gone.

A grid isn't a magic battery that is always there, it is constantly fluctuating, regardless of the intent of producers and consumers. You need to be able to have enough elasticity to deal with that fact. Changing that is hard (and expensive), but it is the only way (such as the technical reality).

The solution is not to create say, 1000 extra coal-fired generating facilities since you can't really turn them on or off at will. Same goes for gas, nuclear etc. You'd need a few of them for your baseline load (combined with other sources like solar, wind, hydro, whatever) and then make sure you have your non-renewable sources have margin and redundancy and use storage for the rest. This was always the case, and it will always be the case.

But now with information technology, the degree to which you can permanently raise demand on the grid to an extreme degree is where the problem becomes much more apparent. And because it's not manufacturing (which is an extreme consumer of energy) you don't really get the "run on lower output" option. You can't have an LLM do "just a little bit of inferencing". Just like you can't have your Netflix send only half a movie to "save power".

In the past we had the luxury of nighttime lower demand which means industry could up their usage, but datacenters don't sleep at night. And they also can't wait for batch processing during the day.

They'll have to build new power generation and build the data centers next to it.

You are massively conflating what is possible with what is done.

Two reasons that I understand 1. not all these AIs are LLMs and many have much lower latency SLAs than chat and 2. These are just one part of a service architecture and when you have multiple latencies across the stack they tend to have multiplicative effects.

If you look at a model with a diverse competitive provider set like llama 3 the latency is 1/4 second, and it will definitely improve at a minimum incrementally if quality is held constant: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/... Remember that as long as you experience the response linearly (very much the case for audio output for eg) then the first-chunk latency is your actual latency, not to stream the entire response.