Better Offline - Data Vampires with Paris Marx

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

In this episode, Ed is joined by Paris Marx, author of the Disconnect Blog and the host of Tech Won't Save Us, to talk about the historic - and horrifying - push of hyper-scalers to build out and control vital parts of the world's infrastructure. Tech Won't Save Us: https://techwontsave.us/episodes Data Vampires Ep 1: https://techwontsave.us/episode/241_data_vampires_going_hyperscale_episode_1 Data Vampires Ep 2: https://techwontsave.us/episode/243_data_vampires_opposing_data_centers_episode_2 Paris on Twitter: https://x.com/parismarx  --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host and the single most punished man alive, Ed Zittron. Everyone hates me, but the people don't hate the man who's joining me today. I've got Paris Marks. The host of Tech Won't Save Us, the writer of the Disconnect blog, and the actual host of the brand new series is about to tell us about, Data Vampires. Paris, thank you for joining me. Absolutely. It's so fun to be on the show. So tell me about the new show. I'm excited. Yeah, it's, you know, I think everyone has kind of been paying attention a bit more to like the energy use of data centers and cryptocurrency and all this kind of stuff.

And, you know, especially what powers generative AI and, you know, what's been kind of fueling the hype for the past two years. And so in this series, I wanted to go into why we're actually building so many data centers. What is behind these things? How much energy are they actually using? And on the one hand, like the commercial impulses to do this, but also like the kind of weird ideological reasons that these people want to build these massive AI systems in the first place relating back to all these like things about AGI and, you know, trying to make computers with human level intelligence

and all this kind of stuff where they eventually want to merge their brains with machines. So it goes into like the wide range of all these sorts of things over four episodes. So talk to me about the scale of this. How many of these data centers are they building? Give the audience some idea, because from what I know, it's not great. Yeah, absolutely. And it's quite a lot, right? Especially when you see it scale up over the past number of years.

So we've seen this really significant escalation over the past five years in particular in the construction of these data centers. So there were something like 500 or so, you know, about five years ago. And now we're looking at more like 1,000 that were completed by the end of, in the early part of 2024, we have many more than that now, and we know that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in particular are making these huge investments to increase the number of data centers that they're building and to build them more quickly. And so, you know, the thing is, some people might listen to this and say, okay, yeah,

but data centers have been around for a long time. And I think that this is an important distinction to make, right? Data centers, as we knew them, were like a floor in an office building that a company was using for their own purposes or, you know, maybe even a specific room in the basement or something. But what we're talking about in particular with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and this move to the cloud and this kind of centralized computation is the hyperscale data centers that exist on the scale that is so much greater than what we used to have before the cloud and how we've really seen that escalate over the past few years in particular. So that is the specific problem, right?

It's not that we have computation, and it's not that there is some degree of centralized computation. It's the scale that these infrastructures exist at. And then the question of why we're actually building all these in the first place. So why are we building them? What are they actually putting in there? Yeah, and it's an essential point, right? And I think there are a few different ways to look at it, right? Some computation is always going to be necessary for the types of things that we're doing online.

You know, there's no question about that, right? I think it's fair to say that we want some degree of Netflix. We want to have easy access to our email. you know, we want to be able to socialize with one another on these various platforms that we use. And I think that that is totally legitimate and that we should be able to do those sorts of things, right? But then you ask, okay, but what is really driving the significant growth that we have been seeing over the past while? And we see on the one hand, certainly that is generative AI. The cryptocurrencies are a little bit separate from that because generally that stuff is not being run on, say, like the Amazon, Microsoft and Google servers.

Those are like specific things being set up. I don't even think they let you. Exactly. right? So these are specific infrastructures being set up by like crypto miners and things like that. So it's a little bit different, but we can still kind of, you know, look at the amount of energy use that's being put into those sorts of use cases. But the other piece that I think that we tend to, you know, not think about so much, especially when we talk so much about generative AI, is this sort of, you know, foundation that we have built the internet on over the past number of decades. And for a lot of these companies, the business model is collect as much data as possible so that, you know, foundation that we have built the internet on over the past number of decades. And for a lot of these companies, the business model is collect as much data as possible. So, so that, then we can target ads and we can target product recommendations on all this sort of stuff to you. And that, like, surveillance piece and storage of massive amounts of data on all of us and everything that we do online is also a big component of it as well that I think it's under-considered. And so my provocation is, like, do we really need to be collecting all that data in the first place

that requires so much, you know, computation but also storage, which is driving the creation in the building of so many of these hyperscale data centers? And are they building them just for generative AI, or is generative AI just kind of an excuse? Yeah, I certainly see it as an excuse. You know, if we're really digging into it, it is a bit of both, right? On the one hand, these companies are trying to build a ton of data centers in order to power generative AI because we both know how computationally intensive, not just the training of those models is, but also then using those products as these companies are trying to roll them out into so much of what we do,

so many of the services that we use, right? But then the other piece of it is that even before the generative AI moment, like I was talking about over the past five years, we can already see that there was this scale up in the number of hyperscale data centers being built in particular. And so in that way, I see generative AI as an excuse to continue building these things that they were already building in the first place. And this is like the foundational point here, right, is that if you think about a company like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google that has this massive cloud business and especially Microsoft, in Amazon where they're getting so many, you know, where the profits from those businesses are so important to their wider business model and being able to expand into so many different areas of business. You know, there is an inherent incentive then, and, you know, we know how capitalism works. These businesses always need to grow. They need to be making more profits in order to keep

shareholders happy. So if your business is, you know, providing centralized computation at scale, you need the amount of computation that we all collectively use to continue growing year on year, and they want it to be growing very quickly. And that means you're not just going to need more hyperscale data centers, but you need to sell people on more computation and to make the things that we use more computationally intensive to justify this kind of business incentive that's driving you. So it almost kind of sounds like they have just been trying to find computationally expensive or intensive even things

so that they could build more ways to compute and justify these expensive. It's kind of sickening. Pisses me off. It's like when I think about it, people say to me, oh, you're angry.

Why are, I don't know why other people aren't angry. I feel like you and I are about as angry. We're very angry. Yeah. Maybe we express it in different ways sometimes.

Perhaps, yes. You're a little nicer than I am, perhaps. Thank you. But it's just, it's just frustrating because I was just on a podcast actually just before this, and I was talking to them, and they were talking about the promise of AI.

But when you get past the promise, it's really just kind of shit. Like, it's mediocre. And they're building all of this infrastructure for nothing. And one theory I have is that it's not being used. I don't know if you've seen anything that suggests that. I mean, you're likely working off of public documents, I'm guessing. But what if this is for nothing? What if they've just built a bunch of data centers for no reason?

Yeah, and that is something that I've talked to a number of people about, right? Because I'm trying to understand that question as well. And I think that there's two potential paths that this takes. So one of them is that maybe they don't end up using some of these data centers that they're currently building or they scale back some of the projects that they're currently planning to build, right? And so, you know, my kind of example to point to for that being a potential pathway is, you know, remember in the early kind of probably year or 18 months, of the pandemic, there was a lot of people who were using, like, Amazon to get more things delivered. And as a result, Amazon kind of created this plan to build a ton more warehouses than they

were actually going to need. And as, like, you know, people went back to kind of shopping a bit more normally as, you know, the threat or as the lockdowns ended and things like that, what you saw is the demand for Amazon or the demand that Amazon had projected decrease. And so they canceled a bunch of warehouse projects and expansions across the United States and their wider warehouse network because they felt that they weren't actually going to need all that capacity that they thought they were going to. So that's one potential path. But I think, you know, because of what we were saying and because of what I was explaining about, you know, this need to grow the amount of computation that we are like collectively using, I think that it is less the chance with

data centers that that is the pathway that we see. And instead, I think that the amount, the number of data centers that these companies are creating, if generative AI falls off, which I think we both think is going to happen ultimately, that there's going to be this collapse, this crash, I think they will ultimately try to find some other use case to justify building out that computation because I think that that is like the inherent project

that they want to realize. On the one hand on the commercial side, but also because the people who are running these companies really believe that everything that we do in our society needs to have computation like inserted in there somehow. Right. And that this is the way that we build like the future, right? Kind of makes me think of Peloton. I don't know.

Sure if you remember the 2021 stories of Peloton where it's like possibly the next trillion dollar company. Everyone was furiously excited about Peloton. And then the moment people got allowed outside again, it started to kind of fall apart. Well, okay, I'm getting my dates wrong because 2021 was when it started to fall off. But nevertheless, I have to wonder if that could happen here. because while you say they'll come up with a reason, what is it?

And how does that lead to money? I just had Zephyr Teach out on, and we were talking about this, it's like, what if there is no plan? What if they don't, other than bigger? Because based on what I've,

what the series you're doing is about, it seems like they're committed to this at least. Like this is, they need to do this to prove that they are cool, rather than I don't know, researching or developing things. It almost feels as if they think this is an ever.

That's what I feel, right? And part of that comes not just from the commercial imperative, but also like these broader ideological things that I'm sure that you've discussed on your show and that I've been discussing with people as well. But when you hear people like, say, Sam Altman or Eric Schmidt or Elon Musk talk about how AIs are going to become so intelligent and, you know, Sam Altman specifically saying that he wants to make sure that we like all merge our brains with machines and all these sorts of things, like I think that suggests also like the direct that these people want to go, not because, you know, not just because of commercial reasons, not just because they think they're going to make, you know, more profits or try to realize

some kind of world that they want to realize this way, but because they think that if this is the direction that we don't take as a society, then, you know, the future that they think is the one that we need to realize in order to have this, you know, wonderful, glorious future where humanity exists forever and we colonize all these planets and all this kind of stuff, if we don't take this direction. If we don't develop these incredibly powerful AIs, then in their mind, this isn't going to happen. So it feels like, yes, there's the commercial element of this, right? They're trying to drive investment with this AI boom by promising so much about it. But like, ideologically, in their, in their kind of minds and worldviews, they think that this

is the direction that we have to go or we're basically all doomed, even though in the process, they're kind of doom us by destroying the climate targets. Yeah, they're destroying the environment to make sure we don't doom ourselves. That's the Eric Schmidt thing. Yeah. podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

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you have some better ideas of how much is actually going into this. Yeah. So it's hundreds of billions. Let me get that right. If not trillions of dollars, right? Um, And I can't remember the exact figure is off the top of my head, but over the past year, say from June of 20203 to July of 2024, Microsoft has been plowing hundreds of billions of dollars into data center expansions around the world. Amazon committed, I believe it was $1.5 trillion earlier this year, last year to data center expansion with about 500 billion of that going out in the short term. So these are like massive numbers. We know that Microsoft and OpenAI have talked about building a 100,000. billion dollar data center complex that would need nuclear energy in order to power it because it would be so energy intensive. Yeah, right? Exactly. So, so like these are the kinds of numbers

that we're talking about. And I feel like these are the types of numbers that we often hear like, you know, governments talk about when they're, when they're making like massive investment projects or something. Right. Not like private companies. But because these private companies are so huge, it's like they can build out these infrastructures that have, you know, such a huge impact that they have impacts not just in communities, but like nationwide globally because they are so significant. Almost feels like a kind of authoritarianism. It feels like they're building out a new governmental system that they control, that they meter out, which includes, I guess it's a vampiric element to it as well, where they control the power of America, even though power is theoretically

a civic good, like a civic utility. Well, it definitely feels that way, especially when you look at like the politics that they're embracing too, right? where you have so many of these influential people in Silicon Valley, not just embracing like Donald Trump, but embracing this form of far-right politics that is, you know, gaining steam in a number of countries around the world that is explicitly anti-democratic. You know, Elon Musk is talking a lot about that these days and saying that he thinks the Democrats are going to end democracy. Meanwhile, like Donald Trump is saying quite explicitly that, you know, he wants to impinge on

democratic rights. And these people have no problem, like working with anti-democratic leaders around the world, as long as they see it as the way to, like, advance not only their kind of personal interests and to make sure their companies do well, but also, again, to try to realize this, like, type of future that they think is desirable. I was just recently talking to Julia Black, who's a reporter at The Information about this, and she did a profile on Curtis Yarven, who is, like, you know, this guy who, yeah, this guy who, like, calls himself a dark elf, but, you know, is one of the co-founders of the dark enlightenment, this like, you know, this, this like political movement that wants to see a monarchy

established in the United States that's structured more like, you know, the CEO of a corporation to have, you know, the United States run as an authoritarian state. We know that Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and a ton of these guys, like, support these ideas. So, you know, like, you can see that with the data centers. You can see this like concerning power grab as these infrastructures expand and they're in the hands of these major tech companies. But even when you look at the leaders of these companies themselves, you can see that they very much want to make sure that the power of the people through democracy is curtailed so that they can do whatever they want. And if you want to know more about Curtis Yavin, somehow behind the bastards had Ed Helms on

to talk about Curtis Yavin? If you want to hear comedian Ed Helms talk about one of the worst people alive. Yeah, I think that's definitely worth listening to. A bottle popper when he pops his clogs there will all be celebrating. So has there been any pushback against these data centers you've seen,

either from governments or people? Yeah, absolutely. And that's part of the reason that I wanted to make the series and also why it came much more on my radar, because I started hearing these stories of pushback happening really around the world, right? And it started with

just hearing like the story of the dolls in Oregon where these people were trying to find out the amount of water that Google's data centers were using and then Google, or sorry, then, you know, there was actually a lawsuit because Google wouldn't share that information and it took a year for them to share it with the Oregonium, which is the local newspaper. And they found that over the past few years, Google's water use, I think it was over the past five years, Google's water use had tripled, you know, just in that city alone. Yeah. So, so these are really significant developments, right? Then I started to hear about how, say, in Phoenix or Northern Virginia or many other parts of the United States, there were also growing concerns about data centers. And then I started to learn about

in Ireland, how now 21% of all electricity goes to data centers. And that's causing concerns about the ability of the power grid to keep up, you know, but also about whether, you know, it makes sense to be allowing this many data centers to be built. You know, concerns in Spain about the amount of water usage in areas that are increasingly facing droughts. You know, concerns in France and the Netherlands, but also in parts of Asia, in South America, where communities in Chile were saying, like, if you build this massive Google data center, will we still have running water into our homes and Google not being able to say, like, yeah, definitely we can make sure that will happen.

And so then they campaign to try to stop it. Like, around the world, you're seeing the opposition to these things grow. And I would say part of the reason for that, going back to what I was saying earlier, is that, you know, it's not just the scale of these infrastructures, but it's because these companies are trying to build out so many more of them around the world. And when they get located in these communities, once one is established, they usually try to build more around it to cluster them, right?

Because they're usually beneficial reasons why they've located one there in the first place. And so then you have these increasingly, you know, greater demands being placed on the power grids and the water infrastructure of these communities. And eventually it reaches the point where many of them start to break and start to say, like, wait, this doesn't make sense anymore. you're threatening our own access to electricity or to water or whatever.

And so, you know, that is why I've been paying so much more attention to this issue because I think it's something that we're all going to be hearing much more about. And I think that the earlier that we do start to take notice of these problems and start to push back on them, you know, hopefully the earlier we can start to curtail these effects and make sure that, you know, these companies can't just get away with doing whatever they want. Have we seen any situations where they have actually stopped people accessing power or water? Yeah. So in a few places we have seen like the grids actually be threatened. So for example, in Ireland now, the grid operator in the winter often has to issue these amber alerts to basically say to people like reduce your energy consumption or we're going to start doing rolling blackouts. There were concerns. There was a story that Karen Howe wrote in, the Atlantic about what was going on in Phoenix. And one of the biggest concerns there is, of course,

is, you know, Phoenix has a lot of desert. Yeah, Phoenix experiences drought a lot. And so as more and more data centers are being built there, because the energy tends to be cheaper and tends to have a higher kind of percentage of renewables in there, is my understanding, that they're going there regardless of the water impacts. And so they're growing concerns about people's ability to, you know, access water. when these data centers need so much, despite the drought conditions that so many people are facing, and how we know that governments tend to turn off water

to the populations before the businesses that rely on those sorts of things. Which is truly awful. Like, every time I think of stuff like that, I start getting a bit crazy, because it's just like you'd think that they would say, well, actually, what we want to do is turn it off for the business. No, no, no, we must make sure the businesses can keep generating. AI Garfields. If we don't have Garfield with an AK-47, well, what use is being able to drink water?

Exactly. One of the wild things, too, that I was learning about in Ireland in particular, is that, so, you know, like I was saying, there's 21% of all the electricity now in that country is going to data centers. It's projected to be about a third by 2030. And so for a while, the government there, or at least in certain jurisdictions of the country, kind of stopped connecting data centers to the grid, stopped making new grid connections because they were like there's not enough power to supply these infrastructures. And so what these data centers started doing instead was to build local methane gas generation facilities to bring in the gas themselves to them power the data center because they couldn't connect directly to the grid. And then, of course, you can imagine all the additional emissions that that creates with this kind of like local gas generation infrastructure. And that's one of the things that's contributing to Ireland, you know, not, you know, being able to meet its climate targets or that not really being in reach. One of the local TDs or members of Parliament who I spoke to there basically told me that like there is renewable energy being added to the grid in Ireland. But the problem that we face is that because the energy demand is increasing so rapidly,

that the renewables just go to powering the data centers, and we can't turn the fossil fuels off. And we're seeing a ton of stories about that in the United States as well, where, yes, renewables are being added to the grid, but the fossil fuels are not being turned off next to it. And in some cases, fossil fuel infrastructure is actually being reactivated. Or there was a story, and I can't remember if it was Bloomberg or the Financial Times recently,

that basically said the United States is investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure at the fastest rate it has in years, which is just like shocking. Virginia, dubbed the Data Center Alley. That's a very depressing thing. I want to die. My question is, why don't we, I know this is perhaps a little bit blunt force, but why are we not making them pay to upgrade the infrastructure? Why is the government not just being like, you want this shit, go and build it for us?

Give us the money, we'll do it. Is that happen? I know we've, there's nuclear power plants, but. In some places that is happening, actually. So in the dolls, for example, in Oregon, where I think maybe most people probably heard the story of that because Google was trying to hold back its water use data and whatnot and eventually had to share it. But in that case, they have made an agreement with the local council in order to upgrade their water infrastructure so that they should have more water available. Again, that doesn't mean that the community isn't still concerned about water access and what's going to happen. It's finite.

There's not an unlimited amount of it. More infrastructure isn't going to help it if we run out of it. Yeah, that's a pretty fundamental issue, right? How do you feel about the nuclear power side? Because I'm kind of 50-50. I like nuclear power. I think it's good at cleanback, but it seems like it's, it seems like they're privatizing it, which is not solving the problem.

Yeah, I would say I'm probably more on the skeptical side of nuclear power, and that's for a few reasons. where nuclear power exists, I think it doesn't make any sense to turn it off, right? Because that's going to be far better than any kind of fossil fuel generation that we're doing. And that should be kind of one of the last things that we actually target for replacement with renewables or whatnot. Like I don't totally agree with, say, Germany turning off its nuclear energy and going back to coal. I think that that is a mistake. But I'm more skeptical of investing in nuclear at this point and treating it as, you know, like a climate response because we know, that nuclear energy is not only very expensive, but takes so much time to, like, set up a new nuclear plant. And it feels like at this point when we've seen the cost of installing solar and wind energy declined so much in recent years, that it feels much more kind of not just cost-effective, but much more rapid to just invest it in, you know, building out large-scale renewables instead. Isn't the issue, though, that renewables don't generate power quite as fast?

Or they don't generate as much? You know, you can set up the battery storage facilities and things like that to store things for the times when it's not generating. Yeah, that's kind of the way that I see it. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the worst singer in the group?

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on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's so funny. I think something's just come to me with this as well that really pisses me off, which is I know unusual for me. The sense that you just mentioned battery storage, What if they put all the money into investing into stuff like that?

What if all of this money could go into inventing that? That would be, my mate Casey brought this up recently. It's like one of the very clear places money could go that would be very good. Like if we had massive battery storage for power, this would solve many problems and actually probably create new things we could do, especially in level conscious. We could like genuinely do amazing things to the world. Even describing it now, I feel more excited about this than generative AI. But it almost feels like they're kind of lazy.

that they don't want to solve the actual problems to get to the point that they just want to build more and keep doing the bullshit they've been doing for years. I feel like part of it is profitability as well, right? Like when you think about investing in like so-called tech or generative AI or what have you, whenever we have investors thinking about tech businesses, we're thinking about these kind of really rapid takeoffs in the amount of money that they're going to make, the chance for these like really significant payoffs if the money, if the company really works. And so you often have these companies trading at multiples that are far above, say, what a traditional company would trade at when it goes public, right?

Whereas if you think of like a more traditional type of company, the possibilities with the chances that you're going to get this massive payoff are far lower. And so there's less of an incentive to put your money into that type of place when, say, some sort of tech business is going to have, you know, this much greater chance of having this huge payoff. And so I think that that is like one place where, obviously we live in a capitalist system where our incentives are kind of misaligned. And it's one of the things that I find quite silly where, like, you know, the United States is having this big feud

with China now and very concerned about the, you know, the ability for Chinese tech companies and whatnot to compete with U.S. companies on the global stage, auto makers and things as well. But one of the reasons that solar energy is so cheap and one of the reasons that we've had this like significant expansion in EVs. We often point to Elon Musk, for example, as like, you know, the one who deserves all the credit for that. But the Chinese have really been successful in bringing down the

cost of those types of technologies, solar panels and batteries and things like that in particular. And, you know, I think that we should be trying to, like, build on that rather than just trying to, like, exclude the cheaper stuff from our markets. Well, fundamentally disagree, Paris, because I don't want any Chinese

companies in, like, stealing my data, tracking America. using that to monetize them somehow and manipulating them using that, that's for American businesses. We keep our surveillance capitalism in the US of A. It just pisses me off as well because, look, I'm not getting into geopolitics,

but it feels like some of this AI boom is even driven by that cynophobia, the sense that if we don't build it, the Chinese will build their AI and their Garfields will be even bustier than ours. And it's just frustrating because, I don't know about working with the Chinese. I'm not going to get into that. But also, it feels like a dumbest, stupid a world where we have another country that's building things fast,

probably in ways that we might not want to do labor-wise, I don't know. But nevertheless, it feels like we're actually not, all of this rapid expansion, all of this shit we're supposedly building, doesn't actually seem to be innovation. It just is capitalist sprawl. Yeah, I definitely agree, right? It feels like Silicon Valley. left innovation behind quite a while ago. Like, I think that you can very genuinely say that in the early days of the internet, there was innovation going on there, right? Whether it was in, you know, software development, but also in hardware development too, right?

You know, the emergence of the mobile phone and, you know, we can even say the iPad and those sorts of things. But it feels like now, you know, those types of developments, those innovations have matured. And it does feel like the industry is, you know, kind of sort of trying to grow up. for whatever might come next, but really failing in doing that because, you know, their profits and their whole businesses are tied up in what is currently successful at the moment. And I think a lot of them don't want to disrupt what is working for them and want to protect these, what are now basically legacy businesses that they have built up and that they're now kind of

soaking for cash, right? And so I don't think that we should be looking to the Googles or apples or Amazon's of the world for innovation and for the path forward for what is going to come next. And I think that even like if you think back to like the internet era and things that came before, you know, often what a lot of people have observed, you know, Mariana Mazukato has this great book called I think it's the entrepreneurial state that goes into this as well, how a lot of the things that these companies were able to launch and able to make so much money from were ultimately things that were being developed like in the public sector and that they were able to privatize and make a lot of money off of, right? Obviously, the internet was a public innovation

before it was privatized and all these companies could use it and commercialize it and whatnot, right? And I feel like something has broken down there as well where so much public research seems to be focused on a very early stage and like, what is the commercialized potential of this, rather than just saying, forget about commercialization for a while and let's just like work on these things and see if it goes anywhere. And it just feels like in general, like, you know, our deep commitment to capitalism in our society has broken down, whereas before, like,

it used to be measured a bit because there needed to be, like, certain deliverables for people and, you know, a different kind of an expectation. But at this point, we've just gone so full tilt on, like, whatever makes profit is what we need to do,

that we've lost the things that ultimately contribute to that in the long term, rather than just focusing on the short term. And it makes me think about, like, giving things time to build, because generative AI as an idea, you have to wonder if they left it alone for another five to ten years without doing this, whether it might have actually been good.

If there was potential for this, because I think we're long gone with large language models, on device stuff I think is cool, but nevertheless, we're not talking about that. But it's kind of we, instead of investing in public things or non-profits that actually build the building blocks that make innovation happen, we've allowed companies like Qualcomm to vacuum up various codecs and standards to the point that most of the, them were owned by one company. And then we pile or we don't really have anyone in power anymore so who understands what the fuck's going on. So we pile all that cash into something that kind of looks like the future. Because I think about the iPhone. I was talking to someone about Jim Covello

in the generative AI paper from Goldman earlier. And he was saying how one of the big things that made the smartphone revolution happen, one of the things that they knew when this happened would bring in was small GPS, was the ability to have some, device level GPS and of course the chips that support it and then someone would need to build the software layer, which is where Apple came in and then Android to some extent. And we don't have that building block kit. We have one thing. We have generative AI. We have transformer based models. And we're going to put all the money in that in the hopes that no one's even thinking of what the next devices might look. I can't stop thinking about batteries now because that really is it.

It's if we had a battery that could power, I don't know, I'm being a bit wanky here, a city. Actually, I'm not being wanky. This is less wanky than what Sam Orman says every day. That feels like, or incredibly small batteries which are powerful, that would enable all sorts of things. Edge AI is exciting, but they've been working on, it's been around 10 years. None of the people in power seem to actually be aware of how good things are built, which I guess explains the data center expansion, because if you think of it, like a dumb fuck if you're like, huh, how do we make money? We got those data centers, right? What

if we build more of them? Yeah, what if they're really big? Then the money will come out of them. I'm just, are you worried? I'm a bit worried about the entire tech economy at this point, as far as the environment, but like, I'm worried about it all. I'm less worried about the tech economy in the sense of like, will they be profitable enough? Will they make their money? Like, I don't really care about that. That's not like something that's important to me. And I know that's the same for you, but it's like, I do worry about where it's going because there are broader, like, societal impacts to everything that they do, right? On the one hand, because of, like, the expectation that we need to adopt so many of these things, but also because our

governments so much are supporting and, you know, willing to push out and not regulate effectively whatever it is that they do until it's too late. And I feel like, you know, what you're talking about with generative AI even, you know, and I'm not going to claim to be like, you know, the most knowledgeable person in the world about the technical angle of that. But, When you look at what, say, Open AI was trying to do and what all these other companies have kind of chased after is they were trying to build, like, the general foundation model that could do virtually everything, right? And you speak to AI researchers or, you know, I've spoken to some AI researchers who say, like, yes, that is very energy intensive. That is going to take a lot of

power, energy data in order to make it work. But you can, like, train very tailored, much smaller models that are not nearly as computationally or energy intensive as the direction that these companies have chosen to go in. But we are not doing that. And I think for a few reasons, mainly because on the one hand, there is like the expectation of scale or the desire of scale that comes with these general foundation models. I think that there is the other side of it where it's very beneficial to the tech companies that exist, you know, the cloud giants, because if you're competing on this scale of general foundation models that need so much computation in order to train, that it's very difficult for smaller companies to

compete on that level. But then I think it also plays into that ideological angle of it that I was talking about earlier, where you have these people who are leading the tech industry who fundamentally believe that we need to build like AI with human intelligence and eventually merge our brains with machines. And so if we're not building these massive general models, then we're not getting closer in their minds to achieving this, which I think is ultimately something where that's never going to get built because I don't think it makes sense, actually. I think it's just science fiction. But I think that is like part of what's driving these people too. So to finish us off, so you've got two episodes out right now. What have we got to look forward to with the rest of the series even?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the first one looked into like what these data centers are, where they're coming from. The second one looked into what this community opposition that we're seeing looks like. The third one that will, you know, come out soon, looks at the climate impacts of generative AI. in the way that generative AI is helping to fuel this further construction of hyperscale data centers. And then the fourth one looks into the broader impacts of this, whether we can think about a different way of approaching this problem and these ideological issues and predispositions and things that these tech billionaires are wound up with, that they are trying to push on the rest of the world, and how that relates to this anti-democratic politics that so many of them are adopting.

Well, Paris, it's been such a pleasure avenue on. where can people find you? Absolutely. You know, they can find the podcast. Tech won't save us on any podcast app where they like to listen. I'm on, you know, most of the social medias, the text-based ones at least, where you can find me at Paris Marks.

Well, thank you so much for listening. Paris, thank you for joining. You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm the most punished man alive, Ed Zittron. You'll now get exactly the same message as this, but slightly different. And you'll get mad at me and you'll email me because it's too saying me. Anyway, you're going to hear it now.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media,

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