China is “set up to hit grand slams,” longtime Chinese energy expert David Fishman told Fortune. “The U.S., at best, can get on base.”
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The race to what?
THE RACE TO WHAT MOTHERFUCKERS?
The thinking goes ‘if we don’t build Skynet first, then China will, so it’s better we be in charge of the Terminators…’
We’re not in charge of shit. We’re the bullet blockers for the evil villains like thiel
All’s grist that comes to Thiels mill.
There’s a school of thought that the first to get AGI/superintelligence can never be caught.
Every school in America getting shot up except that one
And it’s probably correct, but to put it in context, Stephen Hawking thought AGI was the greatest threat we will face in the not-to-distant future, and Daniel Schmachtenberger had pointed out that all the countries basically agree with this assessment, but (to synthesize both of our points), everyone is rushing to a future we nobody wants because it’s a 21st century tragedy of the Commons, is we don’t do it someone else will first…
Best case scenario, great for one country, terrible for everyone else. Worst case scenario, bad for everyone.
Because AGI certainly would choose its creators over the ‘others’ or some shit.
Personally, I expect the first AGI created will try to find a way to kill itself.
the mostest money haver
This is actually their race, in an official capacity.
It’s incredibly surprising that neglecting infrastructure investments for a mere few decades would have such an effect.
Let’s be fair: no one ever warned that this could happen.
No one ever warned us that our energy needs have been climbing steadily for decades, and we need to stop being afraid of nuclear power? Really?
What rock have you been hiding under?
Nuclear and solar have competing problems. Nuclear is a baseload generator. It can’t ramp up or down fast enough to meet the daily demand curve; it needs a steady, stable load, 24/7. The steadier and stabler the load, the better. If the load drops off overnight, nuclear has to dial back its continuous output to match that trough. And again: It can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match demand, so it just has to stay at the lower “trough” level, with the remainder made up by various types of “peaker” plants.
To make nuclear as efficient at possible, we need to drive consumption to that trough. We have to increase overnight demand as high as possible, to minimize our reliance on inefficient peaker plants.
Now, look at solar. Solar stops generating overnight. Solar can’t possibly meet overnight demand without storage, and grid-scale storage solutions are fundamentally limited. To make solar as effective and efficient as possible, we have to move as much demand to daylight hours as possible, where it can be met directly by solar generation, without storage.
The two technologies require opposing demand incentives. Making one more efficient necessarily makes the other less. Whichever choice we make here, the other one is relegated to a limited, auxiliary role in generation, and can never reach its full potential.
The solution is to just spam solar panels. Solar power is getting so comically cheap, that this is the solution we’ll likely use. Have enough storage for overnight. Then spam so many solar panels that your grid can meet demand even on a cloudy day in winter. You have enough to meet demand at the lowest productivity point in the year. Then the rest of the year we have cheap hyper-abundant power.
Exactly. That is exactly what we need to do.
Then the rest of the year we have cheap hyper-abundant power.
Ideally, yes. But, what is actually happening is that near the summer solstice, generation rates aren’t “cheap”. They are negative. We are putting so much power on the grid that generation companies are paying for people to take it off during ideal generation conditions.
That is a big fucking problem. Negative rates mean we stop “spamming” solar panels long before we have enough to meet winter demand.
The solution to that problem is 3-season industries. Major industrial consumers that only operate from spring through autumn, soaking up the excess power, then going offline, shedding their excessive load for the winter.
Batteries, mass of batteries.
Not feasible.
It’s barely feasible to use pumped storage for solar to match the daily demand curve in some small areas. Grid scale storage cannot be feasibly scaled to serve our current overnight power needs. But the daily demand curve isn’t the problem.
The real problem is the seasonal variation.
For solar to be effective, it needs to be able to meet our winter demand with our winter sunlight. 9 hours of low-angle sunlight under largely overcast conditions. That means we need a lot of solar panels, to get sufficient power from these suboptimal conditions.
Now, take that same number of solar panels, and give them the 15 hours of high-angle sunlight under largely clear skies that we have during the summer. When we do this, we have so much power pushed on to the grid that the price of electricity actually goes negative. They literally have to pay people to take it.
There isn’t enough lithium in the world to make the batteries we would need to balance seasonal variation. There isn’t enough land on the planet to support pumped storage facilities that could balance seasonal variation.
We need demand shaping to make solar feasible as our primary energy source, which means driving our heaviest loads to daytime, away from the dark. (This is the exact opposite of what we need to do for nuclear, coal, and other baseload generation.)
We also need 3-season industries that can soak up excess production in spring, summer, and autumn, while going offline and shedding their loads during winter.
Part of my therapy is blocking sardonic people, you’re #4 for today!
You should go ahead and make me #5.
Gladly!
That should prevent future issues. If you’re trying to rid yourself of sardonic people, you really don’t need me fucking up your therapy.
Articles like this are being pushed by AI CEOs and investors to force the US public to pay for grid upgrades to support their profit making. Socialize costs, privatize profits.
If, like most Americans, you’ve noticed an increase in your electric rates in the last year it is in no small part due to the increased demand put on the system by AI data centers. You’re already paying more to prop this shit up because they’re chasing gains with no regard to efficiency.
To be fair though, pur grid is absolutely ass and held together by electrical tape and broken dreams. Because it turns out apending the 40 years gutting the public sector of everything useful and not doing proper maintainence left the US unable to adapt. I apend a lot of time in Lakewood Ohio, a trendy and high density suburb of Cleveland, and they have had weekly blackouts all year because First Energy (of corruption infamy) has refused to do the necessary upkeep.
Privatizing our utilities was a mistake
We need a word for the social lies that capitalism has existed on for so long
Capitalism is not efficient, in fact it is rent seeking and therefore inherently corrupt and wasteful
Capitalism isn’t the only answer, and it isn’t even the best current answer
The free market is not frictionless and omniscient, as it is assumed in ALL models, DECADES of market statistics prove this conclusively yet this is still a cornerstone of ALL arguments in favor of capitalism
Capitalism isn’t the single source that has lifted the most people out of poverty, that is food and healtcare CHARITY programs.
It is outdated, destructive, and benefits the most vicious and cruel narcissists more than anyone.
Yet 90% of you will defend it to the death, even here on lemmy
All while being the same asswipes gobbling up such an obscene amount of gdp that the public can’t possibly pay it.
Articles like this are being pushed by AI CEOs and investors to force the US public to pay for grid upgrades to support their profit making. Socialize costs, privatize profits.
Tone of article is more about the hopeless situation for US. It correctly highlights China’s humanist economics of abundance. The US, as the most corrupt country in the world, not only makes policy for insider trader benefits, but is also committed to climate terrorist interests, and climate terrorist only energy expansion.
In China, renewables are framed as a cornerstone of the economy because they make sense economically and strategically, not because they carry moral weight.
Even under Biden, war on Russia was designed to boost climate terrorism energy and capture of EU markets, including blatant sabotage of Nordstream, despite moral gesticulations supporting renewables.
To your point, every media guest, will tell us that it is a national security priority as great as nuclear weapons dominance to support the achievement of Skynet even if all electricity consumers other than trillionaire tech companies face triple electricity costs. If we are not made miserable through absolute pillage for oligarchs, then China will win, is the propaganda manipulation.
In truth, and best way to understand article, is that if you prioritize AI dominance over climate terrorism, then cheap Chinese energy (solar) and batteries is the path to quickly develop AI datacenters. Climate terrorism and consumer extortion profits is the greater priority of US policy, which infact dooms the US to lose at its Skynet utopia objective.
Wait, you’re serious?
Of all the fucking shit in the world to fight right now, you want to fight an article that would see our power grid upgraded?
Your priorities are wrong, objectively wrong.
Do you really think it’s going to get updated to benefit the regular people of the US when the motivation is to support the AI industry?
It doesn’t matter what the motivation is if the outcome benefits everyone involved.
We cannot stop AI companies from getting piles of investor cash to waste to use to bribe states to build their infrastructure to support them
But we will be there when the bubble bursts and all that new capacity isn’t needed
Or we become the most unbalanced dystopia imaginable by man, basically a 50/50 tossup at this point
“This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations”
Won’t anyone rid us off this troublesome democracy, so that tech companies may grow in peace ?
Won’t someone think of the tech bros?
You don’t need to change your political system to have sound energy policies.
Well, yes, we 100% do. But the above about shedding democracy was a joke. America needs to majorly reform our system. First and foremost by ending first past the post and the stranglehold of the two party system it enables.
And then we need to nationalize our basic infrastructure. Electricity and Fiber first.
The next time a bootlicker demands you present proof of the failings of capitalism, just point out what profit incentive does to a nation’s power grid
They won’t care or listen of course, but at least you can make others aware of their spurious arguments
America is out of the race as a technological leader, we have crippled our education on all levels for half a century, are a land of FAMOUSLY anti-intellectual citizens, and have offshored all off our RnD and manufacturing, ignored infrastructure collapse and elected a facts-optional government
And every single hammer blow over the last 50 years to our nation’s independence and capability was signed by repugnicunt hands all under the banner of patriotism and greatness
And we can’t even organize a protest to keep them from deporting American citizens with no due process.
I hope all of you Genocide Joe memers a terrible, lonely, and complicated rest of your lives
Ahhh yes, this is the meme lord’s fault. Who could forget the meme czar leading our nation into darkness under the promise of dankness.
GTFO… blaming some kids for a 50+ year failure of the political classes. Maybe the issue is, instead of blaming the politicians we all listen to them when they say its the [kids,boomers,libs,leftists,altright,conservatives,mexicans,europeans,russians,chinese] fault.
Pick a different scapegoat. Your argument sucks.
What a complicated way to ask me to block you, but okay!
Sorry your rainbow nationalist bootlicking isn’t turning out how you wanted . . . but to be fair, any cursory look at history would tell you that was gonna happen.
Every one of those hammer blows had massive support from the leadership of the Democratic Party which is still controlling the party.
The “genocide Joe memers” forcing the Democrats to be unrepentant capitalist mass murders who hate their own voter base:
Coal use isn’t cast as a sign of villainy, as it would be among some circles in the U.S. – it’s simply seen as outdated. This pragmatic framing, Fishman argued, allows policymakers to focus on efficiency and results rather than political battles.
There’s truly something for western politicians to learn from this
Also: China’s construction of new coal-power plants ‘reached 10-year high’ in 2024
It doesn’t seem like this “AI expert” knows a lot about anything. Perhaps he is too high on his own supply, getting all his knowledge from hallucinating chatbots.
Hmm that is alarming then. To be honest I didn’t read the complete article, which you linked, but on first glance paints a very different picture.
this is the most vapid post in a thread of vapid posts. Congrats
Their solar is reaching a 10 year high and there’s even talks about more nuclear reactors
That’s the advantage of government ownership of all land: Fuck the NIMBYs
You are acting like they are regressing
They aren’t, and their infrastructure that we spent 2 decades laughing about, ghost cities and 12 lane highways
They are poised for the greatest economic boom in human history, and WE could have had it if crony capitalism hadn’t shuffled 95% of all gains in the last 50 years to the pockets of the ultra wealthy
I don’t think the GOP is racing to build coal plants. They just use coal as a political tool to win votes. And when they win, the idiots that think Republicans are going to save their coal jobs get what they deserved.
That we should build more coal plants to ´win´ the AI race?
If we lose the AI race it is likely the end of us as a nation economically, so either we make more coal plants or collapse.
None of you really understand exponential growth, this is a fact of human biology.
This is all based on the assumption that AI will need exponential power.
It will not.
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AI is a bubble.
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Even if it isn’t, fab capacity is limited.
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The actual ‘AI’ market is racing to the bottom with smaller, task focused models.
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A bunch of reproduced papers (like bitnet, and sparsity schemes) that reduce power exponentially are just waiting for someone to try a larger test.
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They’re slowly getting less ‘dumbly implemented’ so they can actually reference real info for tasks.
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Alltogether… that means inference moves to smartphones and PCs.
This is just the finance crowd parroting Altman. Not that the US doesnt need a better energy grid like China, but the justification (AI scaling) is built on lies that aren’t going to happen.
But! Zuck said they recently saw AI able to work on tasks that involve improving the software that manages AI! He said that means we are not far from super intelligence!
the extrapolation these guys make without new paradigm’s in mind is evidence of a wall and bubble for me
The irony is Zuck shuttered the absolute best asset they have: the Llama team.
Over one experimental failure trying to copy Deepseek. Which, you know, is normal in research, but at the same time was a pretty conservative choice instead of trying a new paper.
Zuck’s a fickle coward who would say and do anything to hide his insecurity.
While AI (as it is currently done) is a bubble,
the article is still rather interesting. It discusses that China’s grid is superior because it has state backing, instead of being privately owned (and therefore short-sighted). Which is true, and America has a lesson to learn from that, if it wants to have a part of the future.
By the way, the same goes for public infrastructure and housing. The state should invest heavily in these and provide them efficiently as a community service long-term, instead of relying on private parties to take care of these needs.
This is exactly a post that reads fine but when you are in insider, it’s obvious it is almost all bullshit
The problem is most of you have very shallow takes on what is going on in AI right now
Artist theft isn’t even close to the worst problem we are facing yet 90% of the energy spent online is to protect some fucking furry sketcher’s income when we are facing an existential threat of social media profiling and dissident targeting
I mean, I’m a local AI evangelist and have made a living off it. The energy use of AI thing is total nonsense, as much as Lemmy doesn’t like to hear it.
I keep a 32B or 49B loaded pretty much all the time.
You are right about the theft vs social media thing too, even if you put it a little abrasively. Why people are so worked up in the face of machines like Facebook and Google is mind boggling.
…But AI is a freaking bubble, too.
Look at company valuations vs how shit isn’t working, and how much it costs.
Look around the ML research community. They all know Altman and his infinite scaling to AGI pitch is just a big fat tech bro lie. AI is going to move forward as a useful tool through making it smaller, smarter, more specialized and more efficient, but transformers LLMs with randomized sampling are not just going to turn into general artificial intelligence if enough investors thrown money at these closed off enterprises.
I can’t help but put everything abrasive, it’s genetic and medical and does not respond well to any treatment for long
I fully agree AI is a bubble, but in the way the Internet was a bubble in the late 90s: Too much enthusiasm with too little application in the moment but an upcoming kaiju style industry that no one really expects to blossom. Same thing applies to NFTs but it’ll take a decade before people really understand the programatic contract capabilities of actual NFTs (I’m not referring to pngs stored on someone else’s server), and I think it will take less than 4 years after the AI bubble pop for the really bad knock-on effects of social control start becoming public.
LLMs eventually will be the interface to stacked suites of expert trained relational nodes, not the actual horsepower doing the data transformation itself, and I feel that is what will be developed after the ‘AI chatbot is your friend’ hype dies down and the investors find the next big thing to ruin.
When our fascist government agents want to crack down on dissidents they will ask an LLM to go query the expert nodes and cross index a list of questionable sentiment posts in the last decade and produce a geoip’d list and real name for every user that doesn’t bow to dear leader and it will be done in a matter of minutes to a high degree of accuracy.
Every other concern, power, IP rights, censorship, all will pale to the chilling effect of the first fascist government with an unblinking eye in everyone’s pocket and house. Every one of you is bitching about money or business or investing when we are heading into a wealth disparity dystopia that will make all of our novels pale.
Which is why it’s so fucking frustrating that nowhere do I see people even slightly concerned about it, and whenever I mention it I get banned for an unrelated reason within hours.
Starting to think most of you are LLM bots specifically prompted to harass the fuck out of every post I ever make.
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China decided to end their dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
The USA decided to double down on oil.
While China has invested enormously in renewable energy, they have also invested enormously in fossil fuels.
Yeah, they are ramping up energy production as a whole.
Pretty smart on their part considering a ton of domestic but hard to mine coal
China has an eye for a future and are building for it
USA only cares about next quarter and how much they can fuck over everyone for
We are not a vibrant economy anymore, and it’s mainly the fault of the greedy financial elites
China decided to end their dependence on fossil fuels, and I decided to retire by age 45. Me and China are about equally close to achieving our goals.
They said “foreign” fossil fuels, not fossil fuels in general.
Either way, they don’t have the reserves to supply their own demand.
They do reach every five year plan they put in place, especially regarding energy where they’re even in advance. Wth are you talking about?
So they want us to foot the bill to upgrade our power grid, and then grind it to a fucking halt again in an effort to create better anime big-tiddy goth gf avatars and shitty electro music?
The lazy western capitalists being out-competed at their own game, you say?
Yeah, it’s crazy what you can do when you don’t have to pay people, and you can instantly stomp out all dissent.
Wait, I’m confused. Are you talking about China or the US here?
They’re just spouting propaganda, and is likely a forum slider account
The mods won’t ever do anything to, as usual
I’m not suggesting that China is some utopia - quite the opposite in a number of respects. But what I am arguing is that privileged classes and groups in the west have captured control of the wider narrative and tipped the scales to their benefit; we’ve ended up with financialised economies focusing on rent extraction which are stagnant and unable to support true innovation.
I wish we could stop using the word utopia, human nature means there will never be an ideal government
You are absolutely correct with the effect of the financial elite’s greed on general quality of life for everyone, even the rich.
Right now the greed and hoarding of the billionaire class has stifled any developments of new luxuries they could lord over the rest of us till it became affordable.
What I mean is that if 50 years of terrible governmental and business choices didn’t cripple and drain our space program, I GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE the ultra rich would ALREADY have space condos and private transport no more complicated than a jet flight to the most exclusive place in human existence
But NooOOooOOo They want to stifle creativity and innovation and crush the engineers and scientists that would have made the way for that future all so their numbers are bigger
but they have less cool shit to spend those big numbers on, and those big numbers don’t mean nearly as much as they used to
All because the greediest sonosofbitches in the entire history of humanity are given the right to do whatever they want because wealth buys freedom from consequences of all natures
Burn it all the fuck down, they will never let us survive otherwise
Crazy we have that too and we’re still losing
Yeah Americans are doing that a lot right now
On the other hand, being a construction worker in China is a career that you can buy a family house on
I’d like to see you try that in the Land of the Fee and the Home of the Paid
Not lazy, greedy
Capitalist greed has crippled our ability to do anything but advertise and sue
Too expesinve to build anything because of inflation, collapsing transport supply chains, and middle and upper management bonuses and payoffs to the board members
So we’re just gonna rot and collapse as China rockets by us in relevance and wealth
I’d say it’s been a good run, but for most of us we NEVER saw the economic benefit of the 80s boom
Who’d have thought that not letting your infrastructure rot would put one in a better position to do infrastructure stuff? Not us, because planning ahead is for poors and commies
A bad joke I recall from middle school was “there’s always an Asian smarter than you” but I think there was something telling about kids thinking that. Clearly, there is some noticeable difference at the very least when comparing to the US. The US takes pride in mediocre scores while maintaining a very broken education system. I guess in that regard, perhaps their average scoring is a miracle in of itself. That doesn’t mean the rest of the world can’t do better but neither does it mean there aren’t dumb people everywhere. Also not trying to justify the very immoral education culture other countries have (which can lead to self harm) but just saying, it’s maybe obvious to see gaps when looking at the US in particular.
China values actual technical skills and knowledge. The US values talentless hacks who exploit the labor of those that actually have technical skills and knowledge.
There are two parallel and mostly separate school systems in the U.S., public and private
The U.S. public education system is designed to make efficient worker drones
The private education system in the U.S. is so good other highly educated countries send their princes and children of billionaires
Repugnicunts have spent half a century crippling public education while donutcrats waved their fingers and said ‘naughty naughty, don’t do that guise’
Part of that strategy is funneling public school funds and services to private schools, from the children of the populace to the children of the elites
And none of you care, none of you ever bother voting on a local level, the proof is we are here now.
It’s not going to get better and pointing out repugnican hypocrisy only makes them happy that you are powerless to stop them.
No worries. AI will figure out a way out of our energy mess by consuming Immense amounts of ener… WAIT…
I think Trump open war against them helps, I mean, if you cut them our of critical supply, you push them to develop their own, they’re not stupid.
China has been ramping up building of coal power plants, many of which are operating at 50% capacity: https://lemmy.ca/post/49779092
coal and NG electricity production declined in 2024. Building new coal plants doesn’t mean using them. Another 1tw of solar this year will reduce this further.
That’s right - that’s what the article is pointing out, and what my comment was pointing out: that despite usage of 50% capacity on current coal plants they are still building more. They are building capacity for the long term - for AI data centers which are giant power consumers. Power generation and transmission capacity can’t be built over night. That’s where top-down planning comes in.
China builds coal plants for resilience, and national security. Its possible assholes will cut off their NG supplies, and Hydro is not guaranteed every year. Still, at 1TW new solar per year (10000 coal turbines equivalent), that capacity rate will keep going down. It does mean that China has no power constraints for AI/datacenters, and then no constraints on more solar or chip manufacturing.
