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François Chollet x.com
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc. So I would not "declare AGI" until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention -- conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc.
The subjects this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the word it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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21 September
20 September
19 September
18 September
17 September
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korrents.com
Failed U.S. attempts to secure its preferred outcomes in the Persian Gulf will keep energy prices elevated.Their words
So it does not seem as though U.S. preferences in the Persian Gulf will be achieved - which means prices in general and energy prices in particular are likely to stay high.
16 September
15 September
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korrents.com
Solar power's exponential growth will continue until all other energy sources are far below 0.1%.Their words
The solar power exponential will continue until all other energy sources are <<0.1%
14 September
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Their words
Now if they get scared of AGI, they'll slow down their own models.
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AI data centers resulting in lower electricity prices for consumers
13 September
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Their words
The best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
12 September
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This is the first time a debate over whether a model ‘was AGI’ felt non-silly. I do not think it is AGI, and I would warn against the dangers of using that label prematurely, but I would not laugh at you for disagreeing.
11 September
10 September
9 September
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Their words
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).
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Their words
data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence.
8 September
7 September
From one piece @fchollet on X 2 beliefs · x.com
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Their words
So I would not "declare AGI" until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention -- conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc.
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korrents.com
The case for building AGI has always been framed around invention, such as curing cancer or solving fusion energy.Their words
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.
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korrents.com
Scaling up clean energy is more effective when it is paired with retiring fossil fuel infrastructure.Their words
Building clean energy is much more likely, and much more effective, if we're also shutting down dirty energy.
6 September
5 September
4 September
3 September
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korrents.com
AGI is not a finish line to be crossed but a smear with width, and we are already standing on it.Their words
some bits of AI are way across the finish line, some bits are like maybe in the middle of it. Who knew the line had dimension? The finish line is actually this sort of smear. And I think the best answer you can give is like we're on the smear.
From one piece Why you won’t get a flying car 2 beliefs · noahpinion.blog
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Their words
It’s a simple truth that if you want your economy to escape poverty, you need lots of energy consumption
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korrents.com
Solar power combined with batteries has surpassed nuclear power as the superior energy technology for most uses.Their words
Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable.
2 September
1 September
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Yet each time, we drastically overreacted, letting ourselves get swept up in a climate of fear after one emotionally vivid incident
From one piece Two Men 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Switching to sustainable energy is the one effective, scalable tool available to prevent catastrophic climate change.Their words
"Just switching to sustainable energy" is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that
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Their words
Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone a hundred times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need.
31 August
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korrents.com
Desalination for drinking and household water is cheap and uses less energy than commonly assumed.Their words
Supplying drinking and household water through desalination is really quite cheap, and uses far less energy than I’d have guessed.
30 August
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Their words
Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them. Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.
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But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.
28 August
26 August
25 August
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Their words
This is a computer system made for pros, and I mean that in the sense of professional computer lovers. People who are willing to invest time and energy into learning how their system works, and reap the benefits that come from that investment.
24 August
From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Planning a day or a week in advance works because it pays the brain's decision cost once rather than dozens of times.Their words
Every decision has a cost in terms as we've seen the brain having to put in invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that.
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Their words
It's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
21 August
20 August
18 August
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korrents.com
Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirsTheir words
I think Britain has a real problem with building almost anything, from train lines to houses, and reservoirs to energy infrastructure.
The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com
17 August
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korrents.com
The large-scale AI compute buildout may turn out to be a temporary phase rather than a permanent necessity.Their words
The supercomputer inside our own skull runs on about 25 watts, which hints that the minimum energy needed for intelligence might be small - and that the giant, controversial AI compute centers we're building now may turn out to be a temporary blip rather than a permanent feature.
15 August
From one piece How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
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energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price, right? So if you can reduce the price, you increase the demand.
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But the problem of nuclear today is like the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like we don't want to make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. Um and actually that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right?
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Energy is the fundamental input to uh the quality of human life. U if you look backward into time and say how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next, it's always unlocked by cheaper energy, right?
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korrents.com
Once AI and robotics do the manufacturing, the price of any object becomes the price of the energy used to make it.Their words
If you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-aututonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.
14 August
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korrents.com
Superintelligence bottoms out in mining, because both the chips and the energy it runs on come out of the ground.Their words
Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?
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But um I think the whole point of that project and the graphics was it isn't really just about a grid of pixels. It's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything.
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korrents.com
Renewable energy offset schemes share the same fundamental flaw as carbon offsets in general.Their words
This renewable energy offsetting suffers from the same fundamental problem as all offsets.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Energy Transitions in Regulated MarketsTheir words
Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets
12 August
From one piece AI’s climate problem is worse than we thought 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
they found that Big Oil's use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI's data centers.
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Their words
AI had to help renewable energy four to five times more than fossil fuels just for emissions to break even.
11 August
10 August
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korrents.com
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least.Their words
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
5 August
From one piece The real energy use of agentic AI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This is the Jevons paradox in action: making compute cheaper per token in turn tends to lead to greater levels of AI use.
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Which is why the lever that actually matters most is the carbon intensity of the electricity.
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Their words
Unlike aviation, this is an end-use we already know how to decarbonize.
31 July
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Yeah, I mean it's a little different, but I think uh you're going to see more and more uh uh high performance and um low energy uh inference hardware systems because I think everyone is now realizing that inference is the key to making you know these agent-based systems be available to more and more people and that latency is really important and that specialization of the hardware is a really key way you can make uh things that are more energy efficient and lower latency than more general purpose uh computational devices like say GPUs or TPUs
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korrents.com
Batching exists only because moving data costs about a thousand times more energy than computing on it.Their words
Um because if you didn't have that thousandx difference then you know you wouldn't have to do batching but you have to do batching of you know many examples or maybe many tokens at once in order to amortize that data movement
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korrents.com
The numbers an AI engineer should know by heart are memory bandwidths and the energy cost of a single operation.Their words
Yeah, I mean I think if you looked at what is important in AI systems these days, you would want to know things like the bandwidth between you know your main memory system on your accelerator to the onchip memory to the um you know the multiplier unit or whatever. You want to know how much energy does it take to do a single multiplier operation.
29 July
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Their words
but I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.
28 July
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Their words
I've never seen any commodity quite like this one but it seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.
27 July
26 July
21 July
20 July
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Their words
And what they found is there's kind of this um bell-shaped curve between energy availability and brain volume. And in general, brain volume, right, the more the better, right, we think. And so if you're chronically calorically restricted, your brain is smaller um because you just don't have the resources to invest in, you know, the structure um and to maintain it. At the other end, you see the same thing. So if you're chronically in a chronic state of chloric excess, you also tend to have a smaller brain on average.
15 July
11 July
9 July
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Their words
I think of it like this: any person has an innate curiosity about life, and an energy toward it, that may manifest itself in all kinds of ways throughout the course of their life.
8 July
7 July
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Their words
Several companies have tried to declare they met a major milestone by having "nobody behind the wheel" and moving supervision to the passenger seat. It's a bad idea
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Without a move away from fossil fuels, future heatwaves will keep testing the limits of public health systems and more people will die.
1 July
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It is actually pretty likely that it was Google's efficiency actions that enabled their total energy consumption to increase.
30 June
From one piece Saving the world from bad ideas: the continuing failure of food ecomodernism 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy
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korrents.com
"Food from thin air" is not from thin air: it runs on water, minerals, ammonia and industrial plant.Their words
Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
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Their words
but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input.
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Their words
Agriculture is the only major sector that at present is significantly energised directly by zero cost and zero carbon sunlight.
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Their words
a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.
29 June
24 June
21 June
From one piece How to breathe air when we’re drowning in big tech’s slop 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Generative AI systems have no built-in drive toward truth and accuracy, unlike people or institutions.Their words
Generative AI has no internal, designed momentum towards truth and accuracy (beyond the absurdly diminishing returns of energy-hungry multi-layered LLMs), but a person or an institution can (and should).
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korrents.com
Genuinely valuing truth, honesty and climate action logically entails opposing generative AI.Their words
Being pro-correctness, anti-theft and anti-fossil fuels automatically places you in an aggressively anti-generative-AI position.
18 June
11 June
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Their words
I think there's a 25% chance of AGI by 2027, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045.
9 June
4 June
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Their words
I would prioritize trying to index, but just given how fast AI could, you know, hit the world. But, um I definitely wouldn't just rely on that because like it could the the sort of um messy middle type cases or the just a long timelines cases on which like you we don't get it anything like AGI all that soon.
From one piece The better AI gets, the smaller its share of the economy might get – Alex Imas and Phil Trammell 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
because a lot with electricity, a lot of the downstream benefits actually came to like the users of the electricity rather than the rather than the actual entity producing the electricity. On the other hand, with social media, it was the opposite case, right? Social media, you know, it was everywhere. Everybody uses social media, but the rents went to the platform.
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Their words
So, I think there is a world where it is concentrated, in which case it's going to be really hard to index AGI. There is another world where it is not It's electricity, then like basically every company has access to AGI. So, you just buy you use buy the index. So, like, you know, Nigeria just needs to buy the index.
3 June
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Their words
we went from infrastructure is code to infrastructure is data and infrastructure is code is like if this do that um bring in this module for loops all this stuff and Kubernetes is like no no no you have to specify exactly the containers you want how much memory that they need and then we have the status field to tell you if they were running or not
29 May
27 May
From one piece BloombergNEF: The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The Gulf conflict and closure of the Strait of Hormuz will accelerate the global shift away from fossil fuelsTheir words
What the current conflict in the Gulf - in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - is going to do is to provide a further push to global attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
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Their words
We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 - a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030.
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Their words
the joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.
21 May
5 May
30 April
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korrents.com
Data centres will become the majority driver of electricity demand growth in Australia's National Electricity Market.Their words
Even if a small fraction of this pipeline ends up operational, data centres will drive far more than 50% of demand growth in the NEM.
21 April
16 April
15 April
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Their words
Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.
14 April
13 April
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Their words
Backlash is also the inevitable consequence of AGI-pilling the nation.
7 April
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What I see now is, well, "I'm a a programmer and I've got six agents. So, really I'm managing a team." No, you're not. You're using six tools at once, which is fine. But, it's that's very different than having a conversation with somebody who believes things that are a little different than what you believe.
6 April
From one piece The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Today’s best AI systems are good enough that they’re now inside the fuzzy conceptual cloud of “AGI-ish”: that is, they’ve surpassed some people’s definitions of AGI, while falling well short of others’.
The term “AGI” is almost useless at this pointhelentoner.substack.com
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Their words
This makes it likely that there could be big gaps between when different definitions of AGI are fulfilled.
The term “AGI” is almost useless at this pointhelentoner.substack.com
24 March
23 March
From one piece Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Asked when an AI could build a billion-dollar business on its own: AGI has already arrived.Their words
I think it's now. I think we've achieved AGI.
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Their words
Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.
22 March
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Their words
We may have a handful of genies, but that's different from having a handful of friends, right? In part because the energy's different, the conversations are different. Also, they just agree with us constantly.
21 March
19 March
17 March
13 March
From one piece Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
You do not have to believe in AGI to believe in the timelines on which the United States wins the semiconductor race.Their words
But I don't know like I don't know what fast timelines means, right? Like I I like don't think you have to believe in AGI to have the timelines where the US wins.
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Their words
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
5 March
17 February
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Their words
Both estimates make me think that the concern about global energy demand for LLMs is over-blown.
13 February
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but it's not an infinitely compelling product, and I don't think even AGI or powerful AI or country of geniuses in a data center will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough maybe to get three or five or 10x a year growth even when you're in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is extremely hard to do and has never been done in history before, but not infinitely fast.
9 February
From one piece Do subsidies make meat much cheaper? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Simply making fossil fuels more expensive without having affordable alternatives just makes energy more expensive, which hits the poorest hardest.
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
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Their words
Again, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
1 February
23 December 2025
12 December 2025
9 December 2025
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korrents.com
Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.Their words
The rapid drop in renewable energy costs in the last decade (alongside huge improvements in battery technologies) has started to break this deadlock.
8 December 2025
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Their words, before
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
From one piece Energy Predictions 2025 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
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Their words
Storing electricity for months is economically difficult, but storing heat is easy.
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Their words
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
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Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
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Their words
By 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
1 December 2025
27 November 2025
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korrents.com
Widespread AI-driven performance tuning agents will meaningfully reduce global energy waste.Their words
In future there will be AI performance agents that can be run on everything, helping to save the planet by reducing energy usage.
25 November 2025
From one piece Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A human being, a human being lacks a huge amount of knowledge. Instead, we rely on continual learning. We rely on continual learning.
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korrents.com
The whole problem of AI and AGI is the power, and nothing else about it is the problem.Their words
Indeed, the whole problem, what is the problem of AI and AGI? The whole problem is the power. The whole problem is the power. When the power is really big, what's going to happen?
17 November 2025
16 November 2025
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Their words
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
30 October 2025
26 October 2025
From one piece The Rise of Renewable Energy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
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korrents.com
Renewables now account for the bulk of the growth in electricity generation, whatever their opponents believe.Their words
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
17 October 2025
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korrents.com
Quietly dropping physical work from the definition of AGI is a major concession, not a clarification.Their words
Now, number one, the first concession that people make all the time is they just take out all the physical stuff because we're just talking about digital knowledge work. I feel like that's a pretty major concession compared to the original definition which was like any task a human can do.
13 October 2025
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Their words
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
10 October 2025
From one piece Data centers & electricity - part 1: as of 2025 they haven't raised national prices 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
That data centres have not raised national electricity prices so far is no promise that they never will.Their words
This is not to say that data centers won’t affect national prices in the future.
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korrents.com
The American states with the fastest electricity load growth saw prices fall rather than rise.Their words
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
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inflationdata centersenergyAmerica
Their words
This is the first conclusion of my deep dive: Data centers have (so far) not affected national average household electricity bills.
5 October 2025
From one piece Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern how sticky is your product and it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit.
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Their words
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
19 September 2025
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korrents.com
LSD is not a truth drug and never could be — it takes you toward your own truth, not out of it.Their words
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.
18 September 2025
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Their words
no one carries the full legitimacy inside of a company. Legitimacy is a currency in a companies. No one carries the full legitimacy in a company, even the CEO. The CEO just has a lot of input on the plan. The plan carries the legitimacy.
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Their words
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
17 September 2025
15 September 2025
10 September 2025
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Their words
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
6 September 2025
18 August 2025
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Their words
I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.
7 August 2025
30 July 2025
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Their words, before
This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.
Their words now
It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.
23 July 2025
From one piece Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games | Lex Fridman Podcast #475 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And maybe also make the system available to a few hundred of the world's top experts, the Terence Taos of each subject area and give them a month or two and see if they can find an obvious flaw in the system. And if they can't, then I think you can be pretty confident we have a fully general system.
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korrents.com
Information is the most fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy or matter.Their words
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
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korrents.com
The last steps to AGI should be taken by a CERN-style international research project, not a Manhattan Project.Their words
I hope we'll end up with something more collaborative if needed, more like a CERN project where it's research-focused and the best minds in the world come together to carefully complete the final steps and make sure it's responsibly done before deploying it to the world.
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korrents.com
Scaling what we already have, with no further breakthroughs, will be enough to reach AGI.Their words
And so we don't know, I would say it's kind of 50/50 whether new things are needed or whether the scaling the existing stuff is going to be enough.
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Their words
I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.
16 June 2025
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Their words
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
15 June 2025
10 June 2025
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korrents.com
A true artificial general intelligence cannot exist without being recognized as a moral subject.Their words
It follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.
7 June 2025
From one piece A knockout blow for LLMs? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The vision of AGI I have always had is one that combines the strengths of humans with the strength of machines, overcoming the weaknesses of humans.
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Their words
What the Apple paper shows, most fundamentally, regardless of how you define AGI, is that LLMs are no substitute for good well-specified conventional algorithms.
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korrents.com
Anyone who thinks large language models are a direct route to transformative AGI is kidding themselves.Their words
But anybody who thinks LLMs are a direct route to the sort AGI that could fundamentally transform society for the good is kidding themselves.
5 June 2025
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Their words
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
19 May 2025
From one piece Lessons from Spain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's all part of the political culture wars where everything gets weaponised to push an agenda, score points against opponents or curry favour.
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korrents.com
The failure of wind or solar power to show up has never been the primary cause of a major grid blackout.Their words
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
12 May 2025
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Their words
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
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korrents.com
Carbon capture and storage cannot be economically competitive without a policy that prices carbon.Their words
CCS can never be competitive in the sense of working economically in the absence of a policy framework to price in the cost of carbon, unlike clean electricity.
Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com
8 May 2025
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Their words
The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.
5 May 2025
From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The hardest step on the road from chemistry to us was multicellularity, and it was strictly a problem of energetics.Their words
I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.
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Their words
And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.
23 April 2025
21 April 2025
From one piece Programming Notes 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there is no such thing as a high-income, low-electricity economy.
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korrents.com
Electrification is a process shift across industries, not just a change in energy source.Their words
Electrification is not just a change of energetic inputs; it's a process shift through and across industries.
6 April 2025
From one piece America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.
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Their words
Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat.
1 April 2025
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Their words
Dismissing discussion of AGI, human-level AI, transformative AI, superintelligence, etc. as “science fiction” should be seen as a sign of total unseriousness.
31 March 2025
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Their words
But, tariffs are unavoidable, even within the ringfence that is US energy trade, and even within electricity trade more specifically.
22 March 2025
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korrents.com
A strong track record in a technical field is only weak evidence that someone has good strategic judgment about AGI.Their words
Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes about AGI, but it's weak evidence.
9 February 2025
3 February 2025
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And for that reason, there's physical constraints to things like AGI, like recursive improvement to kill us all type stuff. For the physical reasons and for how humans have figured things out before, I'm not too worried about AI takeover.
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Their words
I think my personal definition of AGI is much simpler. I think language models are a form of AGI and all of this super powerful stuff is a next step that's great if we get these tools. But a language model has so much value in so many domains that it's a general intelligence to me.
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The important thing about, hey, is cost a limiting factor here? My view is that we'll have really awesome intelligence, like AGI, before we have it permeate throughout the economy.
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Their words
So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.
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Their words
There's this very good quote from Sam Altman who... He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that's the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right?
2 February 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Who We Are and How We Got HereTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Selfish GeneTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Albion's SeedTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Stalin's WarTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Fourth TurningTheir words
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
20 January 2025
From one piece The Inaugural Address 2 beliefs · whitehouse.gov
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korrents.com
The inflation of the early 2020s was caused by government overspending and rising energy prices.Their words
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
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Their words
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
31 December 2024
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korrents.com
Reading fiction is necessary to an engineer's creative capacity; reading only technical books drains itTheir words
Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than grant it, as fiction does.
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Their words
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
22 December 2024
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Their words
There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all.
17 December 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The New MapTheir words
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin explores the changing landscape of energy, geopolitics, & climate change.
27 September 2024
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Their words
Each shift takes its toll, and everyone has a limit of how much energy they’re willing to expend on a new platform that will eventually, like its predecessors, join the graveyard of defunct websites.
13 June 2024
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Their words
I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.
10 June 2024
From one piece How to Build an AI Data Center 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
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korrents.com
Available power, not land or capital, is what now limits how many data centres get built.Their words
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
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Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.
2 June 2024
29 May 2024
25 April 2024
22 April 2024
From one piece Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.
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Their words
I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier.
18 April 2024
From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The optimal scenario is typically when the generators supply 1% of yearly electricity (shown below).
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
2 April 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Little House on the PrairieTheir words
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Harry PotterTheir words
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
18 March 2024
From one piece Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it’s very poorly formed, and that people use extremely different definitions for what AGI is. So I think it makes more sense to talk about when we’ll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z, rather than when we fuzzily cross this one mile marker.
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Their words
In this case, and I think one of the things with our structure that we maybe should have thought about more than we did is that the board of a nonprofit has, unless you put other rules in place, quite a lot of power. They don’t really answer to anyone but themselves. And there’s ways in which that’s good, but what we’d really like is for the board of OpenAI to answer to the world as a whole, as much as that’s a practical thing.
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Their words
The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. The world should… Well, not should. I expect that to be the case.
+ 1 more
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Their words
I continue to not want super-voting control over OpenAI. I never have. Never have had it, never wanted it. Even after all this craziness, I still don’t want it. I continue to think that no company should be making these decisions, and that we really need governments to put rules of the road in place.
4 March 2024
From one piece Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And each major accident, that means global freeze on the nuclear reactor production for at least another 10 years. So that’s what I mean that nuclear industry is politic, not just in terms of technology and not just in terms of radiation, impact on health, but also politically a very, very unreliable option.
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Their words
And then guess what? A few years later, the Soviet Union collapses very much also thanks to the mobilization of people over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy.
22 February 2024
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
JamesTheir words
Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.
6 February 2024
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korrents.com
Most projects fail before they even begin because the activation energy required to start is too high.Their words
Most projects fail before they start. They fail because the activation energy is too high.
14 December 2023
From one piece Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.
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Their words
So if I generalize what you're asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
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Their words
I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
3 December 2023
From one piece Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events | Lex Fridman Podcast #403 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
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korrents.com
Physicists actively want the standard model to break down, because only the deviations can tell us what underlies it.Their words
One of the things we do as physicists is we actually want it to break down at some level, we’re looking for the precision measurement or the energy or whatever it will take where the standard model is no longer working. Not that it’s not working approximately, but we’re looking for the deviations.
27 November 2023
9 November 2023
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Their words
So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity, one third transport, one third heating. And so in order for everything to go sustainable, to go electric, you need to triple electricity output.
25 October 2023
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Their words
The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age did not fail because it lacked energy sources.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coalageofinvention.xyz
1 September 2023
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Their words
What we don't want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology. What we don't want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to happen with bio-based materials.
3 July 2023
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korrents.com
Vertical farming swaps a land problem for an energy problem, and the energy cost is what stops it feeding the world.Their words
I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.
The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettucemichaelgrunwald.substack.com
29 June 2023
From one piece George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.
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korrents.com
Survival can be guaranteed without a universal basic income, by making housing, food and above all energy dirt cheap.Their words
You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy.
6 June 2023
From one piece A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solution 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
an acre of solar panels generates as much energy as 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol.
A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
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korrents.com
Land is good at growing food and storing carbon and bad at growing energy, and we have better ways to grow energy.Their words
Land is really good at growing food and storing carbon, but it sucks at growing energy—and fortunately, we have better ways to grow energy.
A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
11 May 2023
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Their words
Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.
Why Battery Powered Cargo Ships are Compellingaustinvernon.site
28 November 2022
27 September 2022
19 September 2022
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Their words
Drag and tire friction dominate energy expenditure. Engineering effort to improve drag is worth so much more with electric vehicles.
7 September 2022
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Their words
But the thing is, you can’t have this if you don’t have an oxygenated planet because it’s all, in the end, it’s about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat? And if you don’t have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you’ve got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out.
8 July 2022
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Their words
The drone-like architecture of the multicopters is simple, but as the rotors are responsible for keeping the unit at a constant altitude with hover power, they represent an energy-intensive version of VTOLs. Their range is, therefore, short, typically less than 20 miles.
10 June 2022
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korrents.com
There is no written plan for surviving AGI, and a world that was going to survive would have had one decades ago.Their words
Surviving worlds, by this point, and in fact several decades earlier, have a plan for how to survive.
6 June 2022
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
How the World Really WorksTheir words
But I highly recommend reading him on the subject because he is so good at explaining how the world’s energy systems work today.
28 January 2022
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Their words
the electric technology used for cars only has to beat energy hogs that are below 10% in efficiency, our everyday car. But to qualify for aircraft use, the technology has to equal or beat what is used today, which is at the 30% to 40% efficiency level using modern turboprop or turbofan engines.
3 January 2022
1 December 2021
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
A Random Walk Down Wall StreetTheir words
A fine intro to investing if you think you can reliably beat the market or that active trading is a good use of energy. If you're already bought in on index funds though, you won't find much here.
19 June 2021
1 February 2021
From one piece Does energy imbalance (calories in > out) cause obesity? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Common obesity is not caused by a slow metabolism: people with obesity burn more energy, not less.Their words
This tells us that common obesity is not the result of a reduced metabolic rate– a common but erroneous belief.
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korrents.com
The brain, not insulin or fat tissue, is what ultimately controls the energy balance equation.Their words
However, whichever side of the energy balance equation is giving orders, the brain appears to be the commander-in-chief of the equation as a whole.
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Their words
No matter what your model of obesity is, in order to explain the development of an obese body, energy imbalance has to be a link in the model’s causal chain.
29 September 2020
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korrents.com
The tech industry's economic and intellectual energy is directed away from human flourishing rather than toward itTheir words
The economic and intellectual horsepower in Silicon Valley and the wider tech world seems to be pointed away from these goals.
17 July 2020
14 May 2020
From one piece Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) 3 beliefs · rameznaam.com
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korrents.com
Demand for electricity will rise to absorb far more solar than is currently considered feasible.Their words
Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
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korrents.com
Average solar electricity prices in sunny parts of the world will fall to one or two cents per kwh by 2030 or 2035.Their words
This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.
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Their words
The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
2 April 2019
19 September 2018
10 September 2018
5 January 2018
1 May 1977
1 October 1975
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
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