You’re not really correct with that statement.

Most large farms produce almost no local benefit. They don’t buy supplies locally, or sell the product locally, and these days they don’t employ that many people either.

Datacenters are not empty, they still employ people after being built.

So does every city, suburb, town, factory, mine, processing plant, farm, etc.

That’s hardly a datacenter specific issue.

Capacity = capability. It allows them to build better models and run inference.

Other than openai and anthropic, all of the other top models right now are Chinese. That’s just the ones we know about too.

The US datacenters aren’t going to be selling capacity to the Chinese government and military.

I do not understand people who think everything that is happening in international politics is all at the surface level.

This type of action is one of the modern evolutions of war. China absolutely wants dominance in AI, they know how powerful a tool/weapon it can be. They will happily fund propaganda in other countries to improve their odds of winning the race.

Their infrastructure investments into other countries that give them leverage over resources, propping up Russia against Ukraine, hosting North Korean cyber espionage groups, threatening Taiwan, buying up companies, international real estate. The list goes on and on.

China has it’s fingers in everything. They want to become THE world superpower. They know they can’t fight their way to the top with military might anytime in the near future, so they’re investing in damaging the capabilities of western countries and propping up their own influence.

They’re actually doing a pretty good job of it too.

I’m sure the western countries are trying to do the same to China, but it’s hard to influence the Chinese population directly when China locked down most of the communications channels internally. They aren’t stupid.

Your example is bad.

I never said AI was good, though it is, I’m saying your argument against it is weak because you’re ignoring far worse problems to protest something that’s pretty minor in the scheme of things.

I’m calling you out for being a hypocrite and illogical.

If you were protesting all of the things that use too much water AND datacenters, I’d be okay with your argument. That’s just not what any of these protests are, because otherwise we’d see water use protests at beef farms and almond farms… and I don’t remember that happening anytime recently.

Almonds and Beef are just two examples of massive water uses that make the datacenters look like they’re trying to drink the ocean with a straw.

This is exactly my point, people aren’t using their brains with their anti-AI arguments. They’re very emotional responses rather than actual problems.

I love that you’re saying they’re worthless, and at the same time the ruling class is using them effectively to do something.

It’s a great argument.

Global beef production used approximately 264 trillion gallons. Quite literally 1000x more water.

For a single type of food.

Water for irrigation of peoples lawns is just under 3 trillion liters a year in the US, about 10x as much.

Where are the protests against that?

Nowhere, because people are sheep and can’t use their critical thinking skills.

This is like watching people yell at their kids to turn off the light in their room(which is an led) while leaving the AC running at home while they run out to the grocery store 10 miles away in a 7 seat SUV.

Missing the forest for the trees. The lot of you.

So we’re okay with massive pollution as long as it employs people and tastes good?

The water use from global Beef production is on the order of 10 million times more than global datacenters, and yet people screaming bloody murder about the water usage for the data centers.

The noise from traffic down the road you live on is far worse for you than any sort of datacenter, and yet we’re okay with that. Infrasound weapons? That’s the same bullshit people said about Wind Turbines and there’s no scientific proof that any of that is valid at all.

Let’s be realistic about why people hate data centers, those are just excuses, people are afraid they’re going to get fired/laid off if it gets better established. That’s a realistic worry, and totally valid. Preventing a few data centers won’t stop that though.

“had asked ChatGPT what would happen if a human body was put in a garbage bag and thrown in a dumpster, days before they went missing.”

Answering that question isn’t a crime, nor is it actively helping them commit a crime.

There are legitimate reasons to ask that question that have nothing to do with committing a crime.

I have asked Google, and AI agents, many questions which if taken in the worst way would constitute a crime but I was doing so just to debate a topic, or look up a law. I know other people do it for writing. Some might do it to look up =criminal cases that they have seen reported in the news.

That applies equally to everything I said.

If they’re suing OpenAI, they should have already sued and won against the internet service provider, the computer manufacturer, Microsoft/Apple for the software, etc.

Or the gun companies.

Yet all of these companies have a free pass to facilitate crimes. Why should OpenAI be held to a higher standard than the rest of them? This is pure political theater.

You know what also allowed the Gunman to find information, ask questions about shootings, and shoot people?

The internet. Computers/Cellphones. Other Human Beings.

I get that people are looking for reasons to bash AI, because it’s scary as fuck. However people step back and realize how bad some of the other technologies that we have are. There were mass shootings started long before ChatGPT became a thing.

Oh, and guns. We invented guns. That was a bad idea.

I use openrouter for my of my paid online calls, when setting up API keys you get to set a budget. Easy. It’s also pre-paid so unless I turn on auto-charge for my credit card (which is off by default) it will never blow more than I’ve already loaded. Two layers of safety are better than one.

Isn’t there a saying for this? If you owe a bank $10,000, it’s your problem. If you owe a bank $100 million, it’s their problem.

I’m running Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (the MoE model) on an 8GB Vram Nvidia GPU with 32 GB of ram, with tweaking (and Turboquant) I’ve got it up to 30-40 Tokens per second and a 260k Context. It’s very usable. I’ve seen people report success with Dual 3060 Cards, but you’re still talking $1000-1500 for that kind of setup even if you have parts of it already.

A medicine dispenser application for a nurse is still just CRUD operations for the most part. There’s nothing innovative about how the code would be written in an application like that.

You’re both correct, and also wrong.

A lot of code already exists. Or at least in a close enough form that it can be easily adjusted to address a new situation.

When someone comes up with an idea for a new App at this point, it’s almost never because it’s an entirely new branch of computing. It’s very likely just CRUD with a visual design, and then a small more complex algorithm to mix the data around behind the scenes.

What’s the difference between a dating app and an automatic meal plan builder? The algorithm doesn’t care about whether or not the recipe swiped back when it matches it up to you.

You’re right that they’re not going to be inventing entirely new things most of the time, that’s just not what’s needed of them most of the time.

They are making money, don’t confuse a lack of profit because of reinvest for failure. Amazon “lost” money for almost a decade.

Not every company needs to succeed either. Plenty of dead companies from the dot com bubble bursting, yet digital companies are more profitable than ever.

You clearly didn’t read the data. It wouldn’t matter if google was using 10x more. The difference between billions and quadrillions is literally a million times.