I can’t imagine what the UCP did to secure this, if anything. If they did do something, what sort of corporate welfare are they advancing to have this in Alberta
I’d argue we’ve never seen the need for computing power drop. Unless you get biological hardware I don’t see the world hitting a limit for demand. But most of the insides of data centers get upgraded over time to expand computing power to latest tech.
Sounds like a dumb thing to subsidize as it creates nothing but remote construction jobs and you’d be better off pipelining the gas to an area with lower construction costs.
We only saw this massive increase because of LLM's. No one has proven increasing LLM compute leads to eventual AGI, so there is no reason to believe this isn't a technology dead end, either. Amusingly, an hour after I posted that, this came up in my feed:
Quote:
Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete.
Quote:
Reports of its performance follow a flurry of results since 2021 that suggest we are only about five years away from quantum computing becoming powerful enough to start transforming humankind’s capabilities to research and develop new materials from drugs to batteries, one independent UK expert said. Governments around the world are pouring tens of billions of dollars into research.
Significantly, Willow is claimed to be far less prone to error than previous versions and could swell the potential of the already fast-developing field of artificial intelligence.
Now, I'm not suggesting we won't have needs for datacentres, but this is more a processing farm, and I'm not convinced our current brute force model is one that will last all that long. It sure seems like a gamble to go too all-in on this at what looks to be peak of the Gartner hype cycle.
I can’t imagine what the UCP did to secure this, if anything. If they did do something, what sort of corporate welfare are they advancing to have this in Alberta
It does seem like a good get, no question. But, like Fuzz, as soon as I saw that Kevin O’Leary was involved my enthusiasm waned. This just seems like a plan that is not thought through entirely. It reminds me of the crypto schemes we saw in ~2017 here. We have all this energy that’s virtually free (this is how the pitch feels, not that it’s the case), so let’s use that and mine a huge amount of crypto. Replace crypto with AI and this feels similar to me.
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Who do you think provides a better representation of what a data centre looks like? Kevin O'Leary-led Vaporware Valley in Grande Prairie, or Google's project in the UK?
And apparently only 10 people will work there and 4 of them are handicapped?
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We only saw this massive increase because of LLM's. No one has proven increasing LLM compute leads to eventual AGI, so there is no reason to believe this isn't a technology dead end, either. Amusingly, an hour after I posted that, this came up in my feed:
Now, I'm not suggesting we won't have needs for datacentres, but this is more a processing farm, and I'm not convinced our current brute force model is one that will last all that long. It sure seems like a gamble to go too all-in on this at what looks to be peak of the Gartner hype cycle.
I think that technology is always a risk of something new and more efficient and would agree that that could kill a datcenter.
I just disagree that there will be a time that we ask for less flops. Once the infrastructure is built people will find uses for the computing power even in our current environment of doubling every 3 months.
I ran across this video last night and had to watch the whole thing. Was trying to figure out where to put it, but figured the Alberta Politics thread would be best. While this video focuses on Ford and the PCP's antics, there are massive amounts of similarities to how the UCP are starting to handle projects in Calgary and Edmonton as we've seen. Almost as if there's a playbook. It's really aggravating.
Just announced today. I ####ing hate the UCP, but this is quite the project if it actually does goes ahead. Close to Grande Prairie. Gross that Kevin O'Leary's name is attached to this though lol.
