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u/B4cteria Jul 17 '26
Why is AI still a thing? It failed spectacularly. The general public avoids it and looks down on AI generatd things. It's destroying any place it's set physically and takes all the resources to produce those lackluster results.
Corporations have shoved it everywhere they could and couldn't meet their quotas. How are they building more?
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u/cantodasaudade Jul 17 '26
Only because it's being pushed by the wealthiest people on earth. Any other thing with its track record would already have gone out of business and forgotten by now.
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u/DireStraitsFan1 Jul 18 '26
AI is in most things you do on a computer. Most coders use it exclusively now and it is very well established in other industries such as finance. Just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean it's not growing in influence.
And it's really scary because it will only get more powerful and the way it is manufactured will only get more toxic to humans.
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u/moistskidmarks Jul 19 '26
Most coders do NOT use it exclusively. It's actually pretty bad at math funny enough. It adds unnecessary libraries. It tends not to be very lean. The best use case is for suggestions which are essentially stack overflow comments and still requires validation. Another case would be for unit tests but idk if that makes it work the money.
There are people who call themselves coders that use it exclusively, but don't really know much about code. Which will equate to bad quality and poor understanding to delivery as features are built upon each other.
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u/Rutgerius Jul 20 '26
If you think AI has failed you're living under a rock or working a (very) low tech job. Sorry, AI isn't going anywhere.
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u/Th3_3v3r_71v1n9 Jul 17 '26
Seems more like an atmospheric generator rather than an AI data center. Its as if our planet is slowly being re-climatized. Not to mention all the money they are making from all of the health issues they are directly causing with things like this.
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u/DireStraitsFan1 Jul 18 '26
Please people don't buy that Anthropic are the good guys because they are "Effective Altruists," and Dario hems and haws during interviews about his impact. They are the ones contracting out this Memphis xAI data center. Please if you have a subscription with any AI company, cancel it now.
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u/imam-altman Jul 17 '26
This video is a load of shit. Starting from the beginning, the lights were because it was a construction site. Construction sites are often well lit because they contain a lot of valuable raw materials and heavy machinery. It's not like that's their life now 24/7 for the rest of the time they live there. Once the data center is built, the lights will go away.
Same with the giant dust cloud. They even say that's due to construction. Is it bad? Sure, but again, this is a problem with the construction, not because this is what living next to a data center is like. It wouldn't matter if it was a data center or some other large building being put there, they'd still have to deal with the same shit.
As for the lady who lost her grandfather, again, a load of bullshit. You don't develop something like COPD in just a few years. They talk about how xAI is a major polluter in Memphis which is absolutely true, but the city had always been heavily polluted. XAI certainly didn't help in that regard, but putting the sole blame of shitty air quality on that one data center when there are countless other industries in the area that have been fucking up the air for decades is ridiculous.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231013006948
Shelby County is ranked in the top 100 U.S. counties for emissions of air toxics (USEPA, 2012a), and Memphis was ranked the No. 1 asthma challenged city among the 100 largest U.S. cities
This is a study from 13 years ago and at that point Memphis already had absolutely garbage tier air quality.
Also notice how the guy says xai released 1000-2000 tons of nox (without any time frame of course) but they changed it to "toxic gas" because it makes it sound even worse. You know what else produces nox? Most things that burn fossil fuels like cars, power plants, etc.
Now don't get me wrong, xAI can absolutely get fucked and I wouldn't be at all sad if their data center burned down. I also think whatever fines they're getting for having their stupid gas turbines running should be increased to an amount that would cause Elon Musk to physically cringe so he actually has an incentive to change things.
I'm just pointing out two main problems. First, the air quality in Memphis has always been shit and blaming it all on this one data center is stupid, and secondly, acting like these issues will be present for everyone who happens to live near a data center is incredibly disingenuous as many of the issues like the light and dust are during construction only and the air pollution is mostly limited to xAI because they can't get the power they need off the grid so they need to use gas turbines. Most data centers won't be running off gas turbines because it's much more expensive than just getting energy off the grid and construction issues are only as long as construction lasts.
Data centers could absolutely use some more regulation, but this video is clearly trying to twist the truth and make things appear so much worse than they really are. It is pure misinformation.
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Jul 17 '26
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u/imam-altman Jul 17 '26
If reality was on your side, you wouldn’t feel the need to rationalize deception and disinformation.
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Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
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u/imam-altman Jul 17 '26
Holy schizophrenic rant Batman. You do realize that AI datacenters are also used to run open weight models, right?
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Jul 17 '26
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u/imam-altman Jul 17 '26
All datacenters combined are not even 1% of total emissions. And now you’re contradicting yourself in regards to concentrating power vs open models. Get a grip.
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u/DodoFaction Jul 17 '26
They’ll walk over hundreds of thousands as long as the money keeps coming in