LisanBench creator @scaling01 and @teortaxesTex debate whether superintelligence requires massive datacenters or compact, highly localized clusters

Boring company should build some underground datacenters

Chyna isn't nuking DCs. only Eliezer is thinking of this strategically relevant ASI, not another LLM for pleb mass consumption, will probably be very easy to run off a compact cluster. We won't even notice the energy footprint

(I don't think Microsoft, Google or whoever even thought of that. Because if something happens then their business goes to 0 anyways, so why bother?)

@scaling01 I don't think China is spiritually capable of using nukes. Weather controlling weapons, gene-specific plagues, insanity inducing rayguns, yeah. But nukes just seem beneath them

@bayeslord Space is harder to hit than underground bunkers (ask Iran!)

@bayeslord with our resouces I don’t understand why we don’t have megabunkers all over the place that are start up civilization from scratch if electricity goes down or chips get fried bases of operations that layout the steps for the surrounding geography of that bunker

@scaling01 not sure what u mean by the China comment

China has relatively fewer nukes vs US and Russia ?

+ no first use policy

@scaling01 Few things. Many of the largest data centers are crypto mining sites with no strategic value. You acknowledged that the silos are far from everything, not specifically data centers. Why would they waste a nuclear exchange on data centers when they can hack into our power grid?

@scaling01 This is a rather weird idea to think China will use nuclear weapon against US data centers. They would have achieve the same thing by simply bombing the TSMC fabs in Taiwan.

@bayeslord @elonmusk

@scaling01 white house underground datacenter too

@scaling01 what about in space?

@scaling01 If a nuke goes off, its likely that the demand for inference compute would go down alot. So its a self-correcting problem

@tomprimozic For now

@teortaxesTex It's probablyuch easier to supply chain nix to nerf ant's 1000T training run

@scaling01 if you ever build nuclear power plants deep inside mountains, you can start thinking about that. maybe in 20 years (if the US actually is able to build nuclear reactors again by that time). until then, it's all a joke in a nuclear war scenario.

@scaling01 map says it all really. building in the middle of nowhere pays off when the stakes are existential.

@scaling01 I think it's just real estate vs. speed of light xfer

TBH, there's a lot of people thinking about it, due to the "bomb them to the stone age" anglo-israeli doctrine of war, thing is that it is projection, nobody else does that shit.

But defensively, everybody does think about it, having redundant datacenters with >150km distance between them *is* a thing in some highly regulated industries, and I don't believe it to be only about meteors...

@scaling01 We are forbidden to light the cradle of life on fire.

Nope

(Would require an eternal saviour that all the stars that create atoms and also somehow pray without prey … in a flash of light stolen all souls… that you never ever ever wake up again forever.)