Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world
Titans like Musk would love us to believe innovation means top-down solutions that only enrich the wealthy. In fact, we all have the power, says Eleanor Drage, research fellow at Cambridge University
No, there is not plenty of water for data centers: And, yes, we should worry about it, along with the facilities’ power use — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #RioGrande #aridification
A satellite view of Mesa, Arizona, showing a handful of the 91 energy- and water-intensive data centers in the greater Phoenix metro area. Source: Google Earth. Click the link to read the article o…
As more and more decisions about human fates are made by algorithms, a lack of accountability and transparency will elevate heartless treatment driven by efficiency devoid of empathy. Humans become mere data shadows.
The wall is real..
I am not sure who needs to hear it right now, but the transformer wall is real.
Another day, another paper confirms what many of us already know too well. And like the others, it will probably be ignored by those still high on hyperscale hopium.. But Peter Coveney from University College London and Sauro Succi from the Italian Institute of Technology just put the wall into hard math. They formalized it using scaling laws, entropy bounds, and statistical mechanics. They show that LLMs cannot escape a builtin wall or a limit. It is not something temporary. It is not due to lack of or bad data, or insufficient tuning.. It is structural (as has been shown a million times already).
Transformers work by predicting the next token based on learned statistical patterns. They are trained to minimize the divergence between the LLM/LRMs probability distribution and the distribution of the training data. But that divergence, measured as Kullback Leibler bound, cannot be reduced to zero. There is always a nonzero lower value, and no amount of scaling can push through it..
The transformer, as it scales, runs into diminishing returns because it lacks the representational capacity to fully capture the structure of natural language or the world it references. It cannot reliably compress a complex semantic signal into a smooth Gaussian latent and then recover the full structure when decoding.. The LLM acts as a lossy compressor, amplifying nonGaussian output from Gaussian priors, which fuels hallucinations..
The asymptotic flattening of improvement is a direct result of how the model approximates statistical relationships rather than learning grounded semantic meaning. The hallucinations and confident errors are not outliers. They are structural consequences of this limitation (duhhhhhhhh).
The transformer was not built to model human cognition. It was built to solve language to language translation. It was designed to map between two structured domains of text with some stochastic variability added to allow for flexibility in phrasing. That is it.. Yet here we are, doing stupid shit with it.. Scaling a system that was never intended to understand. Wrapping retrieval hacks around it. Feeding it synthetic reinforcement loops and curated context.. Meh.
What we are building are high resolution approximators. Useful in narrow closed world applications or for brainstorming ideas. Dangerous in anything that requires actual reasoning, consistency or correctness.
The LLM wall is real.. It is measurable and it is being hit by frontier labs. And pretending that another gazillion parameters will unlock cognition is not innovation.. It is delulu bullshit and yet most of us gobble it all up.
We are not advancing toward general intelligence. We are just hyperscaling a tool designed for translation and acting surprised when it fails to actually think.. When all it can really do is context conditioned approximate pattern retrieval
#ai | 26 comments on LinkedIn
New data centers expected to demand 7 billion gallons of water a year
As data centers demand more and more water and energy, experts suggest communities adopt policies that prevent energy bills from rising and water supplies from shrinking.
Jacy Reese Anthis, Kristian Lum, Michael Ekstrand, Avi Feller, Chenhao Tan. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.
Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket
The airline touted a partnership with an AI-enabled revenue system as a step on the road to fully personalized ticket pricing, part of its goal to raise profit margins long-term.
Not to be alarmist or anything, but we're basically witnessing the commodification of individual economic psychology in real-time.
Not to be alarmist or anything, but we're basically witnessing the commodification of individual economic psychology in real-time.
You just paid $847 for a flight. The person next to you paid $332. Same seat. Same flight. Same airline. ✈️
Enter: Delta, AI & the death of price transparency.
Delta just quietly announced they're rolling out AI that basically reads your digital soul and charges accordingly. Seriously. This is the beta test for post-market capitalism.
How it works?
The AI doesn't just see supply and demand - it sees YOU.
Your browsing desperation at 2am. 🌙
Your zip code.
How you shop.
Whether you clear cookies.
The algorithm builds a psychological profile and asks: "What will THIS human pay?" Then they charge you what they think you will pay.
So here’s the ethical/philosophical Q:
If AI can predict exactly what you'll pay, do you really even have a choice anymore?
Think about it. This goes way beyond just harvesting your data to show you ads that may or may not influence you. It’s harvesting your data to extract maximum value from everything you already need to buy.
Every CEO is watching.
Your Uber.
Your Amazon cart. 🛒
Your morning Starbucks.
The prices at a grocery store.
All coming soon to an AI near you and charging you whatever it thinks you will pay. 🫠
Is it innovation or exploitation?
Are you ready for an economy where knowing you IS controlling you? And maybe taking away your choices?
NGL, I kind of hate it. 🙃
#AI #Economics #SurveillanceCapitalism | 113 comments on LinkedIn
Catch me on BBC's More or Less podcast talking about all things AI and energy!
Catch me on BBC's More or Less podcast talking about all things AI and energy! ⚡⚡
TL;DR? As always - it's so hard to get any exact numbers with what's out there! We need more transparency, more accountability, and more data about AI's impact on our planet 🌍
https://lnkd.in/eHVhQ5H8
When Swiping Supplants Scissors: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens — and how Designers Can Help
The history of technology is full of innovators who got their start creating with their hands. Steve Jobs cites a calligraphy class at Reed College as influencing the design of the Mac; Susan Kare…
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An eating disorders chatbot offered dieting advice, raising fears about AI in health
The National Eating Disorders Association took down a controversial chatbot, after users showed how the newest version could dispense potentially harmful advice about dieting and calorie counting.
The Trump administration’s plan, in targeting “ideological bias” and “social engineering agendas” in AI, ultimately enforces them, writes Eryk Salvaggio.
No ‘woke AI’ in Washington, Trump says as he launches American AI action plan
Trump has vowed to push back against "woke" AI models and to turn the U.S. into an "AI export powerhouse," signing three AI-focused executive orders Wednesday.
After a much-needed break, I’m back to “kind regards,” and I want to share something that’s been gnawing at me since before my vacation.
After a much-needed break, I’m back to “kind regards,” and I want to share something that’s been gnawing at me since before my vacation.
I attended a conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa on Digital Sovereignty in Africa organised by colleagues Andrew Crawford Mohammad Amir Anwar, where we toured a data center, my first time inside one. And no, it wasn’t the sci‑fi fantasy of endless glowing servers you see in movies. The reality was more mundane, and more troubling.
The place was beautiful, aesthetically, but since I am not talking about pageantry here or interior decor, I won't focus on that. We asked how much energy they were pulling from the grid, and there was a collective gasp when they mentioned the thousands of megawatts. We had seen solar panels on their building and were quite disappointed to find out that they only provided lighting. They proceeded to show us towering generators that, if operational, guzzle almost 500 litres of diesel per hour. We also asked about their water use, and perhaps to stop our shocked gasps again, the staff proudly told us they ran on rainwater and their own boreholes. They then went on a technical run of how the rainwater was recycled and stuff.
From the rooftop, where giant cooling towers and rainwater tanks loomed, I looked across the road. A shanty town stretched opposite: corrugated iron shacks packed tight, electrical wires dangling overhead. Cape Town’s inequality laid bare in a single glance: high-tech servers drinking rainwater to stay cool, while people next door queue for buckets.
People love to point at the sky when they talk about “the cloud.” I recall a conversation with a friend where I was talking about data centers and she asked: “Why do we even need data centers now that everything’s on the cloud?” I chuckled, but here’s the thing: that misunderstanding isn’t just my friend’s. It’s global. Entire tech narratives have trained us to imagine “the cloud” as something ethereal, weightless, almost holy. But here's the thing: the cloud has nothing to do with cumulus or nimbus formations in the sky. The cloud is concrete, glass, and steel. It's thousands of megawatts pulled from the grid, diesel generators guzzling 500 liters per hour, and communities going without water so these digital "clouds" can stay online.
Every photo you upload. Every Netflix binge. Every ChatGPT query. It all runs through buildings like this. AI evangelists call it weightless intelligence. But there’s nothing weightless here: lithium mines, power grids, drought‑stricken lands turned into server farms.
Tech Bros have sold us the lie that AI will solve the climate crisis, but it's actually AI that's accelerating it. Just Google how much energy and water your favorite AI model consumes and then come argue with me.
The next time someone tells you to "upload it to the cloud," don't look up. Look around.
Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? | Pew Research Center
In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.
Plus, OpenAI's absurd listening tour, top AI scientists say AI is evolving beyond our control, Facebook is putting data centers in tents, and the AI bubble question — answered?
