Turns out stubborn contrarianism and anti-science bias are not viable philosophical foundations for progress; what a surprise.
AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over
Submitted 1 month ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/
Comments
Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
pdxfed@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
But for a few fleeting moments we did create a lot of value for the shareholders. Totally worth it to flush it all down the drain.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
But knowing what’s real and what’s bullshit is an absolutely essential prerequisite for progress.
Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
Exactly my point, I wouldn’t trust progress to the country that elected a mentally challenged pedophile twice.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 month ago
renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, [Rui Ma]
Is the person they’re talking about who is “stunned” at how super double awesome China is at powering AI.
Ffffffffffffffuck this.
drmoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I like how Americans propaganda themselves - china doesnt even have to anything as Americans will gladly put them on a pedestal to spite themselves.
Crazy how apparent this is on TikTok especially. People with LGTBQ flags are salivating about China while their flags are literally censored there
RenLinwood@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
Psycoder@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Eastern European American guy who is living at eastern Europe right now.
I don’t know about china, but a lot of things in the country of my birth is a lot better than USA.
I got back to country of my birth because my parent got a dementia. I’m seriously considering permanently staying here. It has its drawbacks. But a lot of things are also a lot better.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Sorry to hear about the health reasons. Stay connected with people local, you’ll need help, as that’s super hard. Best wishes and be nice to yourself.
CubitOom@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
The race to have the magic box that tells you lies that you want to hear while also consuming incredible amounts of resources…why is this a race again?
krunklom@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I really don’t understand this perspective. I truly don’t.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Like. Do you honestly think this is the one technology that researchers are just going to say “it’s fine as-is, let’s just stop improving it”?
You don’t understand the first thing about how it works but people like you are SO certain that the way it is now is how it will always be, and that because there are flaws developing it further is pointless.
I just don’t get it.
CubitOom@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
I’ve actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I’ve built RAG architecture backends for slef hosted FOSS LLMs, i’ve fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I’ve done even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research)
I’ll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It’s like saying you study medicine, it’s a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it’s being marketed to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.
This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more ore less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between capitalism and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.
There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.
The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that’s cool. But we don’t need AI to make improvements to them right now.
I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.
fodor@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Right. You don’t get it. You hear people talk about a new technology but actually they haven’t talked about anything, they are trying to sell you snake oil, but you convince yourself that you understand what they mean, and that it’s somehow meaningful.
We could talk about the history of AI in software development, you know it goes back decades, and there are legitimate areas of research. But the bubble that people are riding right now, they are throwing LLMs at the general public and pretending those LLMs are good enough to replace large swaths of the current workforce, but that’s not going to happen because it won’t work, because that’s not how those models are designed. And then the snake oil salesman, they do classic bait and switch, and they start talking about expert systems and minor improvements to them, as if that is something new.
But even if my prediction is wrong, what that actually means is that people shouldn’t need to work full-time jobs anymore.
To be fair, if your argument is that some day AI research will be legitimate and no longer snake oil, then you could easily be right. But there’s no good reason to think that day is going to be in the next few years, rather than the next few decades or even the next few centuries.
sobchak@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
There’s a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It’s taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI’s new model is a regression (I don’t know, I haven’t really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of “eureka” moments which can’t be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It’s possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Feelings don’t care about logic. It’s that easy.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Say you start with a prototype for a perpetual-motion machine. Then those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
It is intrinsic in some technologies tthat they’re a dead end. That doesn’t mean all of them are, but some are just worthless crap and throwing more good money after bad isn’t going to change that.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
The telling lies part is not good, but I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems. Cure for cancer, sure that will be $10k a pill. Eternal life? Sure that will be 1 million dollars a years for all eternity. Robot army to protect you? Top of the list.
Question I have is, is the AI we see the same AI the teck bros see? Is there a public interface that is made to appear a little buffoonish so the masses can laugh it off, but the real interface is much much better?boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
Those things are being solved by other forms of AI, not LLMs. AlphaFold is about the most useful thing AI has done so far and it’s not a chatbot.
We get access to entertainment AI, but there could be different forms of AI in use in medical science that have nothing to do with image or text generation.
kieron115@startrek.website 5 weeks ago
The only answer I need from an AI is 42.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems
Yeah, that’s the hype. The reality is that with current LLM tech, it’s a slightly more capable text-prediction algorithm.
Womble@piefed.world 5 weeks ago
Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to thrwo coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Yeah. But then i remembered some history and how lobbying and vulture capital works and decided it unlikely.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Governments fail to implement incredibly obvious, easy, and proven solutions all the time so yeh they can be pretty dumb. Not to mention historical examples of governments (paricularly the UK when it was a world superpower) investing their entire economies in nigerian prince tier scams.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
No. I don’t think that either Trump’s idiots, nor the CCP, know more than I do.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Because it was a race for simulating more deadly nukes till now. But that got silly, so they need something new.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah. Kind of amazing that for all of their America first bullshit rhetoric, Republicans have consistently and routinely neglected our infrastructure to focus time and money on gays, immigrants, and giving out blowies to billionaires
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Look at other corrupt governments and you can see some even more startlingly disfunctional infrastructure.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 1 month ago
to purposefully distract with gays, immigrants so they could keep giving out blowies to billionaires
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Conservatism is collapsing into irrelevance as a long term commitment.
baronvonj@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Close. Conservatism is collapsing the United States of America into irrelevance.
Furbag@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I don’t really give a shit about the AI race and I genuinely hope that we lose it, because I feel like being a winner in that “industry” is inherently unsustainable.
The AI hype is so infuriatingly frustrating.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
Further fear mongering about China’s data center/powergrid infrastructure superiority is also the PERFECT excuse techbros need to rationalize building data centers in parts of the US that are in desperate shortage of water for human beings and with precarious electrical grids that ready to fail in the middle of the next heatwave.
The US is essentially in a second Civil War and this will be one of the main methods in which people are killed in this war, purposefully setting up the conditions for people to die in a heat wave and have no water so they are desperate… and the only way people in the US are going to stomach it is if they have been truly convinced they have to accept these brutal conditions “because we are hopelessly behind China!”.
Dasus@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Oh man I’d love some of what you’re smoking or popping
Deflated0ne@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I just want anyone else to win. All the things. I want US Hegemony to end. At any cost. If that’s AI then good.
I hate this country the way Saw Gerrera hates the empire.
frongt@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Sure, but this isn’t going to do that, and it’s going to harm–no, scratch that, continue harming–a bunch of people in the process.
batmaniam@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I understand you’re frustrated about the AI race. That’s an excellent point, and it deserves careful consideration. First, in considering the AI race we need to consider what AI is…
Furbag@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Nah.
Eezyville@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I hope we loose it so we can get humbled. But if we loose, knowing how we are, we’ll likely invent a reason to go to war and steal their talent.
JTskulk@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Ai isn’t an arrow, you can’t loose it.
Azal@pawb.social 5 weeks ago
I have found one use for generative AI that I have liked. I’ve thrown it at aggravating searches for me.
Use case example: I stopped traveling across the country and got a job at one location. It’s across the city. I’d like to find an electric bike to get there. The location is 12 miles away as the crow flies. Unfortunately my city is absolute crap at any kind of non-car transportation so it needs to get myself up to 40 mph at minimum. Honestly if I’m going that speed, I’d like a scooter like the a burgman. Trouble is “scooter” runs the gambit from competing to motorcycles like the Burgman, to little ones like the Vespa, and stand up ones like you see dumped all over cities downtown. Electric motorcycles start getting into “I might as well buy a new motorcycle” prices.
Alright, I do a search for electric scooter, I get all standing scooters. I’ve attempted changes and maybe find a sitting one that is made for not getting over 25 mph. Finally getting frustrated I remembered one of my younger coworkers talking about using AI for searches, fine… ten minutes later I had a series of results of bike that fit my criteria as well as small little dealers across the city that DuckDuckGo nor Google bothered to pull up, and that’s with me specifically asking for links because I didn’t want made up bullshit.
Now if we get to the point of AI becoming overlords, I’m sure I’m going to be among the first against the wall because the first couple searches of it not getting things right involved me calling it a dumbshit so…
So yea… that’s my territory of using an AI, it’s a better search engine for weird esoteric shit… I kind of wish it wasn’t an app or a website because if it was a physical device I’d have it next to a hammer which I guess shows how much I trust it.
ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
The first country to adopt LLMs for everything is the one that will collapse first. This is a race where the winners never start and at best stop before they reach the end.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
AI will move past LLMs
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Maybe. Could also be that humans never invent anything that comes close to a biological brain. Either because we simply aren’t smart enough, or because civilization regresses before we get there. And there’s several trends going on currently which could cause civilization to regress. For example, climate change and declining birth rates (While we could set up an economic system that can deal with a shrinking and aging population, our current one cannot).
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Great. We’ll wait, then we’ll see.
El_guapazo@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
AI is not the panacea they’re making it out to be. This article is attempting to influence readers to support American AI business models to ‘complete’ with China. Except that AI doesn’t make my job easier and is very bad for the environment.
SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
In my case, AI assistants are even confusing and annoying, but since they cannot be turned off, in my case I have to endure it.
lengau@midwest.social 5 weeks ago
Given that part of my job is evaluating applicants’ ability to do the job, and given that LLMs are very good at answering the sort of questions many people ask in interviews, AI is making my job significantly harder.
If someone could make a prompt that actually made an LLM write good code, I wouldn’t have nearly as much of an issue.
T156@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It’s only made worse by the people who treat it like the Master Computer from Star Trek, claim that it can solve all the problems, and thus attempt to shove it into anything and everything.
It’s baffling why my notepad needs to be hooked up to an LLM in the first place. It’s a notepad, for quick scribbling. If people want to write something serious in it, there are far better things for that.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Don’t worry. They’ll just ask AI about the grid and it will tell them how great it is.
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
“good catch! That’s a very astute observation. Here’s a bunch of paragraphs explaining (incorrectly) how you’re wrong!”
KumaSudosa@feddit.dk 5 weeks ago
Just like next quarter’s finance numbers for USA will coincidentally just all the great stuff Trump has achieved!
Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Good, fuck the AI industry, we can’t even go to the doctor over here
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
But you have so many obese guy fart videos to choose from now.
Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
True wealth
moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids
Yeah, capitalism will resolve everything by being greedy. Electricity is not and will never be a merchandise. It’s a basic human need and a natural state monopoly.
elephantium@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Need?
Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world 1 month ago
can’t use power to make everyone use electric cars need power for “AI”
Nice job you jabroonies you did it you lost everything. This is the slow descent of America and it the boomers fault.
My father in law is convinced theres some guy in a garage that’s gonna invent the next big invention, but hey guess what it takes MONEY that regular joe schmoes dont have!!
unconsequential@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Anyone who is working on the next big project in his garage is just signing his own death certificate. That’s the truth about the American energy industry and capitalism’s free markets make “healthy competition economy” myth. Traditional American capitalism is long dead.
tisktisk@piefed.social 1 month ago
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, but blaming past generations is quite precisely how the boomers goofed as severely as they did. They played the blame game to the same tune we are currently, the only difference is they didn't LARP and play pretend about it as shallowly as we do. If we want to be truly better we must first ensure that we don't become exactly like the selfish demons we must vanquish. Otherwise evil persists merely in a different form.
It's got to stop here with us--we are the last generation, all of us. Identifying core issues is critical--but the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets even to themselves.
Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
We grow as a society when the old plant trees for shade they won’t see
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I am very skeptical of any article that boldly claims that China is on the rise and the US is in decline. We’ve been hearing about this decades. People underestimate just how corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent the Chinese system is under the CCP. People think the US is worse only because the US is an open country. China’s isolation give it the illusion that it’s better, but in reality, it’s even worse. Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more, all come with big asterisks attached that make them much more questionable.
kunaltyagi@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing lead is real. You don’t need to believe any propaganda, just travel and observe.
The asterisks are not about their usecase but political.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing lead is real.
And if you ignore the theory of comparative advantage, not only is it real, but it also matters. Otherwise, not.
I also run a consistent payment deficit with my barber. Should that be corrected?
sobchak@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
China leads the world in scientific publication, even when only taking into account reputable journals and high-impact publications. There’s no doubt in my mind the US will decline further with the current attacks on science and education, and anti-intellectualism in general.
andallthat@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
So, a few monthe ago China launched Deepseek and the narrqtive was all “the fact they didn’t have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper”.
Now the US is getting behind on “AI wars” because China has more energy for huge data centers?
How about the US get creativve and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
enough talk already i wish the us empire would just hurry up and actually collapse.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
AFAIK in USA it is pretty common to build the power infra structure as part of the AI data-centers that need it.
This has already been pretty common for normal data-centers for years.
USA never really had good public service infra structure for it. While for instance in Denmark many companies build data-centers because Denmark both has good infrastructure, and also can supply data-centers with relatively cheap energy from renewable sources, without the company having to foot a giant bill to invest in that too.The American model is of course inferior, but it’s not like it doesn’t work at all.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
we considered attacking you, but couldn’t think of a way to ruín anything worse than you already had. Every idea we came up with, you had already done, but worse. Fuck you, i liked this job. I went to college for this shit. You have ruined ne. What the fuck am i gonna do now?
-some chinese saboteur
salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 1 month ago
I guess burning coal as fast as possible means energy is a “solved problem” for China?
Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Everything China has us cooked in every sector
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The race was over in 2021-2022 when every model that uses the only algorithmic approach we have hit a wall when they ran out of training data.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Good, let the Chinese have this demonic technology currently only good for mass surveillance.
jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk 5 weeks ago
Maybe Trump can Make Ampères Great Again.
someguy3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.
For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
the race to the bottom may already be over
MehBlah@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Give up, all is lost, all is lost.
Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Not only the U.S. grid is weak compared to China’s… Strategically China seems to be outpacing the U.S. on many fronts, being much more stringent and focused on long term goals than the chaotic U.S. at the moment. I really don’t like the idea of living in a world with China as the leading nation, but it increasingly seems like the most probable development in the mid to long run. And transition will likely not be smooth…
jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Archived Link and Generated Summary below:
Alt. Link: archive.ph/rD2R4
Generated Summary:
A 600-word bullet point summary focusing on statistics, comparing China and the US’s energy infrastructure readiness for AI development.
- China views energy availability for AI development as a “solved problem,” unlike the US where it’s a major bottleneck.
- McKinsey projects a $6.7 trillion investment in new data center capacity globally (2025-2030) to meet AI’s energy demands.
- US data center development is limited by power grid stress; some companies build their own power plants. Ohio households face at least a $15/month electricity bill increase due to data centers.
- Goldman Sachs highlights AI’s power demand outpacing grid development cycles.
- China annually adds more electricity demand than Germany’s total annual consumption. One Chinese province matches India’s total electricity supply.
- China maintains an 80-100% reserve margin, meaning it has at least twice the needed capacity, allowing it to absorb AI data center demand.
- The US typically operates with a 15% reserve margin or less, leading to warnings about grid strain during peak demand.
- China’s energy planning is coordinated through long-term, technocratic policy, anticipating demand. The US relies heavily on private investment with shorter-term return expectations (3-5 years), unsuitable for long-term power projects (decade-long build and payoff).
- China directs state funding to strategic sectors, accepting some project failures to ensure capacity when needed. The US lacks this public financing for long-term energy projects.
- China’s pragmatic approach to renewables and coal use, focusing on efficiency and results, contrasts with the US’s politically charged debates.
- Without significant changes in US energy infrastructure funding and development, China’s lead will widen.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Blessed be the Temu empire
simplejack@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Gotta hand it to the fossil fuels industry, they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked.
And now Americans have a janky grid, slower / more expensive transportation, and bigger power bills.
AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world 1 month ago
At least we are free*
*Terms and conditions apply
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
“free” is the sound that natural gas makes as it is released from its underground prison …
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Capitalism doesn’t solve for society, it solves for capital.
There is no profit in making the world a better place.
ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
It turns out that there is a lot of profit in making the world a worse place.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
That depends on the incentives. Society can change those to some extent.
dkwannabe@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
And likely those statements will not change anytime soon in the foreseeable future.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
So far.