Energy costs money in China too, they still have coal plants and crazy energy cutback mandates every once in a while.
The truth of the matter is that you need the user interactions from the free model to train and that value cannot be understated and if you are playing catchup it’s a must.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Overvalued - as in, less useful than it seems to be - probably, but the costs of running it are immense and they are certainly not that much lower in China (despite low energy prices due to nonexistent environmental standards), given the hardware embargoes they are under, forcing them to use less efficient hardware.
Shezzagrad@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
“due to non existent environmental standards” buddy unless your from rural northern Europe or the mountains in the Himalayan wtf are you talking about. Compared to America, china is much much less polluted per person with people personally accounting for less than the average American or westerner.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
China has some of the worst polluted cities in the world, far worse than European or American cities. Water quality is abysmal, partly due to extremely inefficient use of fertilizer and pesticides. Products exported from China are commonly exceeding limits on toxic substances. It feels like every other week, there’s another food safety scandal. Soil contamination is still worsening, in part due to extremely dirty mining practices. Chinese companies are falsifying records in order to hide excessive emissions from customers.
Meanwhile, environmental activists are routinely [being persecuted by the state]www.rfa.org/…/environmental-activist-sentenced/) in order to silence them. That’s totally what a country with a great environmental track record would do.
Shezzagrad@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Did you just really send me iqair with such a bold statement without even checking the link itself? DUDE, JERUSALEM AMD SOFIA IN BULGARIA ARE MORE POLLUTED THAN SHANGHAI. For a nation of 1.4x thats seriously impressive. None of their cities crack top 5.
Wisdom is chasing you, but you are faster
pupbiru@aussie.zone 4 days ago
i believe one of the big advancements with deepseek r1 is their method of adding the reasoning component is novel and very very efficient. i haven’t checked it out, but it could legitimately just be more efficient to run
Empricorn@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Uh, no… “Value”, as in quality/performance for the price. You can literally overpay for anything in this world, just look at the luxury market.
I’m not claiming to know enough about AI or LLMs, but I don’t think the first to market or the most prominent always set the price. So I think we’ll have to see what the accepted price actually turns out to be…
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Interesting about Chinese energy market is that in recent decades they’ve been investing heavily in solar power. Once they’ve figured it grid energy storage, running LLMs shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
TanyaJLaird@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.
You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an “AI model training” season?
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
That would be possible, but seasonal production has some serious downsides.
Let’s say you have a steel mill with several solar powered arc furnaces and enough batteries to keep production running through the night. During the summer you can continue production 24/7, but in the winter you’ll have to shut down completely, because there’s not enough energy to keep even a single production line running. This means that there will be wild fluctuations in a variety of things:
In the winter you’ll have plenty of time to fix anything that’s broken, but if there’s an unscheduled shutdown during the summer, you’re suddenly going to need lots of maintenance personnel and materials. Incidentally, those will be in short supply in the summer, because all the other factories would have the same problem. You would need to have lots of spare capacity in maintenance as well.
The AI industry should be fine, since you could train models when energy is cheap. Oh, but what if the summer isn’t long enough for you to update all your models? Simply just buy more computers so you have more spare capa… Oh, it’s the steel mill problem all over again. Oh, but what about the people who use the models during the winter? Maybe you could charge your customers double the price during the winter so that the traffic would be reduced to a reasonable level.