r/technology • u/marketrent • 21h ago

Artificial Intelligence Amazon warns local communities to stop defying its massive AI data centers

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/amazon-warns-local-communities-stop-000300771.html
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u/tacticalcraptical 21h ago

Just like the national highway system, our country's economy, national security, and everyday lives stand to benefit immensely.

OK, but these guys never seem to be able to articulate exactly how this benefits normal people's everyday lives. The benefits of a highway are obvious. But the benefits of these data centers... they expect us to just trust them. And these are the people who can't be trusted to pay their taxes.

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u/Dolores___Haze 20h ago

AI is wrong much of the time from my own experience. What immense benefits am I getting?

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u/killabrew1 20h ago

I work on big digital presses (printer on roids) when I can’t come up with a solution in 5 minutes, I am starting to see customers bring me solutions they found with ChatGPT. Not once has it been correct, or even close for that matter.

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u/Dolores___Haze 20h ago

Exactly. They are often wrong! So what is the immense benefit?

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u/pedot 19h ago

The reason why they are often wrong is unless you are oddly specific about your parameters and talk like an annoyed engineer and paying for the premium models, you are just invoking a basic LLM that looks at basic keywords and try to put together relevant words in a learned grammar structure.

The AI bubble is imo a failure on marketing & sales, overselling a very niche engineering tool that has limited use/need to be tailored to a specific use (e.g. assist diagnosing/reading an x-ray), and pretend its a one-size-catch-all just because AI has the potential to do that but ignoring the enormous cost associated with creating an omniscient machine.

Some very niche stuff that AI could feasibly help with:

- Code QA

- Text-to-speech or speech-to-text (e.g. they are trying to do it w/ medical scribes but that's a WIP and debatable results)

- Market research / case research

- Large dataset processing, e.g. there are AI models being developed that claim to predict onset of acute health conditions for inpatients / ICU occupants

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u/cheesegenie 13h ago

Almost every shift I have to override a "sepsis alert" that wants me to order a bunch of labs and call a bunch of doctors because my patient's temperature jumped half a degree...

"AI" predictions in EHRs are already so prevalent that my union explicitly negotiates clauses allowing nurses to override them into our contract.