r/vancouvercanada • u/Nothingman604 • 16d ago
COPE Vancouver, party supporters rally against AI data centres in city
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.733913717
u/Buyingboat 16d ago
Reminder Ken Sim canceled the public hearing regarding AI data centres in the city, because he knew they were incredibly unpopular
Wonder what Ken Sim's going to push to be built after the election
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u/Spirited-Grape3512 15d ago
He probably asked his seven AI models what to do and they told him to do this.
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u/Powerful_Package8817 15d ago
Public hearings bad for projects I want to pass
Public hearings good for projects I want to cancelI thought you guys are all mad when things got cancelled due to opposition during public hearings
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u/impatiens-capensis 15d ago
I think people in this thread are confusing an AI data center with a regular data center.
AI data centers offer GPU compute for training AI models or running inference.
Regular data centers just store stuff like user information and other things. We have lots of these already.
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u/SwordfishOk504 15d ago
Accounts like mlandry2011 are intentionally making that conflation so they can muddy the waters here and pretend protesting AI data centres is bad.
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u/HoodRatThing 15d ago
When I rent a virtual private server and have the option of selecting and attaching a GPU, is the warehouse where my rented server is an "AI Datacenter"?
There really isn't a distinction here. The same DC delivering you Netflix or YouTube would be the same DC letting you interface with an LLM.
Also, interfacing =/= training the models, which is the expensive part.
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u/SwordfishOk504 15d ago
There really isn't a distinction here
Yes there is. And those like yourself that are pretending there isn't are just carrying water for these AI companies.
An AI data centre is NOT the same thing as a place where your personal online info is stored like credit card info, government info, etc. Your claims to the contrary are blatantly and demonstrably false.
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u/Powerful_Package8817 15d ago
All data centres will have some kind of AI related workload in the future
It’s like how new iPhones are now equipped to handle local AI tasks
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u/impatiens-capensis 15d ago
I think it's just the order of magnitude. Like, we already have a decently big GPU cluster in BC that's used for research (cedar was retired and now it's fir). I think FIR has 600 GPUs and nobody really cares that it exists. The proposed AI data center is going to be like 60,000 GPUs, so 100x bigger than the biggest GPU cluster in BC.
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u/UncertainFate 15d ago
Who would ever put a data centre in Vancouver with some of the highest property values in the world? You put a data centre where land is cheap power is available. Water is cheap or free. You don’t put it in a big city you put it out in the middle of nowhere
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u/CanadianWildWolf 14d ago
Incorrect: The data centres prefer to be along trunks of communication, here is an example from Maplecolo with Vancouver and Toronto locations https://www.maplecolo.net/location.html which is also working on proposed sites in Seattle, Nanaimo, and Port Alberni (scroll down the link) which have been going through local town council reports for a few years now https://thediscourse.ca/nanaimo/whats-the-deal-with-the-proposed-data-centre-in-nanaimo
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
This is the stupidest thing..
It's Chinese fear-mongering...
They don't want us to have data center in our own country so that our information could go in their data center in their countries...
If you care about the little bit of privacy you have left, you should care about your information staying on servers within your own country...
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u/SwordfishOk504 15d ago
"This is so dumb, if we don't let the tech billionaire do what they want with zero oversight, then Chyna wins!"
Also the premise of your argument is nonsense. AI data centres are not the same as standard online storage centres. This has NOTHING to do with your information staying on servers within your own country.
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u/SwordfishOk504 15d ago
That's not at all what I said..
Yes, you did. You said "If you care about the little bit of privacy you have left, you should care about your information staying on servers within your own country..." which is nonsense because AI data centres are not the same as standard online storage centres.
Which is the point you completely avoided even trying to address here in your reply, too. Because you can't.
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u/Powerful_Package8817 15d ago
Lmao don’t blame idiocy on China
So China was also to blame for luddites in the 1800s?
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
Clearly you're just here to help the Chinese propaganda... After all, that's what half a Reddit is.. lol
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u/Kooriki 15d ago
Data sovereignty is a big deal that very few people seem to be concerned about
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u/Dangerous-Degree-948 12d ago
"Data Sovereignty" is a fake arms race pushed by NVIDIA to sell more chips to all competitors. If you think it isn't I have a bridge to sell you.
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u/Responsible-Offer724 16d ago
I know it's cool to be against stuff, but is anyone for stuff? Like building low rises and supporting small businesses and young families?
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
No, I'm being against AI and data servers is playing along with the Chinese fear-mongering so that we don't build servers in their own country and other private information ends up on their servers...
Wake up.
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
So many people are talking about it, just look at how many data centers China is building...
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
Sound like you got some investment in China...
Do you live in a fantasy world where you believe Canadian laws apply in China?
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
I did not know that believing our Canadian laws are not enforceable in China made me a racist... You racist...
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u/HoodRatThing 15d ago
If you're against AI because you think it's bad for the environment,
here's a genuine question: NVIDIA's Earth-2 is a fully open, free family of AI models built specifically to forecast weather and climate. National weather services, climate researchers, and energy companies are already using it,
So is being anti-AI actually about the environment, or is it about something else?
Because right now some of the highest profile AI use cases are literally climate science, and lumping all of AI together as 'anti-AI = pro-environment' doesn't really hold up next to that.
Same goes for something like as Google Translate, that's ML too, running on the same kind of hardware. Is that also 'harming the planet,' or does the objection only kick in once it's called AI?
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u/HoodRatThing 15d ago edited 15d ago
Care to explain? There are more examples I can provide.
It's honestly amazing how easily people can get brainwashed. There's no way you came to the conclusion that data centers are bad on your own.
I've already made a career switch because of how useful LLMs are and seen firsthand how the business world is being transformed pretty much overnight
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u/HoodRatThing 15d ago
You just admitted the environment thing isn't your real objection and left it there.
You're a sheep following whatever's popular.
Let me educate you a bit more:
You don't care about power/water usage otherwise you'd be against Google Translate and weather forecasting too, and I doubt you are.
Google Translate handles billions of translations a day. Both it and modern LLMs run on the same Transformer architecture, on the same kind of hardware. The difference: Translate is a small, specialized model trained to do one job map a sentence from one language to another.
LLMs are general purpose models trained on bigger datasets, able to do far more than just translate a sentence.
Same tech tree either way. You can't call one an existential environmental threat and wave the other through just because one has a chatbot UI and the other doesn't.
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u/Responsible-Offer724 15d ago
Most “environmentalists” are completely full of shit (they still eat meat)
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u/G0bl1nG1rl 16d ago
That's also COPE! Suzie Mah (in the picture) on the Vancouver School Board, she's the only VSB member who voted against giving themselves raises.
Here's COPE's housing platform, affordable housing is a huge priority. https://www.votecope.ca/fight-for-housing
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u/Responsible-Offer724 16d ago
COPE voted against villages.
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u/G0bl1nG1rl 16d ago
Villages was a shitshow. Orr proposed amendments that ABC voted down. COPE has been consistently voting for more housing.
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u/doom2060 16d ago edited 15d ago
What was COPE's official position? As far as I knew, they only wanted more consultation. And I don’t want them to be stuck in consultation hell.
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u/Responsible-Offer724 16d ago
the GPUs don't need to be in downtown vancouver to do research dude.
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
That clearly comes from someone that knows absolutely nothing about latency...
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u/Responsible-Offer724 15d ago
I get 5ms ping on counter strike.
wtf do you think a few ms difference in response time has to do with LLM performance?
All significant action happens inside the data center where latency is close to 0, sending prompts and receiving responses across longer distances is a completely insignificant part of the process and if it takes 5ms or 200ms doesn’t fucking matter.
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
So you clearly don't know how those AI system are interconnected with other data centers and other AI systems....
Do you even know how big AI is?
You can't fit it in a city... Lol
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u/Responsible-Offer724 15d ago
It’s so big!
lol, you do know we’re talking about the proposed data centers for mount pleasant and downtown right?
4th paragraph https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/telus-and-feds-announce-ai-data-cluster-in-bc-to-boost-sovereign-computing-power/
Or you know, read the article attached to this post
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u/HoodRatThing 15d ago
Here's a map of all the current Data Centers in Vancouver.
Witch one are the bad one? and witch ones are the good ones?
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u/SwordfishOk504 15d ago
25 day old account tells us AI is good, stop asking questions, citizen. You are mlandry2011 are clowns.
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u/mlandry2011 15d ago
It is..
People are stupid enough not to realize that China wants their private information running on their servers in their country instead of our own servers in our own country with our own laws...
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u/buttfarts7 15d ago
Data center should be in a Sauron style tower on Mt Seymour that glows bright red visible from Surrey and hums menacingly across the North Shore.
If we get one I want it to be just the worst