Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Tomorrow: The AI Bubble is built on impossible promises. GPUs die in 5 years, nobody has built a 1GW data center, and they have the power to do so. Stargate Abilene won't have enough power before 2028.

Here's a link for $10 off premium.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Everybody is very casual with how they talk about Sam Altman’s theoretical promises of trillions of dollars of data center infrastructure, and I'm not sure anybody realizes how difficult even the very basics of this plan will be.
Nevertheless, everybody is happily publishing stories about how “Stargate Abilene Texas - OpenAI’s massive data center with Oracle - is open,” by which they mean two buildings, and I’m not even confident both of them are providing compute to OpenAI yet. There are six more of them that need to get built for this thing to start rocking at 1.2GW - even though it’s only 1.1GW according to my sources in Abilene.
But, hey, sorry - one minute - while we’re on that subject, did anybody visiting Abilene in the last week or so ever ask whether they’ll have enough power there?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to look - I’m sure you were just about to, and had simply been busy! - but I did the hard work for you and read up on it, and it turns out that Stargate Abilene only has 200 megawatts of power - a 200 megawatt substation that, according to my sources, has only been built within the last couple of months, with 350 Megawatt of gas turbine generators that connect to a natural gas power plant that might get built by the end of the year in the event that one of the multiple construction firms involved . Said turbine is extremely expensive, featuring volatile pricing (for context, volatility fell in Q2 2025…to 69% annualized, meaning that if you had these prices across the entirety of a year you’d see swings of 69% up or down) and even more volatile environmental consequences, and is, while permitted for it (this will download the PDF of the permit), impractical and expensive to use long-term.
Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage.
But th…

$Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity - assuming that the gas turbines function at full power - can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load. I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas - a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI - but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?” The answer is not enough, and the significance of said “not enough” is remarkable. Today, I’m going to tell you, at length, how impossible the future of generative AI is. Gigawatt data centers are a ridiculous pipe dream, one that runs face-first into the walls of reality. The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens. I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting - of simply throwing enough money at the problem - when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America (and the world’s) power grid. I realize it’s easy to get blinded by the constant drumbeat of “gargoyle-like tycoon cabal builds 1 gigawatt data center” and feel that they will simply overwhelm the problem with money, but no, I’m afraid that isn’t the case at all, and all of this is so silly, so ridiculous, so cartoonishly bad that it threatens even the seemingly-infinite wealth of Elon Musk, with xAI burning over a billion dollars a month and planning to spend tens of billions of dollars building the Colossus 2 data center, dragging two billion dollars from SpaceX in his desperate quest to burn as much money as possible for no reason. This is the age of hubris - a time in which we are going to watc…$

21 210 1.2K

Reposted by dmarthal

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 3d

I figured out a uv recipe for running tests for any project with pyproject.toml or setuppy using any Python version:

uv run --python 3.14 --isolated --with-editable '.[test]' pytest

I've wrapped it in a uv-test script:

uv-test -p 3.11

Full details here: til.simonwillison.net/python/uv-te...

setup.py

1 6 73

Reposted by dmarthal

Aki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · 6d

I'm looking for a doctoral student with Bayesian background to work on Bayesian workflow and cross-validation (see my publication list users.aalto.fi/~ave/publica... for my recent work) at Aalto University.

Apply through the ELLIS PhD program (dl October 31) ellis.eu/news/ellis-p...

ELLIS PhD Program: Call for Applications 2025

The ELLIS mission is to create a diverse European network that promotes research excellence and advances breakthroughs in AI, as well as a pan-European PhD program to educate the next generation of AI...

ellis.eu

32 40

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 6d

@dabelcs.bsky.social

1 1

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

🤦‍♂️ i am actually following him 🤣

1 1

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

I mean it is Politico so take it with a grain of salt, but it is demonstrably clear that he didn't want to prosecute and hence only indicted through public pressure: www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Missteps

Blame Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell and the Supreme Court.

www.politico.com

1 3

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

lol I with I chose it! alas I just read the papers...IDK if he is on bluesky tho

2 1

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

Two things can be true at the same time? In fact, Ill say 3 things can be true: SCOTUS fucked us, Garland slow walked the investigation and The Republicans didn't clean their own house. There is enough blame to go around, it isn't an either/or thing.

2 1 12

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

There was a TalkRL podcast with a researcher from DeepMind: David Abel. They discussed exactly this. It is known as the model plasticity empowerment tradeoff.

1 1

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

Welp Merrick Garland didn't do shit, and he was Biden's pick so...The Buck Stops Here?

1 10

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 7d

This goes back to Ford pardoning Nixon. Exacerbated by Obama not prosecuting Bush's war crimes.

3 18

Reposted by dmarthal

Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 16d

I sent him an email, since he clearly hadn’t seen it…

To The.Secretary@hq.doe.gov

Dear Secretary Wright,

I saw that you stated in a press conference yesterday that "there is no disagreement with what's in the [Climate Working Group] report."

You probably have not seen our 85+ climate expert review of the Climate Working Group report, which was submitted as a public comment on August 30, but which appears not yet to have been processed for posting on Regulations.gov. You can find our review here:
https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175745244.41950365/v

As explained at great length in the 450+ pages of our review, the Climate Working Group report currently fails to adequately represent the scientific understanding of climate change, and it would require very substantial revision before it could be relied upon by any federal agency or other entity.

I hope that you find that our extensive expert review adequately addresses the question you raised in your press conference, "If the data and what we've said is wrong- as I read in countless newspaper articles, it's discredited data - what in the climate report is wrong?"

Sincerely,
Robert E. Kopp, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor, Department of Earth and
Planetary Sciences
Rutgers University

1 15 43

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 16d

they are really good! Zoey follows good research practices when figuring out problems. She has a research journal notebook and everything!

1

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 16d

lol you don't know; maybe she is snaking everybody!

1

dmarthal @dmarthal.bsky.social · 16d

Oh you were so close to describing Zoey and Sassafrass...until you got to the dragon. That is Doc McStuffins.

1 1