[ExI] OpenAI Reaches A.I. Agreement With Defense Dept. After Anthropic Clash

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 



 

>  John, you STILL don’t get it.  POTUS is [blah blah blah] 

 

And STILL I receive no answer to my very simple question….

 

What was your simple question please?

 

 

 

 

 

> This is all fair game in war.  The USA is at war.

 

>…Somehow I missed that. Please tell me the date when Congress declared war… Congress has not declared war since 1941.

 

 

Under the war powers resolution, POTUS can bomb Iran.

 

https://news.meaww.com/fetterman-backs-trumps-iran-strike-calls-it-entirely-appropriate-response-to-long-term-threat

 

This does not authorize boots on the ground, which is unlikely anyway.

 

>> We don’t know if the military has covert data centers,

 

>…I am reasonably certain that the military does have covert data centers, but I am even more certain they do NOT have covert AI data centers, except perhaps for ones that are so small that they are not worth a damn…

 

 

> and cannot determine that based on a lack of cooling towers.  Reasoning: the Navy has had nuclear powered carriers and subs since before I was born,

 

>…And the Navy was unable to build a nuclear powered aircraft carrier without anybody noticing. And a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can produce 194 MW of electricity, but an AI Data center in northern Virginia will reach 2,500 MW this year, and even larger ones will go online next year….

 

OK let’s use your numbers.  Imagine you are a commander.  Your boss the captain asks for a proposal for a test facility for nuclear reactors going into a Nimitz class carriers.  Suppose they need 6000 hours of testing before they go aboard.  You want to run a dozen of those simultaneously.  Where would you propose putting that?

 

I have an idea: go out to the existing USNavy property southeast of Fort Davis Alaska.  Arrange to run 20 reactors simultaneously, but don’t use cooling towers.  Use a seawater-cooled condenser.  Twenty of those and the cooling load on the data centers would be about 4E8 W, requiring about 3.6e11 calories/hr or about 1E8 cal/sec.  That means you would need about 100 tons of water per second, assuming the output is 1 degree above sea temperature, but that wouldn’t be necessary.  Let it have a temperature delta of 10 degrees.  Now the flow rate is a manageable 10 tons per second.  Inlet pipe 2 meter diameter, flow rate about 3 m/second in.  

 

Arrange for the outflow be divided into about a dozen pipes diameter of about 60cm, with outlets scattered over an area with a density about as close as Starbucks in a typical California suburb at a depth of about a couple hundred meters.  Water comes in at about 4C, goes out about 14C, very little footprint.  From that, we should be able to run about half a million of those Nvidea GPUs.  They are about $30k each, so $15 billion in processors, which the military could have been buying up without much fanfare or visible footprint already.

 

Compare the cost of that to developing the atomic bomb, which was invisible to Americans.

 

Consider that breeders were run by the Tennessee Valley Authority to produce plutonium in the early 1940s, yet the public was unaware of it.  They knew they were getting electric power cheaply.  

 

>…And how can the military spend $35 billion buying the most advanced AI chips on the planet from Nvidia without anybody noticing? Spike,I'm honestly surprised you're pushing such a ridiculous idea….

 

But it wouldn’t need to be on that scale for what the military wants: to do advanced war gaming and simulations.  It doesn’t need to be equal to Bezos’ effort necessarily.  The military could keep expenditures on the order of 35 billion under cover without too much trouble. 

 

>…I said it before I'll say it again, you don't need a top-secret clearance to use logic….

 

Ja.  But the military has far more capability than you wish to imagine.  They have known about the risk of AI longer than we have, and have far more resources than we do.

 

 

> We don’t know for sure what the government is doing with Amodei,

 

>…Let me ask you this, who do you feel is more trustworthy, a scientist like Daniela Amodei or a politician and former game show host like He Who Must Not Be Named? John K Clark

 

The military is not micromanaged by POTUS.  Only high level direction.  The military has enormous operating budgets which are kept secret for a good reason.  Congress oversees it, but only a select few congressmen who have clearances.  We don’t know what the military is doing in AI.  We can’t assume we know what their capabilities are.

 

John do you know what the US Space Force does?

 

spike

 

 

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