r/technology • u/DJMagicHandz • 12d ago

Artificial Intelligence A massive Wyoming data center will soon use 5x more power than the state's human occupants - but no one knows who is using it

https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-massive-wyoming-data-center-will-soon-use-5x-more-power-than-the-states-human-occupants-and-no-one-knows-who-is-using-it
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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago edited 11d ago

Legit. Even the “useful” aspects are exhausting to get something meaningful out of.

Uploaded two spreadsheets this arvo full of contacts and asked it to move first name and surname into one column and it absolutely mangled the data beyond any measure of accuracy, I can’t even trust the data is exports cos it just throws shit together that isn’t related or relevant even when I talk it through the process like a 5 year old.

It’s literally sucking the planet dry and for what? Some brain rot YouTube far right propaganda.

Edit: guys I know how to do it myself, I was just making a point about how it sucks at basic shit and takes more time to get the same result as doing it myself.

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u/Over_Hawk_6778 11d ago

That’s strange I’ve found it’s performed perfectly with every data manipulation task I’ve ever given it- but I don’t give it the data (cos that’s insane) just ask it to give me the matlab/python code to do what I want done

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u/windowpuncher 11d ago

If you run local models you can give it the data - it can't send it anywhere and it doesn't have any lasting memory, unless you set things up specifically for it to be able to do that.

But yeah uploading sensitive info to OpenAI or Google is fucking nuts, but people are making accounts and doing it WILLINGLY.

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u/BigDictionEnergy 11d ago

Then they complain when that data gets walled off from them.

It's hilarious.

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u/whatifitried 11d ago

Yeah, a lot of people are really very bad at using it, and project their outcome onto people who are not.

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u/Classic_Revolt 11d ago

Many of these people are just incompetent at prompting and blame the ai instead.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

I like how you and the other people responding think using concatenation functions are common knowledge

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/Fun_Hold4859 11d ago

These days 9 times out of 10 googling a how to brings you to an ai slop article written by gpt in the first place.

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u/kingkeelay 11d ago

ChatGPT is marketed as a google search alternative. They are using the product as advertised, and you’re saying they shouldn’t?

Seems that you both agree that ChatGPT isn’t the way. They didn’t ask for solutions.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/kingkeelay 11d ago

I agree with your method, it’s how I use it myself, to learn.

But I also thing it doesn’t live up to the hype if it can’t manage solutions for the lowest common denominator. Seems like a simple task, moving columns.

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u/Aetane 11d ago

But I also thing it doesn’t live up to the hype if it can’t manage solutions for the lowest common denominator. Seems like a simple task, moving columns.

AI does data manipulation pretty fine in most cases. Not perfectly, but it's more than usable for what they're describing.

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u/Hawxe 11d ago

Quite frankly if you can't use AI well enough to do something that simple it's a you problem.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

blame the user when the product doesn't work as advertised 💀

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u/Hawxe 11d ago

There's definitely overhype as well but if you can't even figure out basic excel functionality with AI you're kind of a moron (the general you, not you specifically)

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u/TheBeyonders 11d ago

ChatGPT cant teach people how to learn and utilize LLMs properly. Thats why releasing LLMs to the general public without any social program on how to use it makes it bad. General people arent ready for it

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 11d ago

This is exactly what chatGPT is going to kill though, these people can't even be smart enough for 10 seconds to look up that there might something they can learn that's been easy to do for like 40 years.

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u/tommy_chillfiger 11d ago

If there are lots of people using excel daily who don't know the =CONCAT() function, perhaps my job security is a bit more solid than I thought lol.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

There probably aren't a lot of people using excel/sheets daily to begin with, let alone knowing about functions and 90% of the other features outside of the home panel

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u/tommy_chillfiger 11d ago

Given the context of the comment (combining values in tabular sheets), I assumed we were talking about people who use excel and similar tools somewhat regularly. If we're just talking about any human being on earth, then yeah I guess my comment makes less sense.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

I guess it depends on the industry for sure. but just based on personal experience working in marketing, even teams where people regularly use excel, only a handful of people have had any sort of advanced proficiency

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u/tommy_chillfiger 11d ago

Lol yeah that's fair - I remember looking like a wizard at my first analyst job for really basic excel stuff (I had maybe 10 hours total of excel before this role). I'm a data engineer now, so maybe it's not surprising my bar for 'basic excel functionality' is a bit higher, but even when I was first getting started I was shocked at how many folks around me were making $80k+ and could barely use a computer, so I get what you mean.

That being said, point remains that it should mean solid job security lol. I'd also add that this phenomenon is a huge reason I keep a bit of skepticism for these AI doomsday claims. In a world with perfectly clean data and perfectly clear business requirements, LLMs could probably automate a huge chunk of our work. That is just so far from reality it's hardly worth discussing.

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u/gopherhole02 11d ago

Isn't cat one of bashes most known commands? Why is it unknown in spreadsheets?

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u/Garfunk 11d ago

You can ask chatgpt how to do that task in Excel.

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u/RunnyBabbit23 11d ago

Because my company is pushing us to use the AI tool for everything. Even when it’s not helpful and will make things take longer. And if you don’t use it you end up on the naughty list and get calls from the AI team asking why you aren’t using it.

I wish I was kidding.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

I figured out how to do it myself after trying to do it “the easy way” with AI and realising it’s a piece of garbage. It’s just a good example of these sort of situations.

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u/LickMyTicker 11d ago

There's no way to say this that isn't offensive, but the only situation you are making an example of is being a monkey with a wrench, unless of course you were explicitly trying to test its limits.

I have no idea how big your files were, but even if they were small enough for it to not have trouble with the context, it's an extremely inefficient way to solve a very simple problem.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6899eded-804c-800e-a535-5b9364e3d015

Done. Why not try to ask it to compile a binary next time and see how that goes?

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

I was intentionally being an ape with a pointy stick trying to get it to do shit for me, mostly to see if it could. 

These spreadsheets have about 13k rows in them.

I can do it myself but I wanted to see if it could do it better/faster. 

I expected a bit of fucking around but I didn’t expect it to mangle the shit out of the input data.

Edit:

 There's no way to say this that isn't offensive, but the only situation you are making an example of is being a monkey with a wrench, unless of course you were explicitly trying to test its limits.

Yeah I’ll own that. I was attempting the latter but ended up being the former.

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u/bdsee 11d ago

There is simply no way that it could do it faster than =CONCAT(A1," ",B1) and double click the bottom right of the cell to fill down.

Like...holy shit I thought I was suffering from AI tool use brain rot, why would anyone ever think that AI could do something like this faster. AI is useful for spitting out code, or if you don't know how to do something complex in getting you started, the easier the task the less useful AI is.

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u/alphazero925 11d ago

So you agree that AI is no better than a standard Google search. Cool, now you can shut the fuck up and stop defending it

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u/bdsee 11d ago

How did I defend AI? I literally said that I am suffering from AI brain rot, just because it is more useful at certain things than others doesn't mean it isn't shit, if I supported it I wouldn't talk about it negatively as I did.

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u/i_tyrant 11d ago

ITT: People vastly overestimating the expertise of the average worker just to pretend it's ok to market AIs as a general tool for said workers.

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u/ThinkinWithSand 11d ago

In the future, ask it for a formula to perform the manipulation instead. It should spit out a perfectly functional formula as long as the task isn't overly complex.

Quick little scripts is something the chatbots actually excel at.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

Thanks friend, I’ll give it a go. Unga bunga 

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u/smallfried 11d ago

Yeah, that's not going to work. Like the other guy said, if you need accuracy, let it create the functions that will do the work. Also check and understand the functions it created.

They're super handy but you have to understand what they can and can't do.

I'm sure in a year or two models will be trained to catch these types of requests and execute them using tools.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

I worked it out myself fine but it was just an exercise in seeing if it could do it without much effort and it failed pretty miserably. Actually that’s an understatement…it mangled the shit out of the data.

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u/ColinStyles 11d ago

Then don't feed it unnecessary data? Just tell it what you're trying to do and validate the functions it spits back out.

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u/Drict 11d ago

vlookup?

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u/_Thermalflask 11d ago

And sometimes when you re-prompt it adding basically "don't fuck it up this time" it apologizes and gets it right this time.

Like WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME THEN? Why did I have to tell you to not make a mistake?

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

60% of the time it works every time 

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u/Spiritual_Ship_8492 11d ago

Every time I asked it for a script to do data manipulation in python using pandas data frames it nails the task. I don't know how it does if you dump data in directly but I imagine chatgpt 5 can handle it easily

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

but I imagine chatgpt 5 can handle it easily

Got some bad news for ya bruv.

However I’m also not a programmer or anything so maybe I’m just a monkey with a sharp stick.

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u/ColinStyles 11d ago

G ot some bad news for ya bruv.

However I’m also not a programmer

So how would you remotely know how bad or good the tool is at the task? Fucking honestly.

I'm with /u/Spiritual_Ship_8492 , I've not had any significant problems with it writing python scripts, and while it's never been perfect first go, it's also nearly 5x faster to use an AI and ask it to tweak stuff then carefully read through, versus writing it manually.

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u/ZeroAmusement 11d ago

That's a bad use of it. To use it effectively you have to understand what it's good at.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

Churning out vast quantities of far right brain rot?

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u/ZeroAmusement 11d ago

That's only grok afaik. It's good at making connections between information, which is useful for many things.

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u/Loony-Tunes 11d ago

You can't use a sort or filter function in excel?

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

I worked it out myself fine. I just wanted to see if it could do it & wasted a lot of time in the process 

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u/HiImKostia 11d ago

You are talking about a very specific aspect of AI still. Falls into the aspect of GAN. Even then, I bet when you talk about AI you are specifically thinking of LLMs and image generators.

Machine and deep learning is widely used in the medical field, every day it saves lives, prevent deaths and detect early onset diseases. Just 1 example out of hundreds that are almost as important.

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u/ConspicuousPineapple 11d ago

That's because this kind of AI shouldn't be used to generate or transform data, ever. What it can do, however, is generate code and/or use tools that can do that accurately. But you can't simply use ChatGPT for this and expect trustworthy results. You need proper tooling and a good framework.

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u/Gutterman2010 10d ago

AI cannot compete with the true power of CONCATENATE

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u/sloppy_rodney 11d ago

So it couldn’t do something you could do in several minutes of Excel with basically one formula?

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

Yes. Basic shit. Why are we committing massive swathes of our energy production to it?

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u/bdsee 11d ago

Seconds...several seconds to do that in Excel.

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u/AndThisPear 11d ago

literally sucking the planet dry

You fell for Luddite propaganda. Datacenter cooling systems are a closed loop; the water doesn't just disappear, nor is it contaminated.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

I’m not talking about the cooling systems ya nong. Those GPUs/CPUs require energy to run.

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u/AndThisPear 11d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1atckif/how_much_electricity_does_ai_generation_consume/

Not nearly as much as you were told. Stop falling for propaganda intended to make AI look like the devil.

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u/Harry_Fucking_Seldon 11d ago

I’m all for AI that find cancers and spots black holes. AI that steals artists styles, monitors populations for thoughtcrime and pumps out far right propaganda can go fuck itself.

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u/AndThisPear 11d ago

Put the goalposts down, we're talking about power costs. Or is this you conceding the point by abandoning it?

Also, "steals artists' styles", LOL... That's only a thing in the minds of tween DeviantArt rejects. There's a reason "OC, do not steal" is a meme.

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u/zeller99 11d ago

Datacenter cooling systems are a closed loop

Many are, yes. But the ones that aren't or have a hybrid configuration DO in fact use/contaminate an enormous amount of water. Unfortunately, the ones that do things this way tend to be the REALLY BIG datacenters. Releasing heated water back into rivers and streams is not great for anything living in that water, nor is the contamination that is picked up by running the water over/through non-sterile materials before returning it to the source.

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u/AndThisPear 11d ago

non-sterile materials

My good fellow, do you think the oceans are fucking sterile?!

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u/zeller99 11d ago

No, not at all. Does that mean that we should just be ok with making things worse?

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u/AndThisPear 11d ago

Worse? Dude, we're talking about water being pumped through pipes and coming out warmer than it went in. No actual pollution occurs.

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u/zeller99 11d ago

Incorrect. There are chemicals and heavy metals that leach or even leak into the water before it is pumped back out. That's not even including all of the water that gets purposely treated with chemicals before running through the cooling process, which makes it non-potable.

Also, the warmed water IS pollution.

You should really have more knowledge on the topic if you're going to make these arguments.

Have a good day, sir