this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
1131 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
60058 readers
2224 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren't going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.
That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.
This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn't a phenomenon unique to data centers.
Sorry, but that's wrong. You'll run it as much as is profitable. If electricity cost goes up, there is a point where you'll stop running it, since it becomes too expensive. Even more so considering that AI models don't have a set goal to reach - you train them as long as you want and can, but training a little bit extra will have diminishing returns after a while.
Not really, the limiting factors in AI training are mostly supply of cards. The cards already in use will stay in use until they fail, they won't be replaced with newer cards the second they get released.
This is comparing apples and oranges, since tire factories:
have long-term planning and production goals to reach
have employees who must be planned
have resource input costs that are higher than electricity
Of course you want the highest utilisation that you can economically reach, but a better comparison would be crypto mining - which also has expensive equipment that has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running, and yet they stop mining when electricity is too expensive.