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Grok Code Fast 1

(x.ai)
504 points Terretta | 17 comments | 29 Aug 25 13:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.728s | source | bottom
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Shakahs ◴[29 Aug 25 19:59 UTC] No.45068700[source]▶
Grok are the first models I am boycotting on purely environmental grounds. They built their datacenter without sufficient local power supply and have been illegally powering it with unpermitted gas turbine generators until that capacity gets built, to the significant detriment of the local population.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-gas...

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1. nonethewiser ◴[29 Aug 25 20:23 UTC] No.45068962[source]▶
It would be nice if they could get more power online faster.
replies(1): >>45069032 #
2. Tadpole9181 ◴[29 Aug 25 20:29 UTC] No.45069032[source]▶
Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.
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3. jameslk ◴[29 Aug 25 20:48 UTC] No.45069225[source]▶
China controls 80% of the supply chain for solar and has most of the rare earth magnets needed for wind. Since China is America’s bugbear and containing China’s influence is a bipartisan issue, this was a likely outcome whoever is in office

https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...

Of course, renewables aren’t the only source of energy

replies(1): >>45069250 #
4. burkaman ◴[29 Aug 25 20:51 UTC] No.45069250{3}[source]▶
We don't have to guess what the most likely outcome might have been, someone else was in office 7 months ago so we can just look at what they were doing.
replies(1): >>45069294 #
5. jameslk ◴[29 Aug 25 20:56 UTC] No.45069294{4}[source]▶
Yes, moving away from China
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6. declan_roberts ◴[29 Aug 25 21:16 UTC] No.45069482[source]▶
Solar and wind are not adequate power supply for a data center. You think data centers only run for 8 hours a day?
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7. GrifMD ◴[29 Aug 25 21:22 UTC] No.45069534{3}[source]▶
That's a bad faith argument and you know it. More power is more power. These projects weren't taking away from development of other power plants.
8. gwbas1c ◴[29 Aug 25 21:26 UTC] No.45069583{3}[source]▶
That's what these are for: https://www.tesla.com/megapack
9. hkt ◴[29 Aug 25 21:42 UTC] No.45069731{5}[source]▶
Not, one assumes, from renewables.
10. namibj ◴[29 Aug 25 22:17 UTC] No.45070055{3}[source]▶
They're VERY suitable for such trivially deferrable workloads as (much of) AI (specifically, LLM pretraining and other similar training).
replies(1): >>45070317 #
11. kelnos ◴[29 Aug 25 22:49 UTC] No.45070282{5}[source]▶
But not at the expense of building renewable energy, as is the current administration's policy.
replies(1): >>45070760 #
12. Jabrov ◴[29 Aug 25 22:54 UTC] No.45070317{4}[source]▶
What makes you think it’s a deferrable workload? Companies don’t buy all that expensive hardware to just have it sit there inactive.
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13. burkaman ◴[29 Aug 25 23:17 UTC] No.45070482{5}[source]▶
Were they "cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant"? That's the "likely outcome" we're discussing.
replies(1): >>45070735 #
14. jameslk ◴[29 Aug 25 23:58 UTC] No.45070735{6}[source]▶
Yes, the US has been scaling back on China-sourced renewable energy supply chains since 2023 at least, with tariffs and by removing incentives

Not exactly your wording at that time, but my point still stands that the outcome was going to be the same because the imports were heavily skewed towards China. This has all been in motion before this current admin

15. jameslk ◴[30 Aug 25 00:02 UTC] No.45070760{6}[source]▶
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-br...

16. namibj ◴[30 Aug 25 01:46 UTC] No.45071227{5}[source]▶
You're conflating two things that shouldn't be:

(1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster.

For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough.

For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.

17. Tadpole9181 ◴[30 Aug 25 02:13 UTC] No.45071350{3}[source]▶
Most people aren't programming or operating heavy machinery at 4AM, either. Most power is consumed in the day, and most AI will be leveraged in the day.