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> Have you read about the impact of data centers in non-US countries? Building a data center that requires potable water in a drought stricken country that lacks the resources to defend itself is incredibly destructive.

And? Have you read about the impact of ${production facilities} in non-US countries? That's literally what industrialization and globalization are about. Data centers aren't unique here - same is true about power plants, factories, industrial zones, etc. It all boils down to the fact that money, electricity and compute are fungible.

Note: this alone is not a defense of LLMs, merely me arguing that they're nothing special and don't deserve being singled out - it's just another convoluted scenario of multinational industries vs. local population.

(Also last time I checked, the whole controversy was being stoked up by a bunch of large interest groups that aren't happy about competition disturbing their subsidized water costs - it's not actually a grassroots thing, but an industry-level PR war.)

> Man’s best friend > online sex bot.

That's disingenous. I could just as well say: {education, empowering individuals to solve more of their own problems, improving patient outcomes} > pets and trimmed lawns. LLMs do all of these and sex bots too; I'm pretty sure they do more of the former than the latter, but you can't prove it either way, because compute is fungible and accurate metrics are hard to come by :P.





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