alt Hacker NewsIs there a world where frontier labs move to somewhere else like London to escape the business hurdles of the US? There are trillions at stake, is it a plausible scenario?
Replies
eamag • today at 8:37 AM
They already have offices in London and Zurich, but it doesn't let them to escape anything
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theplumber • today at 8:28 AM
London sucks, not to mention the UK’s political future seems even more nationalistic than MAGA
A world, yes. Plausible, no.
The US is already seeing energy market distortions from the power use of AI; the UK has a much smaller total electricity supply, both from a lower population and the baseline per person being lower.
Total UK demand in 2023 was 316.8 TWh[0], or an average of about 36 GW. The US currently has 33 GW of data centres, and the AI boom plan, so far as discern actual plans from AI hallucinations in the modern web, is about ten times that.
From the scales people talk about, my expectation is that even the smaller additional supply needed for the constant churn of newly trained frontier models would probably exceed what London alone can manage.
[0] generation less than that, it has imports; chapter 5: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a7e14da3c2a...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=316.8+TWh+%2F+year