alt Hacker News> If the "half a million tons" figure were accurate, a single 1 GW data center would consume 1.7% of the world's annual copper supply. If we built 30 GW of capacity—a reasonable projection for the AI build-out—that sector alone would theoretically absorb almost half of all the copper mined on Earth.
Quickly doing such "back of an envelope" calculations, and calling out things that seem outlandish, could be a useful function of an AI assistant.
Replies
I think this is exactly the thing that should be done by a person without AI, to check what AI is writing.
Nobody on HN is a bigger AI stan than I am -- well, maybe that SimonW guy, I guess -- but the truth is that problems involving unit conversions are among the riskiest things you can ask an LLM to handle for you.
It's not hard to imagine why, as the embedding vectors for terms like pounds/kilograms and feet/yards/meters are not going to be far from each other. Extreme caution is called for.
Using your brain is so vastly more energy efficient, we might just only need half of that 30 GW capacity if fewer people had these leftpad-style knee-jerk reactions.