Is the Term 'AI Factories' Necessary and Illuminating - or Marketing Hogwash? (msn.com)
- Reference: 0179867802
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/25/0612233/is-the-term-ai-factories-necessary-and-illuminating---or-marketing-hogwash
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-hottest-term-in-ai-is-completely-made-up/ar-AA1OUe4r
"The question is whether it's necessary and illuminating to rebrand AI-specialized data centers, or if calling them 'AI factories' is just marketing hogwash."
> The AI computer chip company Nvidia seems to have originated the use of " [2]AI factories ." CEO Jensen Huang has [3]said that the term is apt because similar to industrial factories, AI factories take in raw materials to produce a product... The term is spreading. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT parent company OpenAI, recently said that he [4]wants a "factory" to regularly produce more building blocks for AI. Crusoe, a start-up that's erecting a [5]mammoth "Stargate" data center in Texas, calls itself the " [6]AI factory company ." The [7]prime minister of Bulgaria recently touted an "AI factory" in his country...
>
> Alex Hanna, director of research at the [8]Distributed AI Research Institute and co-author the book, " [9]The AI Con ," had a more pessimistic view of the term "AI factories." She said that it's a way to deflect the negative connotations of data centers. Some people and politicians blame power-hungry computing hubs for [10]driving up residential electric bills , [11]spewing pollution , [12]draining drinking water and [13]producing few permanent jobs .
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-hottest-term-in-ai-is-completely-made-up/ar-AA1OUe4r
[2] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/glossary/ai-factory/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/live/Y2F8yisiS6E?t=568s
[4] https://blog.samaltman.com/abundant-intelligence
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhIJs4zbH0o&t=783s
[6] https://www.crusoe.ai/
[7] https://www.gov.bg/en/Press-center/News/Prime-Minister-Rossen-Jeliazkov-Bulgaria-is-a-strategic-destination-for-high-tech-investment-in-energy-and-AI
[8] https://www.dair-institute.org/
[9] https://thecon.ai/
[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/01/ai-data-centers-electricity-bills-google-amazon/
[11] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/19/ai-cop29-climate-data-centers/
[12] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
[13] https://www.businessinsider.com/data-centers-tax-subsidies-jobs-ohio-2025-5
AI factories (Score:2)
Is an apt term - raw materials (questions) in, finished products (answers) out - meets all the definitions of a factory
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, if, as you have done, you redefine "raw materials" and "finished products".
Re: (Score:3)
exactly why railroads lost out to trucking - failure to redefine transportation.
In a game where billions are at stake... (Score:3)
...ALL public statements have political or economic motivation
They should all be treated accordingly, with the proper degree of skepticism
Bad spin (Score:2)
No doubt those behind this "rebranding" of AI data centers as "AI factories" think this will improve public perception, but I'm guessing this will backfire.
If AI takes off to the extent the promoters think it will, and eliminates large number of jobs, or has other negative effects such as driving up electricity prices, or just causes societal disruption and enshittification, then branding these buildings as "where the enshittification comes from" seems like a bad idea.
Re: (Score:2)
> where the enshittification comes from
In that case the term "AI cesspool/cesspit" would be apt.
Like everything else involving "AI" (Score:2)
It's bullshit, just like everything else associated with "AI".
But get, these days, you can get far and make billions with complete bullshit, so who am I to judge?
Factories produce and output goods. That isn't happening with data centers. They may produce something, but whatever it is they produce, they're not "goods".
Re: (Score:2)
They do produce one tangible product ... hot air.
A better question (Score:3)
Is whether we should have them in the first place.
Not every technology is good. Especially for the majority of people. And I mean the vast majority like 99%
We aren't talking the occasional supercomputer used to simulate the interaction of drugs or something. These are giant thousand acre data centers designed for the sole purpose of eliminating customer service jobs and white collar jobs in general.
And even if you want to ignore the technological employment following the industrial revolution, the 25% unemployment in the 30s and the world war that followed and all of that this isn't like buggy whips where there was another factory making cars you could go work at.
Try to answer the question, what's going to replace your white collar job when it's automated? You can't even say you're going to go drive Uber that's going away too.
Meanwhile they devour electricity and water. The cost of both will skyrocket to the point where they are unaffordable.
At a certain point you should be asking why we have to live like this? Of course nobody believes they're going to be the one that have their electricity stolen by a data center or their job completely eliminated and their place in society gone.
Crypto factories. (Score:2)
> They use a different mix of computer chips, cost a lot more and need a lot more energy.
Yeah. A lot like crypto mining in the 21st Century. Gonna cost a lot more to finish that gotta-mine-'em-all game of Fuck-e-mon to the end of the blockchain rainbow.
When the AI bubble pops like a wet fart in church, Greed is gonna need a high-paying fallback plan to keep building that nuclear reactor farm for Too Big To Fail.
It's just not correct (Score:2)
It is not manufacturing the product named AI, it is running it.
You could argue that the TSMC lines are an "ai factory", but not the AI running machines.