In short:
Firmus Technologies is building an “AI factory” in Launceston, and plans for two more factories in Tasmania have come to light.
The company is looking to build facilities at Bell Bay in the state’s north and Wesley Vale in the north-west.
What’s next?
Firmus has submitted a development application for the Wesley Vale site and one for the former pulp mill location at Bell Bay.
Many AI companies are increasingly looking to Australia to build their infrastructure due to its access to renewable energy
Nice cheap energy to gobble gobble gobble and the puny poor humans can foot the bill.
AI factory
It’s a data centre. You’re not fooling anyone by giving it a different name.
A data centre is where data is stored. This is where data is crunched and analysed and taken apart and put back together to create absolute garbage.
It is a BS factory.
It’s surreal how seemingly everyone in this article - including the journalist - has adopted the rebranding effort.
It’s not my area of expertise, but this bit also seems like a nonsensical attempt at selling the ‘factory’ rebrand spin:
Firmus has said the factory will contain data centre infrastructure and specialised computers that use graphics processing units to produce “AI tokens” needed for tools such as generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but in the context of GenAI, ‘tokens’ are either ‘credits’ used as the billing unit of a GenAI tool (and they aren’t ‘produced’), or they are the (transformed) semantic units of a query/response (e.g. words). They aren’t some kind of fungible resource produced like a good output from a factory to then be used by some other tool as this would imply. Am I misinterpreting the implications of that paragraph? Maybe it’s not deliberate and the journo is just out of their depth?
This is just more CryptoCurrency.
It’s surreal how seemingly everyone in this article - including the journalist - has adopted the rebranding effort.
I’m frustrated with that shit, it is a data centre with all the environmental and humanitarian implications, yet they seem 100% on board with it and with adapting Firmus’ stupid attempt at a rebrand. Great journalism.
Tokens are indeed produced, by the tokenizer.
Then they go through the transformer, where they go forward and backwards inside until they pop out as a coherent (depending on the input) reply.
Words > tokens > Transformer > tokens > words.
Looks like a production line to me.
It would be great if we could normalise not lobotomising society with gleeful, wanton abandon.
Conveniently placed between a power substation and a river. Totally not going to tunnel under either for free resources, no sir.
If they have to build it, they should be forced to build it in Queenstown. Their only allowed water supply should be the Queen River.
They should be forced to neutralise the toxic waste from the mines before they can use the water and there should be strict guidelines on the quality of the water continuing past their “Factory”.
I can assure you that they won’t just dump any toxic slop their facility produce into the river, they’d never! /s
