China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer

Casey Handmer · 1h 08m · youtube.com ↗

24 korrents from this recording

Casey Handmer did not write this page.

Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

0:01:16 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Building a lot of high-speed rail is not a sign that a country is good at building, it is a sign that it is bad at allocating capital.

Their wordsI would never like hold up a flag saying I'm really good at building highspeed trains. Like that is just a sign that you're really bad at capital allocation.

Interesting
1 min later
0:01:48 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
China's real weakness is not its economy but its geography: it imports almost all its oil across an ocean its navy cannot defend.

Their wordsChina is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.

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0:02:17 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Cheap synthetic fuel made from sunlight and air would help China more than America, because it frees China from the oil it has to import.

Their wordsIt absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.

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3 min later
0:05:21 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
China's advantage in solar manufacturing is neither cheap labour nor a friendlier business environment: the first is gone and the second was never true.

Their wordsso the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.

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1 min later
0:06:32 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The United States could localise the entire solar supply chain, from dirt to finished module, in two years or less if it started today.

Their wordsAnd I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.

Interesting
1 min later
0:07:33 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The binding constraint on the AI build-out is chips, not power, which is why not having a solar panel factory will never be on the critical path.

Their wordsThey're focused on the chips, right? Because they understand like the key bottleneck is the chips, not the solar power, right?

Interesting
3 min later
0:10:48 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Natural gas can power the first gigawatt of data centres a year but not the fiftieth, because every input behind it runs into a supply limit.

Their wordsWe're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.

Interesting
3 min later
0:13:45 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Large captive loads like data centres will go back to building their own power plants, the way aluminium smelters once did.

Their wordsyou're going to have to build your own power plant for them, which is how it used to work. Like if you if you had an aluminum plant back in the day, you would be building your own power plant for it as well.

Interesting
4 min later
0:17:31 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Ten cents of electricity generates a thousand dollars of economic value in AI, so the price of power barely matters to the labs.

Their wordswell their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.

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3 min later
0:20:06 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Solar's growth is not merely continuing but accelerating, and the rate of that acceleration is itself still rising.

Their wordsIt is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.

Interesting
2 min later
0:21:48 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Nobody will finance new gas turbine factories, because paying one off takes twenty years of a market that solar and batteries will already have taken.

Their wordsYou you also don't know like in order to make that money back, you have to then operate that plant at that capacity for 20 years, right? And if I was looking at the same charts as they're looking at right now, I'd say what are the odds that in 25 years time we can produce gas turbines at a price that is relevant in a world where solar is already at its current price and batteries at a price where they're already like you cannot win.

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3 min later
0:25:13 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Within a few years, the majority of newly broken-ground data centres will be mostly solar-powered.

Their wordsSo I think within a few years we'll probably see that like the majority of new DCs that are going in will be mostly solar

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7 min later
0:32:40 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
An off-grid data centre needs nothing connecting it to the world but an optical fibre — no transmission line, no interconnection, no grid at all.

Their wordsBut then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.

Interesting
1 min later
0:33:53 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
A solar-powered data centre can cut its power draw a great deal while giving up very little compute, which is how it survives a run of bad weather.

Their wordsactually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just like you can dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or or um or training.

Interesting
5 min later
0:38:47 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The hyperscalers are not sensitive to the cost of power at all; they are sensitive only to whether power is available.

Their wordscentral takeaway is that is that the hyperscalers are not power cost sensitive they are power availability sensitive

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2 min later
0:40:52 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Tariffs are beside the point in the energy race with China; what is actually costing America is environmental regulation, and Texas is out-deploying California ten to one because of it.

Their wordsIn terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.

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1 min later
0:42:14 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Covering desert in solar panels is good for the desert: it shades the ground, holds moisture, and would pay for reversing desertification.

Their wordsAnd the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves like soil moisture retention. Um there like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it and that would pay for the process.

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1 min later
0:43:40 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
If the industrial stack is not off fossil fuels within ten or twenty years, the country gets poor twice over — the way Britain did when its coal ran out, and again when Florida floods.

Their wordsthe meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way you UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change.

Interesting
5 min later
0:48:13 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The average distance an electron travels between where it is generated and where it is consumed is going to fall radically.

Their wordsSo it's just very clear that like the average distance the electron is going to travel between generation and consumption is going to decrease in the future pretty radically.

Interesting
4 min later
0:51:51 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Every industrial revolution is the same move — routing around a bottleneck — and the bottleneck before ours was the limit of what a human or a horse could digest.

Their wordsAnd the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was uh metabolism, right? It's just like how much like oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for you know their their um their peasant overlord or whatever.

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4 min later
0:55:47 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
An AI as good as a top researcher will not be priced like one, because it competes against the other labs rather than against humans.

Their wordsbecause it's not competing against humans for most of those roles, it would be competing against the other labs, right? And so you'd actually see like the cost pushed down to, you know, a mult a small multiple of whatever the marginal production cost of those tokens is.

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4 min later
0:59:42 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
All a thinking machine needs is a big slab of cheap silicon to make the power and a small slab of expensive silicon to do the thinking.

Their wordsso what you actually need is a big slab of relatively cheap silicon to make the power and then a small slab of relatively expensive silicon to do the thinking.

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2 min later
1:01:39 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The posthuman form is a square metre of silicon the thickness of a sheet of paper, floating in space, carrying one mind.

Their wordsone square meter of silicon like like the thickness of a sheet of paper floating in space that's a future human form that's that's my final form

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2 min later
1:03:11 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
With nearly free solar power, industrial processes optimised for efficiency should be redesigned to use far more power and run faster and cheaper instead.

Their wordsYou can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?

Interesting