▲ 149 points
back
120 comments
While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making.
If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.
If you read the article you see that
1. There isn't even a penalty. Journalists literally had to fly drones with thermal imaging to prove the gas turbines were indeed on. Then some non-profits had to use their own money to file a lawsuit
2. Corruption could get even the lawsuit kicked out:
> Enter the Federal Government and the Department of Justice, who pushed the courts to dismiss the suit as a matter of national security, stating that the xAI models were needed for "artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations." So, residents are left without legal means of contesting these developments, barring individual claims and damages.
I was speaking more generally, but yes, in the increasingly dystopian world of the current US administration, it seems to be even easier for certain people and companies to ignore the law altogether.
There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible.
For example, if a data center is illegally running gas turbines, the penalty could be that the data center must be shut down for 3 years and no equipment can be removed from the data center during that time.
With financial penalties, there's always calculus on whether the penalty is high enough to deter the action. But the only reason they'd want to, for example, use illegal power generators at a data center is to run the data center. Losing access to 100% of the value of that data center for 3 years would make the calculus easy: it wouldn't be worth it for the companies. They'd lose the entire reason for doing it and so much of the capital investment in equipment as it depreciated during those 3 years.
With AI companies believing the market is worth trillions, it's hard to imagine a financial penalty high enough to deter illegal actions. It might need to be in the hundreds of billions - a level which they probably can't pay given their current resources and which governments wouldn't levy. Not that they'll essentially confiscate a data center and its hardware for multiple years as a penalty either.
I agree with almost everything you wrote, but... confiscation and inability to operate at a location (as you suggest as a penalty) still ultimately boils down to a financial penalty for an organisation. It feels especially severe in this case (law breaking by a data center operator) because of the high cost and high depreciation rate of GPUs and supporting hardware.
If you take a different field of business, you can still imagine an organisation making the calculation that operation for a period of time --before their illegality was discovered and then acted upon by the authorities-- would still be worthwhile even if confiscation was the end result. (In some odd cases, this is close to the actual business model.)
If you want to deter hyper-rich companies, you could shift to fining them a meaningful percentage of their annual turnover or even their market capitalisation.
Another school of thought is that punishment should be proportional to the crime or harm.
Something isn't really a big deal, it doesn't make sense to stick it to a company.
This is better at balancing the public interest of legal compliance against the public interest in the product the company provides.
It's basically the same trade-off with set in criminal punishments in general. If we made it it the death penalty for jaywalking or littering, we would have a lot less of it. Seems like a slam dunk right? Why don't we just do that?
> Another school of thought is that punishment should be proportional to the crime or harm.
Maybe harm * wealth. Rich people could be fined proportionally more than poor people. Rich companies (turnover, market cap?) could be fined proportionally more too.
> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027.
This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
The HN crowd that doesn't seem to get it is like that because they're either white collar criminals themselves, or they work for such criminals.
"It's only a crime because it's against the law." - someone, inevitably
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?
Are you really out here stanning white collar crimes? The reason this is ok is because people aren’t angry enough about it? Your comment absolutely boggles the mind.
>we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.
Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.
“Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.
Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements.
> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.
> They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Do we punish other crimes?
I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
>> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".
> unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center
Just a reminder that when you're building a business, having land and a datacenter ready and cannot be switched on, with idle staff, costs the business money.
xAI could only draw 7-8MW from the grid and needed to run 10s of 1000s of H1000s. They shipped in 15 gas turbines as a more permanent onsite power plant while TVA/MLGW worked on expanding the grid supply to 150-300MW.
So you can get upset at musk all you want, but he has a business to run, and waiting for a full grid build out isn't practical.
Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects).
And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.
And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.
Hi all, pleasantly surprised to see my own article posted to HN before I did! I did space to push anything out about this for the most part, so thank you to speckx.
Anyway, happy to see the understanding reception here, I think it's worth continuing to drive home that these data centers have immediate impacts on the areas around them, which are disproportionately minorities and poor.
If you liked this article there's plenty more on my website, and feel free to ask any questions.
I hate to sounds like I'm defending them... but that's like every startup.
Taxi Pendants? Never heard of her
- Uber/Lyft
Gambling laws? Pssht
- Polymarkets
Oh - I was and still am absolutely against Uber's tactics in expanding to cities. I still do not use Uber unless I travel to countries where that's the only option.
Yes, a lot of startups are only successful because what they are doing suddenly isn't illegal anymore because it's being done with an app. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his book Enshittification
Aah yes that scrappy $1.7 trillion start-up.
I think we're far past calling the 7th largest stock on the S&P owned by the richest man in the world a "startup". Startups can't do something like this at scale.
It's been flagged now. Upset too many Elon bots and fanboys.
Intersting that the title was also changed from the current top level header:
>xAI Ignores Laws And Profits: Rules For Thee, Not For Me
To what it is now, as if this is just healthy competition.
Unaccountable flagging is a massive problem here and it's amazing the site doesn't have more protections for astroturfing
Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous
Who cares, Musk will soon solve also those pesky problems by putting data centers in space, it is easy. Also next year FSD but for real this time. /s
solely about the FSD part of your comment. I got a chance to ride in a 2024 edition of the system this year and I was shocked at how good it was. Was it level 5? of course not. But from my very lay understanding of level 3 it seemd to have achieved all that I would have assumed a computer could reasonably do.
You are behind, FSD is already here, my car drove me to work today (fully self driving)
Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas
I don't like Elon Musk.
I don't like Grok or xAI. Or X. Or Twitter before.
I also don't like articles that try to bias readers with irrelevant details:
> This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to:
> Spreading antisemitic slurs and conspiracies while calling itself "Mecha-Hitler"
> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children
> Acting as a mouthpiece for Elon's racist belief in South African white genocide
I stopped reading right there.
Hardly irrelevant. The purpose is establishing a pattern of abusive behavior so this can't be dismissed as a "misunderstanding".
Why would these be irrelevant when they're examples of Musk biasing the LLM? Do you think these things came out of nowhere?
Was part of this incorrect?
Interesting, you encounter a fact you don’t like and just quit reading all together. What a curious way to engage with the world.
I stopped at "f*ck*ss". Irreverent drivel is unserious and a waste of time.
The applications are not tangential, they're an irreplaceable tool the hyperscalers relied on to get us where we are now. Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians. This is like the fundamental principle of effective altruism, which everyone in tech industry leadership used to justify their negative externalities on the way up. Now that they're being asked to show results it's out the window.
I mean, that's the good faith argument anyways. I suspect you don't actually care, and just also believe in South African white genocide etc.
Hard to call them "irrelevant details" when they are facts, and that this data center is specifically used to run this AI for anti-semitic, pro-Hitler, and CSAM content. It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.
What part offended you? The statement of fact?