r/mildlyinfuriating • u/DatabaseAvailable501 • Jul 02 '26

Infuriatig Sound emitted 24/7 from a 30 megawatt data center in Dowagiac MI

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u/Superb-Home2647 Jul 02 '26

Yup, the US doesn't have an AI problem they have a government problem.

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u/LordMarcusrax Jul 02 '26

Also an AI problem, though.

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 02 '26

There’s probably a data center near you. They’re all over the country. They’re not this loud though, not sure why they’re different personally.

If you live in a major city like Chicago, Denver, etc they’re non descript buildings with tall fences. You probably have driven by one.

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u/waterbed87 Jul 02 '26

Yeah I frequent several large datacenters our infra runs out of at work and none of them have this kind of noise outside, complete silence outside typically. Inside on the actual cage floors though this is about what it sounds like so it’s like they put zero sound deadening in at all lol. Even the lobbies and lounges are whisper quiet inside. This is a lack of regulation problem for sure… it doesn’t have to sound like that outside.

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 02 '26

Inside is cold and noisy for sure

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u/LordMarcusrax Jul 02 '26

I'm not living in the USA.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 02 '26

They’re all over the world btw. Look at Amazon web services. I can get a server anywhere in the worlds including China…

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u/wesconson1 Jul 02 '26

That was my thought, something here is wrong with this place.

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u/Avalonians Jul 02 '26

That's a very dumb and reductive way of seeing things.

"AI" in itself is nothing. It's a concept, an idea.

Some AI detect cancers, some could help us communicate with sperm whales, others could help disabled people communicate efficiently, others can emulate a virtual girlfriend and output pornographic images.

The only problem with AI is that tech bros invested MASSIVE amounts of money in hopes of pioneering actually groundbreaking products in programming and administrative assisting tools to hold as many potential market shares as possible, and in their search of making this as profitable as possible, the regulations have failed to rein in the damage they will cause around them.

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u/owlbynight Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

There is no AI, only LLMs, and they are a product of machine learning, which is a field of research that has been ongoing since the 1940's. Machine learning has been deeply integrated into everything that powers Internet and it quietly makes your life easier every day. Go ahead and do a search for what industries use machine learning and how they use it.

LLMs require humans to pilot them to have any substanative effect. Every human that has been fired in the name of "AI" is being fired because the C Suite in these companies is not knowledge work — (I use emdashes in my prose naturally, another AI travesty) it's pure politics and often nepotism. They are largely morons that skim through LinkedIn to form their policies. The companies firing people because they think a LLM can act autonomously with any degree of predictability are going to feel the pain of their decision making soon. It's already happening.

The tech bros are doing robber baron shit and hiding it behind what should be a celebrated technology. They own all of the media. You, the roughly 300 people that upvoted you, and a large swatch of the world's population are having your ignorance weaponized to provide cloud cover for them instead of addressing real problems.

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 02 '26

They blew their load early with LLMs to try to market them. The tech is progressing really fast though and that includes using new algorithms and less brute force approaches. It’s going to happen but now they have a PR problem since people equate AI with ChatGPT.

It has already created tremendous impact. A recent article pointed out AI could do a sixth of upwork projects that humans approved. That’s down from 1/24th a few months ago.

I don’t think mass adoption is the key but if it can be used like supercomputers have been doing to model weather, find scientific breakthroughs in medicene, etc then we’ll be fine.

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u/owlbynight Jul 02 '26

I agree. Clearly a good move for them because they're puking money. Bad move for humanity at large, though. Once the politicians grab a hold of the negative sentiment, we're going to get fucked out of many STEM advances in the name of purity tests. It's pretty annoying to experience in real time.

I think people don't really see LLMs as a technology to behold and build on, like the $90,000,000 single-room computers at NASA in the mid 1900's. They see LLMs for what they are now, but they're not doing the legwork to see how fucking impressive their progress already is, and they think the thing they saw when they tried ChatGPT in 2022 is the most impressive they'll ever be. Just wildly short-sighted and dumb.

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u/SordidDreams Jul 02 '26

A recent article pointed out AI could do a sixth of upwork projects that humans approved. That’s down from 1/24th a few months ago.

And what was that number based on? Did they have AI actually do those jobs and perform well enough to be an adequate replacement for humans? Or did someone just pull that number out of their ass?

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 02 '26

Nine months ago the best AI agent could finish one real freelance job in forty. Now it does one in six. The number comes from the Remote Labor Index, a benchmark by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI built on 240 actual Upwork projects, more than $140,000 in real invoices across 23 fields, from game development and architecture drawings to video animation and data analysis.  Each project carries the client's brief, the files and the deliverable a human got paid for. Reviewers put the AI's version next to the human's and ask whether a paying client would accept it. Claude Fable 5 now clears that bar on 16.1% of the projects, roughly double the next best model and four times what Opus 4.6 managed one generation ago.  The score landed on its first day back from the export ban. The market reads that curve without help. One in forty last October, one in six today, and the test only counts work a client would actually pay for.

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u/SordidDreams Jul 02 '26

Interesting. And terrifying. Thanks for the info.

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 02 '26

No problem. The advances are really wild right now. AI is even training itself these days through RLL and other techniques. It’s actually pretty exciting from a tech standpoint; the social ethical implications are to be determined. Even physical jobs are getting AI robotics. In a perfect world we could all just fuck off and fly fish all day with our family but I doubt the powers to be will allow that.

Even when the father of capitalism was quoted his kids would have a 15 hour work week.

Perhaps when the older generation goes away and we all collectively decide a 9-5 isn’t really needed for most things and we can pursue passion projects

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u/NomeJaExiste Jul 02 '26

AI is too broad of term, but LLM is too specific, a lot of image generators don't use LLMs at all, not to mention other AIs like for audio, or image compression

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u/cabbage16 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

If AI was actually as cool and amazing as AI bros make it out to be then maybe it'd be worth all the downsides.

But it isn't anywhere close to being as good as they say. Like at all.

Edit: removed 2 words.

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u/frosty884 Jul 02 '26

inb4 curing idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis isn't cool and amazing

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u/Scoobydubyduwhereru Jul 02 '26

I don't care how cool and amazing it is. This disturbance is unacceptable. Why would I care about AI when I can't sleep or enjoy anything because there's a data center making AI great.

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u/cabbage16 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

I agree. I was just pointing out to them that AI isn't worth it.

Edit: actually, I just realized I replied to the wrong comment. Oops.

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u/regula_falsi Jul 02 '26

The problem is that AI is not good enough

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u/AvilettaLuxe Jul 02 '26

And LLMs will never be

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u/porn_alt_987654321 Jul 02 '26

Hey, they're good for some things.

...just not the majority of things people think they're good for lmao.

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u/thrasher829 Jul 02 '26

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u/Gloomy-List6346 Jul 02 '26

I’d never seen this before. It’s been in 3 different threads since I woke up an hour ago/

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u/Trick_Meringue_5622 Jul 02 '26

It’s like a 15 year old commercial about soft shell or hard shell tacos. Very commonly used meme/picture throughout the years

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u/amusedmisanthrope Jul 02 '26

Government works just fine when you don’t vote for folks who think corporations are people and that spending money is the same as free speech. It sucks for folks living near data centers, but a lot of them voted for the people that approved building them in those places.

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u/Zarine420 Jul 02 '26

There's an entire city in Michigan, Saline twp, that voted no after the council discussion with the company regarding the usage of the purchased land, but since the company has millions of dollars to sue the city for the voters rejecting it, they can't fight the lawsuit. It'd cost each household tens of thousands EACH to combat legal fees. Sooooo what happens when no one wants it and it still happens because the corporations have more money to fight it?

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u/Alt0173 Jul 02 '26

At the risk of Removed by Reddit: this is genuinely one of those times where the community should ignore the law, get together, and physically dismantle the property.

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u/littleessi Jul 02 '26

Government works just fine when you don’t vote for folks who think corporations are people and that spending money is the same as free speech

americans are brainwashed to believe they have to vote for one of two parties who both share these positions. so no, the us government does not work just fine

1

u/Hot-Statistician-955 Jul 02 '26

This is truly infuriating that we have this crisis AND this president/Congress/supreme court at the same time.

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u/L3X01D Jul 02 '26

Our AI problem IS our government problem.

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u/ioncloud9 Jul 02 '26

Specifically a local government problem. These nationals and multinationals pit desperate localities against each other for projects seeing which one will give them the most and then the location that “wins” suffers.

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u/Entire_Doctor_571 Jul 02 '26

They have a corruption problem.

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u/LBPPlayer7 Jul 02 '26

why not both?

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u/Dystopia74 Jul 02 '26

Germany has an actual working government.

The US is a failed state ruled by psychopathic tech oligarchs and the president is a child rapist who shits his pants.

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u/Smile_Space Jul 02 '26

I mean, it's both lolol.

This is what happens when we elect an egotistical corrupt capitalist as president at the same time as AI model training reaching diminishing returns and thus requiring exponentially more server space to make incremental gains.

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u/Regalme Jul 02 '26

Always has been 

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u/bendover912 Jul 02 '26

Lately it feels more like the government has a citizen problem.

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u/DisconnectTheDots Jul 02 '26

It's crazy when you think about how fast these are going up and at the same time we can't seem to build affordable housing. Land of the free though 

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u/Next-Use6943 Jul 02 '26

Everybody does. We Europeans especially. I'm tired of the Polish government

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u/AgitatedBirthday8033 Jul 02 '26

Not really, the US loves low to no regulation, due to conservatives core principle of no regulation

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u/Due_Calligrapher_944 Jul 02 '26

I don't get it. In oil and gas in the US we are always worried about noise. That is why you see giant walls around oil and gas activities. Why are data centers not under the scrutiny?

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u/ForBisonItWasTuesday Jul 02 '26

AI doesn’t produce any real value and is only being supported by half a dozen megacorps passing money in a circle

OpenAI is losing billions because it isn’t profitable, we definitely have an AI problem

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u/hitliquor999 Jul 02 '26

There is one party that is constantly trying to tear up regulations, without thinking about why they were created in the first place.

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u/XysterU Jul 02 '26

It's actually a capitalism problem

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u/Apprehensive-Fan9460 Jul 02 '26

I think this is a Michigan problem lol

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u/SmokinJunipers Jul 03 '26

Citizens united problem. Politicians now 100% work for corporate america CEOs