Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

I don’t want to be all “I told you so” but I have been saying they’re building all these data centers for surveillance reasons for a while now. Like people aren’t using LLMs enough for any reason to justify all the data centers and the numbers aren’t growing, but Surveillance Data? That’s always growing.

They’re definitely not. Hard drives use a fraction of the energy a single LLM prompt does. A study calculated that every 100 words uses an entire water bottle’s worth of water. That’s a lot of cooling for 100 words. It’s very likely that these companies use several gpus for every single prompt, meaning huge servers for just a few users.

Meanwhile the internet archive has archived a significant portion of the internet with nary a data center in sight.

You can compress video. You can’t compress the energy needed to generate output.

All the hard drive do is storing the data, they do need the data centers to comb through them for any patterns they deemed to be a threat to them

Which still doesn’t require as much energy as LLMs do. I run exactly that on my own server at home. And my unifi system does it on video all locally with no GPU at all. Video processing for identification is incredibly cheap and easy from a computer processing standpoint these days. You literally can do it on a raspberry pi.