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.

just fyi the internet archive storage is most definitely in a data center or 3. your hospitals use data centers, schools too. just not at the scale of ai types.