In short:
Firmus Technologies is building an “AI factory” in Launceston, and plans for two more factories in Tasmania have come to light.
The company is looking to build facilities at Bell Bay in the state’s north and Wesley Vale in the north-west.
What’s next?
Firmus has submitted a development application for the Wesley Vale site and one for the former pulp mill location at Bell Bay.
It’s a data centre. You’re not fooling anyone by giving it a different name.
It’s surreal how seemingly everyone in this article - including the journalist - has adopted the rebranding effort.
It’s not my area of expertise, but this bit also seems like a nonsensical attempt at selling the ‘factory’ rebrand spin:
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but in the context of GenAI, ‘tokens’ are either ‘credits’ used as the billing unit of a GenAI tool (and they aren’t ‘produced’), or they are the (transformed) semantic units of a query/response (e.g. words). They aren’t some kind of fungible resource produced like a good output from a factory to then be used by some other tool as this would imply. Am I misinterpreting the implications of that paragraph? Maybe it’s not deliberate and the journo is just out of their depth?
I’m frustrated with that shit, it is a data centre with all the environmental and humanitarian implications, yet they seem 100% on board with it and with adopting Firmus’ stupid attempt at a rebrand. Great journalism.
This is just more CryptoCurrency.
Tokens are indeed produced, by the tokenizer.
Then they go through the transformer, where they go forward and backwards inside until they pop out as a coherent (depending on the input) reply.
Words > tokens > Transformer > tokens > words.
Looks like a production line to me.
A data centre is where data is stored. This is where data is crunched and analysed and taken apart and put back together to create absolute garbage.
It is a BS factory.