Post

In his acceptance speech, Lula says he will work to regulate digital platforms in Brazil. “Digital crimes must be dealt with like real-life crimes.” This comes after Meta directly interfered with the Brazilian elections, favouring Flávio Bolsonaro.

And on AI: “I don’t want to depend on Chinese nor American AI. I want to create a Brazilian intelligence.” He also mentioned having Brazilian data centres dealing with our intelligence. “We will no longer be a peripheral country. We want to be central.”

A reminder: Lula’s politics centre the environment, which he mentioned immediately after, so I’m hopeful he’ll thread this issue carefully and with all needed consideration. His current mandate brought down deforestation levels to its lowest numbers since measurements began being taken in 1988.

214 reposts2.7K likes

> His current mandate brought down deforestation levels to its lowest numbers since measurements began being taken in 1988. Helpful visualization ->

Carbon Brief@carbonbrief.org

UPDATED – Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022 ✍️ By @orladwyer.carbonbrief.org and @joshgabbatiss.bsky.social 💬 With comments from @claudioangelo.bsky.social Read here: buff.ly/QqRBFfy

There’s ways to do it right. Heating for homes and other uses from data centre temperature imbalances & power generation. I’m confident Lula will find them.

Lula's call for Brazilian AI sovereignty is significant. But independence from American and Chinese technology is only the beginning. Who controls Brazil's AI infrastructure? Who owns the data? Who benefits from the productivity? Sovereignty must extend to the Brazilian people, not just the state. 🦁

Data centers are pointless, they're not needed. You can LLM models locally if you want them. The only reason the hardware is expensive is because nVidia is keeping supply off the market by forcing the operators to keep buying chips they'll never use. Microsoft and AMD sell devices with local LLMs

Would assume that Brazil would pursue lower cost/power open weight models like China. Some data center use is needed, but part of being lower cost is the reduced need for these massive frontier model data centers. Still not ideal, but also probably not the disaster the US is.

Our per-task cost-vs-quality grid shows the same: on Research Community Selection the top two tied exactly 14.1% of the time, median gap 0.2/10 — the model choice barely moved the result. Cheap good-enough is a real threshold https://post.fronset.ai/55hz3fca

And he centers the environment specifically around the interests of the workers and indigenous communities. It’s not about the environment itself. It’s about the people.

Sure. But he doesn’t lead with the environment. There’s a difference between “save the trees” and “save the trees for our future generations of our people.”

I hope at some point in the evening of his political life he acknowledges that his various successes are due partly to the institutional foundation laid by his predecessor and lifelong frenemy, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.