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Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

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Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. Sadly, lots of people out there with the "trust me bro, just need more compute". Hopefully we don't consume all the planet's resources trying.

I reevaluated my priors long ago when I saw that scaling laws show no sign of stopping, no sign of plateau. Strangely some people on HN seem to desperately cling to the notion that it's all going to come to a halt. This is unscientific. What evidence do you have - any evidence - that the scaling laws are due to come to an end?

Why should we have strong priors in either direction? Maybe it will keep scaling for decades like Moore's law. Maybe not.

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#43
post #2

There's no limit to the algorithms. People dont understand yet. They can learn the whole universe with a big enough compute cluster. We built a generalizable learning machine

Not sure if this is satire. Edit: What we have built is a natural language interface to existing, textually recorded, information. Transformers cannot learn the whole universe because the universe has not yet been recorded into text.

Transformers operate on images and a variety of sensor data. They can also operate completely on non-textual inputs and outputs. I don't know what the ceiling on their capabilities is, but the complaint that they only operate on text seems just obviously wrong. There are numerous examples but one is meteorological forecasting which takes in a variety of time series sensor inputs and outputs e.g. time-series temperature maps. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-07897-4

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#44
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. Sadly, lots of people out there with the "trust me bro, just need more compute". Hopefully we don't consume all the planet's resources trying.

I reevaluated my priors long ago when I saw that scaling laws show no sign of stopping, no sign of plateau. Strangely some people on HN seem to desperately cling to the notion that it's all going to come to a halt. This is unscientific. What evidence do you have - any evidence - that the scaling laws are due to come to an end?

Bro the planet is literally experiencing a climate disaster and you think the solution is to create more systems that are misaligned with the planet's ecosystem for humans?

I guess the great filter is a real thing and not just a thought experiment.

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#45
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. Sadly, lots of people out there with the "trust me bro, just need more compute". Hopefully we don't consume all the planet's resources trying.

I reevaluated my priors long ago when I saw that scaling laws show no sign of stopping, no sign of plateau. Strangely some people on HN seem to desperately cling to the notion that it's all going to come to a halt. This is unscientific. What evidence do you have - any evidence - that the scaling laws are due to come to an end?

I’d like to see something that indicates models are getting better without the need for more training data. I would expect most gains are coming from more and better labeled data. We’re racing towards a complete encyclopedia of human knowledge. If we get there that’s only a drop in the bucket of all knowable things.

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#47

I guess gigawatts is how we roughly measure computing capacity at the datacenter scale? Also saw something similar here: > Costs and pricing are expressed per “token”, but the published data immediately seems to admit that this is a bad choice of unit because it costs a lot more to output a token than input one. It seems to me that the actual marginal quantity being produced and consumed is “processing power”, which…

Gigawatts seems like more a statement of the power supply and dissipation of the actual facility. I’m assuming you can cram more chips in there if you have more efficient chips to make use of spare capacity? Trying to measure the actual compute is a moving target since you’d be upgrading things over time, whereas the power aspects are probably more fixed by fire code, building size, and utilities.

Measuring data centers in watts is like measuring cars in horsepower. Power isn't a direct measure of performance, but of the primary constraint on performance. When in doubt choose the thermodynamic perspective.

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#48
post #44
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reevaluated my priors long ago when I saw that scaling laws show no sign of stopping, no sign of plateau. Strangely some people on HN seem to desperately cling to the notion that it's all going to come to a halt. This is unscientific. What evidence do you have - any evidence - that the scaling laws are due to come to an end?

Bro the planet is literally experiencing a climate disaster and you think the solution is to create more systems that are misaligned with the planet's ecosystem for humans? I guess the great filter is a real thing and not just a thought experiment.

I assure you that voluntary meat consumption because "taste buds go brr" is a much bigger problem than AI that results in actual productivity gains (and potentially solve the very climate crisis you complain about.)

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reevaluated my priors long ago when I saw that scaling laws show no sign of stopping, no sign of plateau. Strangely some people on HN seem to desperately cling to the notion that it's all going to come to a halt. This is unscientific. What evidence do you have - any evidence - that the scaling laws are due to come to an end?

The issue people have isn’t some interpretation of scaling laws, it’s whether the planet’s ecology is goi g to be able to sustain this endeavour. I shouldn’t have to say this out loud, but if the environment collapses, we will die, and no amount of “just a bit more scaling bro, just think of the gains” will matter.

People's voluntary dietary choices cause far more suffering and ecological damage than AI, and for much less return or economic output. But you tell people to switch to plant based foods and they lose their shit.

Re: Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

#50

I guess gigawatts is how we roughly measure computing capacity at the datacenter scale? Also saw something similar here: > Costs and pricing are expressed per “token”, but the published data immediately seems to admit that this is a bad choice of unit because it costs a lot more to output a token than input one. It seems to me that the actual marginal quantity being produced and consumed is “processing power”, which…

That these data centers can turn electricity + a little bit of fairly simple software directly into consumer and business value is pretty much the whole story. Compare what you need to add to AWS EC2 to get the same result, above and beyond the electricity.

That's a convenient story, but most consumers' and businesses' use of AI is light enough that they could easily run local models on their existing silicon. Resorting to proprietary AI running in the datacenter would only add a tiny fraction of incremental value over that, and at a significant cost.
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