101–110 of 296 posts
This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
Tulips: weeks
GPUs: 6 years
Fiber: 20-50 years
Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years
Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…
Also railways would always have alternative uses at that time - e.g. logistics in warfare. What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol In addition to your points, this is why I always laugh when people do backward comparisons. What characteristics do they share in common? Very little.
Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions.
Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective.
FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them). I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it ha…
I agree that AI will probably have bigger effects that we could possibly predict right now. But unlike past booms/bubbles, I suspect the infrastructure being built now won't be useful after it resolves. The railroads, interstate system, and dotcom fiber buildout are all still useful. AI will need to get more efficient to be useful as established technology, so the huge datacenters will be overbuilt. And almost none o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them). I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it ha…
And I'm not an AI doomer, but hell no, give me another space program/station over this every single time and pretty please. We are not pioneering new engineering science or creating a pipeline of hard research and innovation that will spread in and better our everyday lives for the decades to come. We are overbuilding boring data centers packed with single-purpose chips that WILL BE obsolete within a couple years, fo…
Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI. They can converse in natural language, recall any common fact off the top of their heads, do research online and synthesize new information, translate between different human languages (and explain the nuances involved), translate a vague hand wavey description into working source code (and explain how it works), find security vulnerabilities, and draw SVGs of pelicans on bicycles. All in one singularly mind-blowing piece of tech.
The age of computers that just do what you tell them to, in plain language, is upon us! My God, just look at the front page! Are we on the same HN?
This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)
For some reason this reminds me of people at work who walk up and say we did x bazillion things in n time, and then pause and expect us to express shock at how amazing that is and how much more productive they are than other teams. So what. Without a proper comparison to something equivalent I can't evaluate whether it's exceptional. I could treat each molecule as a thing and tell people how incredibly many things I…
Further evidence that the US, for whatever reason, lacks basic ability to rationally use resources.
This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that once built, railroads provided economic value right off the bat. I would love to hear about the economic value being generated by these LLMs. I think a couple years is enough time for us to start putting some actual numbers to the value provided.
Equating this buildout with LLMs is also a category error. Waymo (self-driving cars) depends on the same infrastructure, and there are a variety of other robotics programs which are actually functioning, you can see them in operation. They all require a lot of GPUs to train and run the models which operate the robotics.
This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)
regardless, it's true that AI-related spending is the largest mobilization of capital in history
This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…