141–150 of 296 posts
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Depreciation schedule: Tulips: weeks GPUs: 6 years Fiber: 20-50 years Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.
What rail, road or bridge in the US lasts 50 years? The maintenance of rail over 6 years costs more than replacing all the GPUs in a data center, even at their current markup.
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> GPUs do have a use in warfare though. Unclassified public cloud GPUs are completely useless when your warfighting workloads are at the SECRET level or above.
They’re unclassified public cloud GPUs today , much the same as the massive industrial base of the United States was churning out harmless consumer widgets in 1939. Those widget makers happened to be reconfigurable into weapon makers, and so wartime production exploded from 2% to 40% of GDP in 5 years [1]. But the total industrial output of course didn’t expand by nearly that much. I think it’s maybe plausible that p…
Even if private compute was at a level of maturity where you could use it for classified workloads, knowing that the infrastructure is being managed by someone in India or China, securely getting data into and out of that infrastructure is still a mostly unsolvable problem.
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!
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The shovels and labour used to make those things where not depreciated. The GPUs are the shovels, not the project. AI at any capability will retain that capbibilty forever. It only gets reduced in value by superior developments. Which are built upon technologies that the previous generation developed.
Calling the GPUs the shovels is bonkers because a) shovels are cheap, GPUs are not. And b) when you build a bridge the bridge doesn’t need shovels to be passable. Without GPUs, the datacenter is useless, the model is useless, etc. If anything, the GPUs are the steel that the bridge is made of. Each beam can be replaced, but if too many fail the bridge is impassible. A bridge with a 6 year lifespan for each beam is in…
A less literal example is the conquistadors: their shovels were ships, horses, gunpowder, and steel. You can look at Spanish records from the Council of the Indies archive and any time treasures were discovered, the price of each skyrocketed to the point where only the wealthiest hidalgos and their patrons could afford to go on such adventures. I.e. the cost of a ship capable of a cross Atlantic voyage going from 100k pieces of eight to over a million in the span of only a few years (predating the treasure fleet inflation!)
Gold rushes create demand shocks, and anyone who is a supplier to that demand makes bank, regardless of whether its GPUs or “shovels”.
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The shovels and labour used to make those things where not depreciated. The GPUs are the shovels, not the project. AI at any capability will retain that capbibilty forever. It only gets reduced in value by superior developments. Which are built upon technologies that the previous generation developed.
> retain that capbibilty forever Not really. The base training data cutoff will quickly render models useless as they fail to keep up with developments. Translating some Farsi news articles about the war was hilarious, Gemini Pro got into a panic. ChatGPT either accused me of spreading fake news, or assumed this was some sort of fantasy scenario.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The shovels and labour used to make those things where not depreciated. The GPUs are the shovels, not the project. AI at any capability will retain that capbibilty forever. It only gets reduced in value by superior developments. Which are built upon technologies that the previous generation developed.
Calling the GPUs the shovels is bonkers because a) shovels are cheap, GPUs are not. And b) when you build a bridge the bridge doesn’t need shovels to be passable. Without GPUs, the datacenter is useless, the model is useless, etc. If anything, the GPUs are the steel that the bridge is made of. Each beam can be replaced, but if too many fail the bridge is impassible. A bridge with a 6 year lifespan for each beam is in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> retain that capbibilty forever Not really. The base training data cutoff will quickly render models useless as they fail to keep up with developments. Translating some Farsi news articles about the war was hilarious, Gemini Pro got into a panic. ChatGPT either accused me of spreading fake news, or assumed this was some sort of fantasy scenario.
That's GPT4 thinking. New models use tools to look at current events or latest versions, and rely very little on weight knowledge.
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You don't even need to go that far back to run into issues, when I read Pride and Prejudice, I think Mr. Darcy was one of the richest people in England at around £10,000/year, but if you to calculate his wealth in today's terms it wasn't some outrageous sum (Wikipedia is telling me ~£800,000/year). The thing is that the economy was totally different back then -- labor cost practically nothing, but goods like furnitur…
Newsflash, old antique furniture from around that time is still really expensive even today. It was a hand-crafted specialty product, not run-of-the-mill IKEA stuff. If you compare the prices of single consumer goods while adjusting for inflation, they generally check out at least wrt. the overall ballpark. The difference is that living standards (and real incomes) back then for the average person were a lot lower.
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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…
The side effects of spending funds on these mega projects is also something to consider. NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies .
We're a little too early to know if that's the case here too. I do foresee a chance at a reality where AI is a dead end, but after it we have a ton of cheap GPU compute lying about, which we all rush to somehow convert into useful compute (by emulating CPU's or translating traditional algorithms into GPU oriented ones or whatever).
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…
The shovels and labour used to make those things where not depreciated. The GPUs are the shovels, not the project. AI at any capability will retain that capbibilty forever. It only gets reduced in value by superior developments. Which are built upon technologies that the previous generation developed.