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Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

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Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#151

Post by AngryData »

jhide wrote: post #123
wr2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the topic of warfare, wars are fought differently now. Compute will be mentioned in the same breath as total manufacturing output if a global war between superpowers erupts. In highly competitive industries this is already the case. Compute will be part of industrial mobilization in the same way that physical manufacturing or transportation capacity were mobilized in WWII. I’m not an expert on military computing b…

There are plenty of military uses for computing, but I also find it hard to believe anything but a handful of datacenters are or could be a major factor in anything but a completely 1 sided war. They are very vulnerable targets that are easy to locate and require large amounts of power and cooling. I also just don't see the application, encryption capabilities far exceed the compute available needed for decryption and computing precision and speed with even 20 year old tech far exceeds the precision of anything you would want to control. Even with tangible banefits, say 10% more or less casualties than there would be otherwise, in an exchange with anything resembling a peer military force im not sure it matters because everybody already loses.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#152

Post by contingencies »

nullhole wrote: post #114
wisemanwillhear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something" - Mitch Hedberg

Also, if you have huge amounts of fresh water and a tropical climate... you can get three harvests per year. Unlike most staple crops.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#155

Post by PunchyHamster »

delusional wrote: post #149
gravypod wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day 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).

I think there is little chance it is a "dead end", it's here to stay but at least LLMs seem to have hit the diminishing returns curve already, despise what investors might think, and so far none of the big providers actually makes money for all that investment

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#156

Post by PunchyHamster »

zozbot234 wrote: post #146
kennywinker wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GPUs don't really have six year lifespans, though. The hardware itself lasts far longer than that, even hardware that's been used for cryptomining in terrible makeshift setups is absolutely fine for reuse.

In context of datacenter using AI workloads, it's cheaper to replace them after few years with faster, more energy efficient ones, because the power cost is major factor

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#157

Post by m_mueller »

delusional wrote: post #149
gravypod wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day 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).

e.g. the climate models that could be run on some of these systems would dwarve anything we’ve been able to do so far.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#158

Post by tim333 »

boxedemp wrote: post #134
therobots927 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the AI fanatics claimed that AI would solve cold fusion, making that whole thing moot. The only problem is, if AI doesn’t solve cold fusion, we’re back to square one. And a few trillion dollars in the hole.

If we're counting, the USA was already pretty deep in the hole. Anybody that has experienced crippling debt understands there's a point of no return where you just embrace it. And that point is right before rock bottom.

Government debt is different - mostly gets inflated away.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#159

Post by herbst »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #79
timmg wrote: post #3

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!

> Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big *'n deal the railroads were! It also makes it more dramatic, consider the programs on the list and what they have in common. * The Apollo program. A government-funded science project. No return on investment required. * The Manhattan Project. A government-funded military project. No return on investment required. * The F-35 program. A government funded mili…

European railroad bubble failed?

Can you explain that? I really have no idea what you are referring to?

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#160

Post by tim333 »

rcxdude wrote: post #53
therein wrote: post #5

I really dislike the term hyperscaler. Comes off very insincere. They came up with it themselves, didn't they? What's the official definition supposed to be now? Companies that are setting up as many GPU/TPU server clusters as possible for a demand that's yet to exist?

Hyperscale exists as a term pre-LLM-hype. It mainly exists to describe the kind of datacenteres that companies like google and amazon have been building for at least a decade now: very large, very highly integrated and customised hardware, with a focus on cloud deployment and management strategies. This is to distinguish from just a large datacenter built with commodity server parts from a set of vendors (i.e. the ki…

Some history: https://ocient.com/blog/the-history-of-hyperscale-in-computi...

>The term “hyperscale” first emerged in the late 1990s, heralding a paradigm shift in the world of computing. It was primarily used to describe the awe-inspiring scale and capabilities of data centers...

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