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xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

martinalderson.com

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Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#481

Post by joefourier »

redox99 wrote: post #314
joefourier wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Anthropic is paying xAI over a billion dollars a month for those out of date GPUs in their first datacentre (H100s being nearly 4 years old at this point). Even A100s are still barely available on the major clouds despite being 6 years old.

And I expect blackwells to hold value even more (already very LLM optimized, and semiconductor processes will slow down).

Yeah most of the performance increases have mostly been from architectural improvements like reduced precision tensor cores. AFAIK FP4 is basically the limit for floating point matmuls, after which you need to switch to integer addition if you want to reduce bits, and I don’t think we’ve figured out 1-bit LLMs just yet.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#482

Post by fluidcruft »

ben_w wrote: post #472
fluidcruft wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything? So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money? But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.

Long term, or short term? Short term, money physically exists and gets spent, so if you wave a magic want of oversimplification and transition all labour to AI instantly, all the money currently in bank accounts and wallets gets spend on the same businesses it was already getting spent on, a lot of which gets spent on stuff from other businesses who have in this scenario also replaced all their labour with AI. Eventu…

I don't know. It just seems odd because money was used as an abstraction of labor and if labor disappears it seems like money has no fundamental value. If you can't pay people to do something (because machines are doing all the labor). Then people have no money and money has no value to people. Industrialization resulted in transition to service-based economy but this new wave of machines are being said to replace service work.

I'm just trying to understand if suppose you have fully robotic farms and fully automated slaughterhouses and fully automated McDonald's, who is McDonald's selling anything to and how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers have jobs? Something just doesn't add up about this in my head about how this equation balances.

UBI ultimately seems like socialism with extra steps. Mostly is comes across as billionaires desperately begging for an alternative to being nationalized.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#483

Post by dan00 »

Dig1t wrote: post #265
jhallenworld wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are no dark GPUs This might not be true. Someone was comparing Nvidia's production rate with known data center capacity, and they do not match. Their conclusion was that people (possibly even Nvidia) were hoarding GPUs- in the very short term this might be a good strategy, but GPUs go EOL fast. There are other stories about paused datacenter builds that match with this. TSMC is definitely fully allocated, base…

All that means is that there's a bottleneck at the data center layer. When he says "dark GPUs" he's saying that there are no dark DEPLOYED GPUs. This is a reference to the 1990's dot com bubble where internet infrastructure companies overbuilt network capacity, leading to the term "dark fiber". That was an indicator of a bubble because it showed that capacity was larger than demand. OP is saying that this is specific…

> IMO none of these things point to a AI being a bubble (over-hyped, demand does not match the stated value). It mostly points to the opposite, there is massive demand for AI and every layer of the supply chain is struggling to keep up with that demand.

Yes, the demand is there for the currently unsustainable price. Lets see what happens when the dumping of money into AI stops and the companies are forced to increase prices a lot.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#484

Post by kranke155 »

WarmWash wrote: post #160
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the big providers are charging full freight for inference. Except they're not. Anthropic's claims of temporary profitability line up exactly with when SpaceX is giving them discounted compute, OpenAI's such a shitfest they threw the CFO off the glass cliff for daring to push back against the IPO. "Profitable on inference" is an unsubstantiated rumour. Just look at the copilot changes. Demand switching to other prov…

>For the investors get their money back and the bubble to not implode, they functionally need to unemploy everyone in the US. More like $75/mo per user for the next 5-10 years if they can get 5% of the global population to pay that.

Can 5% of the population even pay for that? Some kind of huge increase in prices for compute and inference and companies maintaining large bills for AI assistants for key employees or teams (1000-2000$) seems most likely to me.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#485

Post by SiempreViernes »

ben_w wrote: post #477
ForHackernews wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> permitting delays for terrestrial datacentres "Well, you didn't want a data centre in the field near your town, so instead we'll rain astrocentere debris across the western hemisphere and set off a Kessler syndrome cascade. Thank god we didn't have to wait for a permit."

I get the point, but if society cared about globally distributed pollution more than about money, we've have transitioned to renewables and EVs a decade or three earlier.

A lot of bribes have been spent to buy that delay you know, the first global meetings about addressing climate change happened in 1992 and the petrostates have been stalling since then.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#486

Post by [deleted] »

lmm wrote: post #400
emodendroket wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People “personify” their cars but I don’t think because they think cars have human cognition

People are weird about their cars and make major errors in judgement as a result (e.g. we tolerate incredibly high rates of people getting killed because they were "hit by a car", as though the driver had nothing to do with it). Pushing back on that is absolutely worthwhile.

[deleted]

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#487

Post by bob1029 »

I started doing some numbers around the scale of tokens per second we can generate with figures like 300 million watts and I really don't understand the destination anymore. I see that Anthropic is somehow constrained in the news, but that doesn't line up with headlines. Everything seems off by 3-4 orders of magnitude here. I realize there are some users of AI who can burn a million tokens like it's nothing, but these facilities can produce trillions (10^12) per day.

I feel like there is some use case planned here that isn't to be known about until it's way too late to do something about it. Or this is a very serious bubble. One of the two or some really horrible blend.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#488

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #366
frankacter wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two. Colossus is the world's largest single, unified GPU cluster, all GPUs acting as one coherent supercomputer rather than fragmented pools or multi-site setups. They spun it up in a fraction of the time by all estimates. It's not something you can just throw money at and reproduce the results. Per Jensen Huang: "As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that; Elon i…

Yeah, maybe the thing xAI gets is perfect is the enemy of good (enough).

Especially when the line separating “perfect” from “good” is “negative externalities impacting non-shareholder populace”.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#489

Post by tylergetsay »

bob1029 wrote: post #487

I started doing some numbers around the scale of tokens per second we can generate with figures like 300 million watts and I really don't understand the destination anymore. I see that Anthropic is somehow constrained in the news, but that doesn't line up with headlines. Everything seems off by 3-4 orders of magnitude here. I realize there are some users of AI who can burn a million tokens like it's nothing, but thes…

I'd be really interested in seeing your numbers, I've thought about this.

I do feel like there are some use cases which are cost constrained right now, but that area is getting smaller as local models get better.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#490

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #472
fluidcruft wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything? So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money? But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.

Long term, or short term? Short term, money physically exists and gets spent, so if you wave a magic want of oversimplification and transition all labour to AI instantly, all the money currently in bank accounts and wallets gets spend on the same businesses it was already getting spent on, a lot of which gets spent on stuff from other businesses who have in this scenario also replaced all their labour with AI. Eventu…

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