Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. Unfortunately, that's not how capitalism makes decisions.
Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market. If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.
xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
491–500 of 580 posts
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#492Same idea expressed by a commenter here 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48426082
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. Unfortunately, that's not how capitalism makes decisions.
Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market. If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.
Capitalism provides a set of incentives that shape how people make decisions. Anyone can be selfish, but selfishness in capitalist society has a particular shape. To ignore the external incentives when looking at human behavior is horribly naive and shortsighted, but is frequently done by capitalism-apologists who seek to disregard any criticism of their favorite incentive system.
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also feel that the GPU/NPU value does not lose money as fast anymore. What I am wondering though is how long can you run such a system at basically full load without interruption before it starts to just physically degrade. If I have a H100 and I let it run for 4 years at full throttle does it still have the same theoretical value as it had at the start or are the chips just burning out. I think I remember that bac…
Quite the opposite, GPUs running at a stable rate degrade less than GPU that continuously hit highs and lows (like it would happen on a gaming rig).
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...
Others say that moderate load means a lifespan of ~5 years
Not sure what that means but I would assume that a datacenter will start replacing a node once the error rate hits a certain threshold without really investigating why it failed, so the practical lifespan may be shorter than 5 years even if it would technically still be usable enough
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's the default assumption but in the new GPU+Memory constrained age isn't true. Is it an age or a temporary situation?
Memory is unlikely to drop in price before mid-2027 when new capacity starts to come online. The GPU shortage looks to be even longer lived.
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#496AFAIK the Colossus data center was more or less "brute force" when it comes to building a datacenter fast -- ie it was very expensive and they cut some pretty ugly corners (their generators are "temporary" to get around regulations, but I don't see how they can possibly be "temporary" and they create a massive amount of pollution compared to other power sources). The reason I point that out is the article mentions th…
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…
Ahahaha. Just like when he marshaled resources to buy Twitter?
More like he just cracked the whip, and the actual smart people worked day and night to figure it out, or else they’re fired.
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#497I 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…
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compute is also a rapidly depreciating asset. I want to make a comparison with a car rental business and say that it would be like valuing Hertz entirely on the basis of the number of cars they own, as opposed to how many they rent out, but cars have a much longer depreciation period, if there are no customers they’re not costing you more money, unlike your computer which you are using for training and sucking up mas…
Compute is about to come an appreciating asset in the near-term, and it some ways it already is. The frontier labs are shifting from pricing grounded in the price of compute, to pricing grounded in the intelligence provided, or more specifically the economic value of that intelligence downstream. The margins on that allow them to pay a hefty premium on compute and still come out ahead. As they buy more compute at hig…
In the medium term, everyone ramps up production. Huawei and other Chinese companies work really hard to develop in-house alternatives. At some point, the hype cycle will peak and less money will flow into datacentres (yes, this will happen. It always does. Even for technologies that change society. The bubble always bursts).
The question is not if this will happen. It will happen. It's just a question of when it happens and how big the magnitude of the cycle is.
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, that’s an argument against the typical passive, broad market, market cap weighted fund like VTI or SPY. But there are many funds that have different strategies, both passive and active. Such as by investing based on value, quality, dividends, etc. I get that the average person doesn’t know this, but the 401k doesn’t inherently force somebody into broad market funds.
When you destroy pensions by crushing organized labor, create 401k incentives, and place your new captive audience by default into a certain investment class, a whole lot of people are going to leave it there. Whether the provider forces anyone to do anything is irrelevant, it creates second order impacts that ultimately lead to what is perhaps the greatest attempted fleecing in market history
I think the main problem with the 401k is that not enough people actually contribute to one. Or they don’t put in enough.
But I very much doubt the average person who’d invested enough over several decades in a 401k feels like they got fleeced.