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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

#531

Post by eightysixfour »

root_axis wrote: post #361
blactuary wrote: post #308

Writing this: > In comparison, SpaceX/xAI are incredible at building datacentres on time. The original Colossus 1 datacentre was built in 122 days. Musk's empire does have a huge advantage in really understanding how to plan, build and execute enormous infrastructure projects quickly Without even mentioning that it was done illegally and the air pollution they are creating with gas turbines is wildly irresponsible

Interesting that Anthropic doesn't feel that leasing an illegally powered data center is a risk to their business operations or brand.

It definitely did brand damage for me but my alternatives are running low.

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

#532

Post by nonethewiser »

olyjohn wrote: post #96
irishcoffee wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you've described "investing with a hope for a profitable return" which is usually the point of investing. Circular investing is a thing that is happening with all of these companies related to language models. Google hoping for a ROI isn't a great example of that.

Since when is leasing capacity in a datacenter considered investing?

>Since when is leasing capacity in a datacenter considered investing?

You misunderstand. The comment notes Google's initial shares, which is referring to a roughly 6.1% stake in SpaceX.

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

#534

Post by mcmcmc »

declan_roberts wrote: post #492
xnx wrote: post #42

Same idea expressed by a commenter here 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48426082

As an investor it's really important for me to see this kind of bearish sentiment widely. It's actually a positive for the stock in my opinion, not a negative.

Those are the worlds of a cult member, not someone who makes responsible financial decisions. I hope you don’t have anyone depending on you

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

#535

Post by [deleted] »

leetharris wrote: post #15
hawkice wrote: post #2

They have developed an LLM, so they are an AI lab, but the quality of that model suggests they're not a frontier anything.

I have the pro account for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. They all have various strengths and weaknesses. My favorite is still ChatGPT, then Gemini/Claude, then Grok. Grok often feels 1-2 generations behind the competition in general use, but it has three things that I love: 1. It seems to be the best at understanding current events. Maybe due to X integration, or some other tool call optimization in the backend?…

[deleted]

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

#538

Post by ben_w »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #485
ben_w wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Musk has a lot of money for that, too, if he wanted.

Also, well before then, most of the bigger petrostates got together to create OPEC, raised prices enough to cause an economic crisis and stagflation. I don't doubt that big oil companies have bribed and/or SuperPACed and/or lobbied, but fact was, until the mid 2010s (exact year depending on where you live), renewables were more expensive than oil. Now PV and wind are both cheaper. But before renewables were cheaper they were a very hard sell, while "support oil and coal because power is critical" was a very easy sell.

Right now, space data centres are a hard sell even economically, but given most of the land area of the world isn't the USA, I can easily imagine the US not caring (because even what survives re-entry mostly won't end up in the US), while everyone else can care as much as they like but can't do anything about it (unless I'm right about a completely unrelated topic, which is that we're pretty close to ground-to-orbit laser weapons being viable).

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

#539

Post by ben_w »

fluidcruft wrote: post #482
ben_w wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

> 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.

Well, people need to eat, so either the customers are on government support, or it comes from passive income, or from savings.

The people without those options, do it the old fashioned way: pick berries, throw rocks at animals, rub sticks for fire to cook them, or starve. Mostly starve, as the maximum number of humans who can survive as hunter-gatherers is 100-1000x smaller than the current global population.

> UBI ultimately seems like socialism with extra steps.

I agree. It's very much "from each according to their ability, oh wait we're all strictly worse than machines I guess that's from each nothing, to each according to their needs".

> Mostly is comes across as billionaires desperately begging for an alternative to being nationalized.

Perhaps, but that feels like claiming they're playing 5D chess, when Zuckerberg only plays Settlers of Catan with sycophants who let him win.

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

#540

Post by grim_io »

bottlepalm wrote: post #11
hawkice wrote: post #2

They have developed an LLM, so they are an AI lab, but the quality of that model suggests they're not a frontier anything.

Grok isn't at the front of the frontier, but they are there for sure.

As much as the Chinese models, so not at all.
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