41–50 of 67 posts
So like likes of AWS are spending crazy sums building capacity citing amazing demand they can’t meet. Meanwhile those with capacity are saying hey maybe we don’t need so much and are building cloud businesses to compete with AWS and flood the market with excess capacity. Oh yeah, this is gonna end well.
Hope so. It also would put hardware prices down.
xAI has shown this to be quite lucrative. And it seems to even make some sense - if the contract can be ended on relatively short notice, you basically have the capacity on stand-by if you ever need it yourself (accumulating GPUs is not trivial), but can monetize it if you don't need it. Though it's probably a bad sign generally that you can't capitalize on all the GPUs you've acquired.
How do you know this? Have they released any numbers?
Excess AI capacity? Huh? Wait a minute does that mean they've built more data centers than there's demand for? Oh! How did that happen? Well, I'm a complete idiot, a layman, not even a developer, what do I know about economics and technology...
It’s a hard thing to measure right? Google under bet on demand for their AI infra and left lots of money on the table with Anthropic/ has to buy computer from SpaceX for awhile, Meta over built.
In retrospect, this seems pretty easy for Meta to have done as heretofore they were a single captive customer AI shop.
I'm excited for the opportunities that an abundance of compute brings, even in the absense of AI applications. Big compute is the right direction, if we can afford it. There are always things to simulate or discover or automate in some way shape or form.
Good news. The more providers, the more competition and lower prices. Meta are laying their own sub-sea cables globally at present: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgrgz8271go
In the grim darkness of the AI boom everyone is watching high profitability industries move into areas characterized by having few providers due to incredibly poor margins and high expenses and declare it business genius.
Google Cloud recently told Meta they couldn't supply all the ai compute they want so Meta has no choice but to secure their supply?
https://memeburn.com/google-limits-metas-gemini-ai-access-as...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is the hardware will become obsolete in a few years, unlike the dark fibre (really, rights of way) that provided cheap connectivity for years after the crash.
Do we have any good data on how many of the GPU burn out given hard usage? Are we talkinga bout loosing 50% of the hardware as it fails? Or far less?
Good news. The more providers, the more competition and lower prices. Meta are laying their own sub-sea cables globally at present: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgrgz8271go
In the grim darkness of the AI boom everyone is watching high profitability industries move into areas characterized by having few providers due to incredibly poor margins and high expenses and declare it business genius.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the grim darkness of the AI boom everyone is watching high profitability industries move into areas characterized by having few providers due to incredibly poor margins and high expenses and declare it business genius.
AWS have 35% profit margins. Google Cloud recently told Meta they couldn't supply all the ai compute they want so Meta has no choice but to secure their supply? https://memeburn.com/google-limits-metas-gemini-ai-access-as...
Google, Microsoft and others have separate cash cows. For Amazon, AWS is the cash cow. They can’t afford a blip here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we have any good data on how many of the GPU burn out given hard usage? Are we talkinga bout loosing 50% of the hardware as it fails? Or far less?
It's an inherently different thing. Fibre is infrastructure. It'll still function decades later. GPUs at this scale are consumables. I've heard 3-5 years lifespan before they fail out. This might be a low estimate, but even if you double it - they're 50% of the cost of datacenters. We're flushing entire countries worth of economic value down an Nvidia shaped toilet.
For one thing, I still don't understand Meta as a business. It seems like Zuck refused to accept owning a boring ad business and keeps trying to act like a tech business. For another, this seems like a move that happens when the bubble pops. The dotcom bubble went from having tons of business raising fortunes on the promise of business models the internet unlocks to having few internet businesses left at that scale a…
The difference is the hardware will become obsolete in a few years, unlike the dark fibre (really, rights of way) that provided cheap connectivity for years after the crash.