61–70 of 121 posts
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End humanity, maybe not. Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.
Worse than voluntarily inviting masses of incompatible cultures into western countries like we're already doing?
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There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?) Training is quite expensive and it does look likely that the American providers have been doing that at a loss. In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in, and 140W is not exactly a huge amount of power (roughly 50¢ per day i…
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?) None of the big providers are profitable. It’s subsidised by overly enthusiastic VCs. > In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in Right, people could. But they won’t, because that’s a bloody expensive computer and they don…
You can look at API pricing on a service like OpenRouter (which isn't subsidised) and see pretty readily that it's not expensive to provide lower-tier inference. Higher-tier inference like GPT-5.6-Sol or Opus is expensive - $100 a month plan for realistic usage, and only up from there.
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Because they thought they could. Turns out the Chinese and Elon had other plans.
The Chinese providers are just as much getting subsidies from the CCP, and Musk/SpaceX is (indirectly) raiding retirement funds to fund the bonanza.
I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?
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So infinite? There’s no amount of compute that would satisfy everyone’s needs and demands.
Isn’t this exactly the type of thing that a market is designed to discover, which we’re seeing unfold right now? Yes, maybe they’re building too many right now, who knows. It’s very likely that demand for computation will go up in the future, and EVs are also going to be consuming much more electricity, so all governments better start preparing for more (clean) electrical supply.
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So infinite? There’s no amount of compute that would satisfy everyone’s needs and demands.
I doubt this. It's probably quite high but there is a limit to how much compute you can genuinely use. Just like there's only so much water you're gonna use even if you greatly enjoy Californian almonds. However, there's probably no limit to energy/electricity we can usefully allocate. And therefore yes, we should in fact provide as much as possible, Dyson spheres and all.
Dyson spheres are science fiction. Science fiction is fiction.
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There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?) Training is quite expensive and it does look likely that the American providers have been doing that at a loss. In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in, and 140W is not exactly a huge amount of power (roughly 50¢ per day i…
I agree with using smaller models, it's just that the majority of people I know feel like they need the biggest, beefier, behemoth model possible (with the longest thought setting) and consume much more than necessary when a flash or smaller model would be OK. I would also like to be able to use a smaller model, but given ram prices I would have to sell a kidney to buy ram now
You can run Qwen-3.6 on a 32GB card which will set you back about $1400, or $400 of just RAM if you want to run it on a CPU.
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The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better. Pluralism? What’s that?
I know that market, and people for that matter don't care, but the environmentalist in me questions the word "needs" in the context of using AI.
Plainly it was not a "need" since people managed for thousands of years without it.
This is what progress looks like.
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So infinite? There’s no amount of compute that would satisfy everyone’s needs and demands.
Isn’t this exactly the type of thing that a market is designed to discover, which we’re seeing unfold right now? Yes, maybe they’re building too many right now, who knows. It’s very likely that demand for computation will go up in the future, and EVs are also going to be consuming much more electricity, so all governments better start preparing for more (clean) electrical supply.
That’s not the same as conceding that “everyone should get as much compute as they demand”.
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I doubt this. It's probably quite high but there is a limit to how much compute you can genuinely use. Just like there's only so much water you're gonna use even if you greatly enjoy Californian almonds. However, there's probably no limit to energy/electricity we can usefully allocate. And therefore yes, we should in fact provide as much as possible, Dyson spheres and all.
How do you figure that? And if it exceeds what we can generate, a very big number is as unsatisfiable as infinity Dyson spheres are science fiction. Science fiction is fiction.
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They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines. This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power. If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors,…
A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.
Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.