111–120 of 985 posts
Don’t worry. The same servers will be used for other computing purposes. And maybe that will be profitable. Maybe it will be beneficial to others. But This cycle of investment and loss is a version of distribution of wealth. Some benefit. The banks and loaners always benefit.
As an elder millennial, I just don't know what to say. That a once in a generation allocation of capital should go towards...whatever this all will be, is certainly tragic given current state of the world and its problems. Can't help but see it as the latest in a lifelong series of baffling high stakes decisions of dubious social benefit that have necessarily global consequences.
But I don't see the mechanics of how it would work. Rewind to October 2022. How, exactly, does the money* invested in AI since that time get redirected towards whatever issues you find more pressing?
*I have some doubts about the headline numbers
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First, I think it's $80b per 100 GW datacenter. The way you figure that out is a GPU costs $x and consumes y power. The $x is pretty well known, for example an H100 costs $25-30k and uses 350-700 watts (that's from Gemini and I didn't check my work). You add an infrastructure (i) cost to the GPU cost, but that should be pretty small, like 10% or less. So a 1 gigawatt data center uses n chips, where y n = 1 GW. It cos…
The article says, "Kirshna said that it takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center." But thanks for you insight -- I used your basic idea to estimate and for 1GW it comes to about $30b just for enough GPU power to pull 1GW. And of course that doesn't take into account any other costs. So $80b for a GW datacenter seems high, but it's within a small constant factor. That said, power seems like a weir…
Because this technology changes so fast, that's the only metric that you can control over several data centers. It is also directly connected to the general capacity of data center, which is limited by available energy to operate.
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I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty. Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources , but it's still capital . It shou…
> Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power. It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.
That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen.
Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind).
As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.
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It could have, though. Higher taxes on the rich, spend it on social programs.
Why is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations. Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?
Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
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The last 10 years has seen CA spend more on homelessness than ever before, and more than any other state by a huge margin. The result of that giant expenditure is the problem is worse than ever. I don't want to get deep in the philosophical weeds around human behavior, techno-optimism, etc., but it is a bit reductive to say "why don't we just give homeless people money".
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I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty. Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources , but it's still capital . It shou…
From what I’ve read, addressing homelessness effectively requires competence more than it requires vast sums of money. Here’s one article: https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-t... Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.
As an elder millennial, I just don't know what to say. That a once in a generation allocation of capital should go towards...whatever this all will be, is certainly tragic given current state of the world and its problems. Can't help but see it as the latest in a lifelong series of baffling high stakes decisions of dubious social benefit that have necessarily global consequences.
I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty. Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources , but it's still capital . It shou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations. Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?
I'm not saying you are wrong that some redistribution can be good, but your analysis is simplistic and ignores many factors. You can just redistribute and then say 'well people will spend the money'. That's literally the 'Broken Window' fallacy from economics. You are ignoring that if you don't redistribute it, money also gets spend, just differently. Also, the central bank is targeting AD, so you're not actually inc…
Give a rich person a million dollars, and they will put it in an offshore tax shelter. That’s not exactly driving economic activity.
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> Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power. It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.
"It's capital that belongs to people and those people..." That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" t…