211–220 of 296 posts
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> What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol GPUs are essential to every kind of scientific and engineering simulation you can think of. AI-accelerated simulations are a huge deal now.
GPUs that have lives of..? Now compare that with the life a rail road. Amusing.
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So your argument basically boils down to, the datacenter build out is not a waste of resources because if it was, these companies wouldn’t be building them. Got it.
I mean, your argument is that Google has had increasing revenue and profit for a decade, to the point that they have $400B in revenue + profit this year, and that they are going to lose money because they plan to spend $180B on capital projects for new data centers next year, because you know their business better than they do.
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GPUs don't really have six year lifespans, though. The hardware itself lasts far longer than that, even hardware that's been used for cryptomining in terrible makeshift setups is absolutely fine for reuse.
Each of these GPUs pull up to a kilowatt of power. The average commercial power cost is 13.4 ¢/kWh. That means running a single H100 full tilt 24/7 is a power operationing cost of $1,100 per card per year. In three years the current generation of GPUs will be 50% or more faster. In six years your talking more than 100% faster. For the same energy costs. If you're running a GPU data center on six year old GPUs, your c…
This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…
Imagine this world: the bubble "pops" in a couple years. The GPUs stick around for a few more years after that. At the end, we pretty much don't train new foundation models anymore - no one wants to spend the money on the hardware needed to make a real advance.
People continue to refine, distill, and optimize the existing foundation models for the next century or two, just like people keep laying new track over old railway right of ways.
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European railroad bubble failed? Can you explain that? I really have no idea what you are referring to?
The search term is the "Railway Mania", which predominant describes the UK's railroad bubble, with smaller similar booms on mainland europe. (You will have to look up French and German sources for the best info on those) The bubble failed in the sense that massive commitments for new railways were made, and then the 1847 economic crisis caused investment to dry up, which collapsed the bubble and put a halt to the rai…
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Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?
What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail? Writing prescriptions? Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot. Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds?…
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The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them). I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it ha…
I agree that AI will probably have bigger effects that we could possibly predict right now. But unlike past booms/bubbles, I suspect the infrastructure being built now won't be useful after it resolves. The railroads, interstate system, and dotcom fiber buildout are all still useful. AI will need to get more efficient to be useful as established technology, so the huge datacenters will be overbuilt. And almost none o…
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I just don’t see it. Both professionally and personally I’m producing so much more now. Back burner projects that weren’t worth months of my time are easily worth a few hours and $20 or whatever. Why would I pull back?
You're forgetting that the 20$ are not a sustainable price point. Would your backburner personal app thingy be worth 200$?
Perhaps if we used something exotic like solid gold cookware, there might be some amazing benefits that people would love.
But it would be far from practical without being wildly subsidized…
With AI, it feels too much like the “grownups” are acting worse than the kids…
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What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail? Writing prescriptions? Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot. Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds?…
maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
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We could have had non-carbon energy independence by now.
But the AI fanatics claimed that AI would solve cold fusion, making that whole thing moot. The only problem is, if AI doesn’t solve cold fusion, we’re back to square one. And a few trillion dollars in the hole.
Then the first question we ask it is: 'How do we fix climate change?' And it answers: 'you can start by unplugging me'