if you think datacenters are a waste (they are), wait til you hear about department of war spending
Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
241–250 of 296 posts
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#242Is this an appropriate spend and risk? I'm starting to feel as if we have been collectively glamoured by AI and are not making sound decisions on this.
I’ve had similar thoughts, but I’ve come around to this buildout being rational. All of the big ai labs are still jockeying for compute and are having trouble keeping up with inference demand.
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Argument from authority with a little whataboutism thrown in. I’m done wasting time with you.
Lol, it's not an argument from authority.
The claim isn't "google said so". It's "google is doing so". It's a claim to incentives and rational actors, or perhaps to revealed preferences.
If you want to get on a high horse around logical fallacies, make sure to understand them, else you reveal... something else, about yourself.
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
If all AI progress somehow immediately halted, the models that have currently been built will still have more economic impact than the Internet. Not least because the slower the frontier advances, the cheaper ASICs get on a relative basis, and therefore the cheaper tokens at the frontier get. We have a massive scaffolding capability overhang, give it ten years to diffuse and most industries will be radically differen…
You have to agree that it's totally possible that none of those things you are envisioning getting built out actually end up working as products, right? AI (LLM) progress would stop, and then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting or at least temporary. That's the world I'm calling a "dead end". No matter how unlikely you think that is, you have to agree that it…
> then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting
I believe that some of my made up examples won’t end up getting built, but my point is that there is _so much_ low hanging fruit like this.
Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood.
In my forecast the possible worlds where progress stops and then the existing models don’t end up making anything interesting are almost exclusively scenarios like “Taiwan was invaded, TSMC fabs were destroyed, and somehow we deleted existing datacenters’ installed capacity too” or “neo-Luddites take over globally and ban GPUs”, all of this gives sub-1% likelihood.
You can imagine 5-10% likelihood worlds where the growth rate of new chips dramatically decreases for a decade due to a single black-swan event like Taiwan getting glassed, but that’s a temporary setback not a permanent blocker.
Again, I’m just looking at all the things that can obviously be built now, and just haven’t made it to the top of the list yet. I’m extremely confident that this todo list is already long enough that “this all fizzles to nothing” is basically excluded.
I think if model progress stops then everyone investing in ASI takes a big haircut, but the long-term stock market progression will look a lot like the internet after the dot com boom, ie the bloodbath ends up looking like a small blip in the rear view mirror.
I guess, a question for you - how do you think about coding agents? Don’t they already show AI is going to do more than “end up uninteresting”?
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#245We could have had a space elevator by now.
Or free education and universal healthcare and a better society. I would even take someone reanimating dinosaurs like jurassic park over this.
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day We're a little too early to know if that's the case here too. I do foresee a chance at a reality where AI is a dead end, but after it we have a ton of cheap GPU compute lying about, which we all rush to somehow convert into useful compute (by emulating CPU's or translating traditional algorithms into GPU oriented ones or whatever).
If all AI progress somehow immediately halted, the models that have currently been built will still have more economic impact than the Internet. Not least because the slower the frontier advances, the cheaper ASICs get on a relative basis, and therefore the cheaper tokens at the frontier get. We have a massive scaffolding capability overhang, give it ten years to diffuse and most industries will be radically differen…
i feel a lot of people in tech have this incuriously deterministic attitude about llms right now… previous revolutionized the world, therefore llms will! despite there really nothing to show for it so far other than writing rote code is a bit easier and still requires active baby sitting by someone who knows what they are doing
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?
There's a video by Siliconversations [0] about it. Medicine is first and foremost limited by high-quality data, not intelligence. If OpenAI built a superhuman AGI tomorrow, it would not change a thing about the state of cancer treatment, at least not for a while. Trying to design a cancer cure by setting a trillion alight on AI is like trying to achieve UBI by funneling citizen's taxes into Polymarket, so they may op…
How can we be sure of that when we don't even know what improved "intelligence" might look like in this context? Especially given the increased importance of "big data" (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics etc.) to the field and the sheer amount of obscure data that's currently buried in all sorts of archival sources and might be resurfaced with some "intelligence".
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Argument from authority with a little whataboutism thrown in. I’m done wasting time with you.
Lol, it's not an argument from authority. The claim isn't "google said so". It's "google is doing so". It's a claim to incentives and rational actors, or perhaps to revealed preferences. If you want to get on a high horse around logical fallacies, make sure to understand them, else you reveal... something else, about yourself.
Google is doing something != they are doing the rational thing.
Suggesting otherwise is defintionally argument from authority.
You know you can just admit you’re a sophist and we can move on.
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to agree that it's totally possible that none of those things you are envisioning getting built out actually end up working as products, right? AI (LLM) progress would stop, and then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting or at least temporary. That's the world I'm calling a "dead end". No matter how unlikely you think that is, you have to agree that it…
> then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting I believe that some of my made up examples won’t end up getting built, but my point is that there is _so much_ low hanging fruit like this. Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood. In my forecast the possible worlds where progress stops and then the existing models don’t end up making anything in…
> Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood.
The problem with talking likelihood is that it's an interpretation game. I understand you think it's wholly unlikely that it all fizzles out, I could read that from your first post. I hope it's also clear that I do think it's likely.
That's the point where we have to just agree to disagree. We have no rapport. I have no reason to trust your judgment, and neither do you mine.
Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, it's not an argument from authority. The claim isn't "google said so". It's "google is doing so". It's a claim to incentives and rational actors, or perhaps to revealed preferences. If you want to get on a high horse around logical fallacies, make sure to understand them, else you reveal... something else, about yourself.
Google is doing something != they are doing the rational thing. Suggesting otherwise is defintionally argument from authority. You know you can just admit you’re a sophist and we can move on.
That's why it's a "claim".
Learn basic english before moving onto the big words :)