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Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

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Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#271

Post by tmnvix »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #168
herbst wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and then the 1847 economic crisis ... the world in the mid-1800s was much less financialized so the consequences in absolute terms were less pronounced than a similar bubble-collapse would be today.

And yet 1848 was a very interesting year! Revolutionary even.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#272

Post by bombcar »

tmnvix wrote: post #269
bombcar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes feel that the facts are all out there, but half the people pick one half the facts as causal and the other half pick the other half. Are home prices rising because people have fewer kids (and therefore more to spend on housing) or are people having fewer kids because house prices are rising (and therefore less to spend on kids)? I suspect that it's a complex mixture of all possibilities, and you can only…

> Are home prices rising because people have fewer kids (and therefore more to spend on housing) or are people having fewer kids because house prices are rising (and therefore less to spend on kids)? Maybe a false dichotomy? My suspicion is that home prices rise because more credit becomes available (and not only homes prices but the price of other assets). If you think about it in broader terms this explains what ha…

There's something there, definitely - reading "ordinary man's guide to the financial life" from different eras is informative; many of the older ones work really hard to convince you that a home loan is something worth getting and "you'll pay it off faster than you think" - now we have guides talking about "good debt" and "never pay it off".

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#273

Post by keeda »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #72
keeda wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're seeing exactly the same thing with AI, as there is massive investment creating a bubble without a payoff. ... And so far there's no evidence that all this investment has generated more profit for the users of AI. If you look around a bit, you will find evidence for both. Recent data finds pretty high success in GenAI adoption even as "formal ROI measurement" -- i.e. not based on "vibes" -- becomes common: htt…

75% report positive ROI (and the VPs are much more "optimistic" than the middle managers who are closer to the work) - but how much ROI? 1%? The fact that they don't quote a figure at all is pretty telling. And that's the ROI of the people buying the AI services, which are often heavily subsidized. If it costs a billion dollars to give a mid-sized company a 1% ROI, that doesn't sound sustainable. I would love to see…

Good questions! I have only skimmed through the report but slide 45 onwards of the full report has some vague numbers: https://ai.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025...

Can't say why they don't report exact numbers, but it may be because a) of confidentiality and b) RoI is very context dependent and c) there is a wide spectrum of RoI by different dimensions, including some 9% even reporting negative RoI. This may make it hard to cite a single number, but the majority report "moderate" to "significant" RoI, whatever that means to them.

I'll add that I've seen mentions of similar reports from other sources like McKinsey and co. e.g. this one that claims actual revenue increase: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/week-in-charts/ge... -- I tend not to take these reports at face value, but I'm seeing multiple of them from various sources that tend to align.

As an aside, I just wanted to say, these are the kinds of discussions I was hoping to see here!

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#274

Post by keeda »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #74
keeda wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're seeing exactly the same thing with AI, as there is massive investment creating a bubble without a payoff. ... And so far there's no evidence that all this investment has generated more profit for the users of AI. If you look around a bit, you will find evidence for both. Recent data finds pretty high success in GenAI adoption even as "formal ROI measurement" -- i.e. not based on "vibes" -- becomes common: htt…

> The trustworthiness, salience and nuances of this report is worth discussing, but unfortunately reports like this gets no airtime in the HN and the media echo chamber. It honestly just isn't that interesting. (Being most notable for people misunderstanding and misrepresenting the chart on page 46 of the report as being "ROI" rather than "ROI measurement") In terms of ROI figures, it's really just a survey with the…

That's fair, it is survey based but it is apparently based on formal internal measurements. The full report (https://ai.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025... -- slides 43 onwards) mentions that for 75% of them have "integrated formal ROI measurement."

There is little discussion of what that means, however, but we really can't expect concrete numbers for what is going to be sensitive business data,and given that the report tracks it across multiple industries and functions ranging from IT to operations to legal to sales, it may be hard to put into sensible numbers, or how the measurements may be flawed or biased.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#275

Post by pstuart »

big-and-small wrote: post #153
pstuart wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could have had non-carbon energy independence by now.

China is working on this.

China is actually working to make China better for the inhabitants of China.

The US is working to keep the oligarchs happy.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#276

Post by spprashant »

whiplash451 wrote: post #234
spprashant wrote: post #174

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

You could take the same issue with all productivity changes that came before AI (typewriters, laptops, etc)

None of those seem like they had an capital investment equivalent to 1% of the GDP. Apparently railroad was the only technological investment that was higher than AI when measured as a percentage of the GDP.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#277

Post by casefields »

dlenski wrote: post #135

There's a pretty big missing case in this comparison: nuclear weapons. The US spent ~$12 trillion in ~2024 dollars on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996, and the vast majority of that spending was in the 1950s and early 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

This is called paltering, which is lying telling by telling the truth.

The delivery systems are included when coming up with that number. So all those submarines, bombers, and ICBMs are also counted. All 3 systems of course are still valuable and useful without nuclear weapons.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#278

Post by senordevnyc »

datatrashfire wrote: post #246
theptip wrote: post #237

Earlier 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…

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

They’re already far more useful than that, and I suspect harness engineering alone could add another OOM of productivity, without any underlying change in the models available today.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#279

Post by comfysocks »

timmg wrote: post #3

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!

Railroad looks huge on the GDP (estimate) chart because the US transcontinental railroad was built in the mid 1800’s when the US economy was relatively tiny.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#280

Post by edmundsauto »

nradov wrote: post #259
jclulow wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No piece of compute capacity (in the form of equipment) I have bought this year has been in any way cheaper than last year.

So what. Fluctuations over a year or two are meaningless. Do you really believe that the constant-dollar price of an LLM token will be higher in 20 years?

I can see a world where energy costs rise at a rate faster than overall inflation, or are a leading indicator. In that scenario then yes I could see LLM token costs going up.
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