Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Elon is brilliant when it comes to hardware. What shall that even mean?
Tesla, Falcon 9, Starlink, Mechazilla, SolarCity, Colossus, Neuralink, Starship, Optimus...
Tesla is the only profitable example in that list?
xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
301–310 of 580 posts
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compute is about to come an appreciating asset in the near-term, and it some ways it already is. The frontier labs are shifting from pricing grounded in the price of compute, to pricing grounded in the intelligence provided, or more specifically the economic value of that intelligence downstream. The margins on that allow them to pay a hefty premium on compute and still come out ahead. As they buy more compute at hig…
There is zero evidence of this shift in pricing occurring. It’s still a dream which seems unlikely
News to me?
Opus 4.7 has all the signs of a smaller model distilled from a newer pretraining run... except a smaller price.
Flash 3.5 raised in price pretty meaningfully over Flash 3
GPT 5.4 got a small price bump over gpt-5.3-Codex/gpt-5.2, then gpt-5.5 doubled pricing over gpt-5.4
Even open weights isn't immune: Kimi K2.6 was originally priced higher despite openly being 2.5 + more post-training, same with GLM 5.1 vs 5
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All while rental prices are spiking month over month, and NVIDIA Inception discounted prices for buying are higher than undiscounted prices for buying 6 months ago...
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is zero evidence of this shift in pricing occurring. It’s still a dream which seems unlikely
It feels like this is the line people are using to justify the expense of compute capex
I run a consumer AI product and the current reality of trying to get compute vs what it was 6-12 months ago is enough to justify it to anyone who has the money.
I think OpenClaw created a mania that was completely unfounded (Apple Silicon is worth dirt compared to literally anything from NVIDIA including consumer GPUs), but the prediction of compute becoming scarce was correct
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Datacenter operators who rent space are selling electricity. SpaceX is selling a fully built datacenter with compute designed for a specific purpose. They’re operating at a higher level of the value chain and can charge accordingly.
What's their novelty or moat to maintain the value chain? And why do we only see google, who already owns it, raising their hand to rent at these prices?
SpaceX and Tesla used aggressive vertical integration, manufacturing simplification, and reuse to radically lower the cost of building rockets and EVs. It's not unreasonable to speculate they might be able to do the same for hyperscale compute.
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it sortof did in assets, just not in the changes tracked by CPI.
That's because they take and modify what is tracked in the CPI at will
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/home.htm
What do you find controversial, and would cause a material difference in the headline inflation rate?
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the pro account for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. They all have various strengths and weaknesses. My favorite is still ChatGPT, then Gemini/Claude, then Grok. Grok often feels 1-2 generations behind the competition in general use, but it has three things that I love: 1. It seems to be the best at understanding current events. Maybe due to X integration, or some other tool call optimization in the backend?…
> 1. It seems to be the best at understanding current events. Maybe due to X integration, or some other tool call optimization in the backend? I don't know, but I often ask about things going on, and the other models have outdated info, give unhelpful answers, etc. That makes sense, but occasionally you ask about an issue where it's clearly received political instruction from the commissar and it acts totally lobotom…
We saw this too with Gemini specifically. My favorite example - we built a hallucination detector (given the input, does the output make any false claims) in Gemini, and after the Seahawks won the Superbowl in February, it would consistently flag that as "not possible".
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#307Not that my feelings or opinion matter, but I'm going to be devastated if this xAI grift takes down SpaceX. I am reminded that the 90s Boy Band groups Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC were the side projects of a Ponzi Scheme.
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#308Writing this:
> In comparison, SpaceX/xAI are incredible at building datacentres on time. The original Colossus 1 datacentre was built in 122 days. Musk's empire does have a huge advantage in really understanding how to plan, build and execute enormous infrastructure projects quickly
Without even mentioning that it was done illegally and the air pollution they are creating with gas turbines is wildly irresponsible
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, hear me out, maybe there's a compute shortage and xAI has compute and manages that well. There are no dark GPUs. Compute translates directly to money for these frontier labs. I think everyone is reading way too much into this. Sure there is some circular transactions that are sus, but this ain't it.
Compute is also a rapidly depreciating asset. I want to make a comparison with a car rental business and say that it would be like valuing Hertz entirely on the basis of the number of cars they own, as opposed to how many they rent out, but cars have a much longer depreciation period, if there are no customers they’re not costing you more money, unlike your computer which you are using for training and sucking up mas…
> Compute is also a rapidly depreciating asset.
That's the default assumption but in the new GPU+Memory constrained age isn't true.
Time on 4 year old H100 servers costs more now than when they were new (!!)
Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
#310Writing this: > In comparison, SpaceX/xAI are incredible at building datacentres on time. The original Colossus 1 datacentre was built in 122 days. Musk's empire does have a huge advantage in really understanding how to plan, build and execute enormous infrastructure projects quickly Without even mentioning that it was done illegally and the air pollution they are creating with gas turbines is wildly irresponsible
It’s easy when you skirt regulations.