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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that have to do with the current CEO's assessment of the situation?
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> In an October letter to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommended that the US add 100 gigawatts in energy capacity every year. > Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said. And people think the clima…
100GW per year is not going to happen. The largest plant in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China at 22GW and it’s off the scales huge. We’re not building the equivalent of four of those every year. Unless the plan is to power it off Sam Altman’s hot air. That could work. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations
It is possible, just may be not in the U.S.
Note: given renewables can't provide base load, capacity factor is 10-30% (lower for solar, higher for wind), so actual energy generation will vary...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the actual article. He is pointing out that the current costs to create the data centres means you will never be able to make a profit to cover those costs. $800 Billion just to cover the interest. OpenAI is already haemorrhaging money and the space data centres has already been debunked. There is even a recent paper that points out that LLMs will never become AGI. The article also finishes out with some other…
>> There is even a recent paper that points out that LLMs will never become AGI. can you share a link?
Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill Also now using ChatGPT intensely since months for all kinds of tasks and having tried Claude etc. None of this is on par with a human. The code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow...
Your assessment of Claude simply isn’t true. Or Stackoverflow is really good. I’m producing multiple projects per week that are weeks of work each.
Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?
If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better than you at selling it?
As long as the dollar remains the reserve currency of the world and US retains its hegemony, a lot of the finances will work itself out, the only threat to the US empire crumbling is by losing a major war or extreme civil unrest and that threat is astronomically low. The US is orders of magnitude stronger than the Roman Empire, I don't think people realize the scale or control.
> In an October letter to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommended that the US add 100 gigawatts in energy capacity every year. > Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said. And people think the clima…
100GW per year is not going to happen. The largest plant in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China at 22GW and it’s off the scales huge. We’re not building the equivalent of four of those every year. Unless the plan is to power it off Sam Altman’s hot air. That could work. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other way to look at it is that the entire consulting industry is teetering on catastrophe. And IBM, being largely a consulting company now, is not being spared.
This is a separate argument though. A failing company may still be right in identifying other companies failure modes. You can be prescient about failure in one area and still fail yourself. There's no gotcha.
Agreed if this is what they are doing, but what if theyre spewing claims to try and discredit an industry in order to quell their shareholder concerns?
$8 billion / US adult adult population of of 270 million comes out to about $3000 per adult per year. That's only to cover cost of interest, let alone other costs and profits.
That sounds crazy, but let's think about it...
- How much does an average American spend on a car and car-related expenses? If AI becomes as big as "cars", then this number is not as nuts.
- These firms will target the global market, not US only, so number of adults is 20x, and the average required spend per adult per year becomes $150.
- Let's say only about 1/3 of the world's adult population is poised to take advantage of paid tools enabled by AI. The total spend per targetable adult per year becomes closer to $500.
- The $8 billion in interest is on the total investment by all AI firms. All companies will not succeed. Let's say that the one that will succeed will spend 1/4 of that. So that's $2 billion dollar per year, and roughly $125 per adult per year.
- Triple that number to factor in other costs and profits and that company needs to get $500 in sales per targetable adult per year.
People spend more than that on each of these: smoking, booze, cars, TV. If AI can penetrate as deep as the above things did, it's not as crazy of an investment as it looks. It's one hell of a bet though.
If it is so obvious that it won’t pay off, why is every company investing in it? What alpha do you have that they don’t?
That's a good question. During the .com boom everybody was investing in 'the internet' or at least in 'the web'. And lots of those companies went bust, quite a few spectacularly so. Since then everything that was promised and a lot more has been realized. Even so, a lot of those initial schemes were harebrained at best at the time and there is a fair chance that we will look in a similar way at the current AI offerin…
pets.com "selling dogfood on the internet" is the major example of the web boom then bust. (1)
But today, I can get dog food, cat food, other pet supplies with my weekly "online order" grocery delivery. Or I can get them from the big river megaretailer. I have a weekly delivery of coffee beans from a niche online supplier, and it usually comes with flyers for products like a beer or wine subscription or artisanal high-meat cat or dog foods.
So the idea of "selling dogfood on the internet" is now pervasive not extinct, the inflated expectation that went bust was that this niche was a billion-dollar idea and not a commodity where brand, efficiencies of scale and execution matter more.
Nobody really knows the future. What were originally consumer graphics expansion cards turned out useful in delivering more compute than traditional CPUs. Now that compute is being used for transformers and machine learning, but we really don't know what it'll be used for in 10 years. It might all be for naught, or maybe transformers will become more useful, or maybe something else. 'no way' is very absolute. Unlikel…
> What were originally consumer graphics expansion cards turned out useful in delivering more compute than traditional CPUs. Graphics cards were relatively inexpensive. When one got old, you tossed it out and move on to the new hotness. Here when you have spent $1 trillion on AI graphics cards and a new hotness comes around that renders your current hardware obsolete, what do you do? Either people are failing to do s…