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xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

martinalderson.com

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Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#551

Post by senordevnyc »

kccqzy wrote: post #168
mikeryan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also just announced a new equity raise of $80B. I have no idea if doing this via equity vs debt is trying to suck some of the wind out of the IPO Market for Anthropic and OpenAI but it’s going to be interesting to see how the markets deal with all the new equity being floated. Someone isn’t going to hit their raise targets and the later IPOs may be the ones holding the bag.

The $80B of equity raise is nothing compared to its previous share buyback programs.

It looks like they've done annual buybacks of about $70b the last few years, so your claim doesn't really hold water.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#552

Post by [deleted] »

fer wrote: post #461
fragmede wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing RAM chips off old cards is uneconomical, until it isn't. With things going the way they are, if you've got a card with soldered on RAM that could be transplanted to a newer card, I think you'll start seeing that happening.

It has already become economic. While not exactly the same, the NVIDIA 2080 11GB cards are notorious for being upcycled with extra RAM: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/146us12/nvidia_gefo...

[deleted]

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#553

Post by game_the0ry »

I worked in REITs. A REIT is a tax structure with 2 key features:

1. By law, they must pass through and distribute at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders every year.

2. They pay 0% in corporate income taxes on the income they distribute, as long as they meet the 1st requirement.

xai is not even close on either. Terrible take. What they should have said -- xai is looking more like a hyper scaler, the aws for ai infra.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#554

Post by brightball »

grim_io wrote: post #542
brightball wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet

What's first, a usable frontier grok model or actual FSD(unsupervised)? Might as well be the Mars colonization the way both are going.

I mean...I have a Tesla Model 3 with FSD enabled. I turn it on by default now when I'm in the car and I can't remember the last time I felt like I needed to takeover. It's been at least a month.

FSD unsupervised seems pretty close to me.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#555

Post by nijave »

bob1029 wrote: post #487

I started doing some numbers around the scale of tokens per second we can generate with figures like 300 million watts and I really don't understand the destination anymore. I see that Anthropic is somehow constrained in the news, but that doesn't line up with headlines. Everything seems off by 3-4 orders of magnitude here. I realize there are some users of AI who can burn a million tokens like it's nothing, but thes…

Did you factor in model training and peak vs avg throughput?

Also yes, it is serious bubble.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#556

Post by nijave »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #497
bob1029 wrote: post #487

I started doing some numbers around the scale of tokens per second we can generate with figures like 300 million watts and I really don't understand the destination anymore. I see that Anthropic is somehow constrained in the news, but that doesn't line up with headlines. Everything seems off by 3-4 orders of magnitude here. I realize there are some users of AI who can burn a million tokens like it's nothing, but thes…

I haven't done any math, but if you have individual users that can burn millions of tokens a day, then it does not take very many of them (at SaaS scale even limiting to power users) to hit trillions. And even fewer to run into problems specifically with time of use.

Also consider it's a pyramid scheme of AI users using AI to generate AI apps filled with AI features powered by OpenAI and Anthropic APIs monitored and fixed by AI tools and automation.

Meanwhile product managers and sales busy drumming up new features with AI

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#557

Post by lmm »

emodendroket wrote: post #513
lmm wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are weird about their cars and make major errors in judgement as a result (e.g. we tolerate incredibly high rates of people getting killed because they were "hit by a car", as though the driver had nothing to do with it). Pushing back on that is absolutely worthwhile.

Which has approximately zero to do with the anthropomorphization of the car itself. I could have chosen a different machine or tool to make my point.

> Which has approximately zero to do with the anthropomorphization of the car itself.

You don't think people talking about the car doing things has anything to do with anthropomorphising the car?

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#558

Post by johnsmith1840 »

podocarp wrote: post #330
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Chinese companies can do that? It's government subsidising price they do it with literally every ibdustry. Home grow a bunch discount them federally, let them wipe the foreign markets. If AI is threatened by china why would US NOT do the same? If they did they're in a much stronger position to do so than china. Cheaper energy, more cash, stronger industries. Infrastrucure is thr kind of thing that on…

This is just silly. Deepseek has published so much regarding speeding up and making cheaper inference and people are still harping on the government subsidies thing. So what's all the project Stargate stuff? Subsidies only work when China is doing it? Deepseek is actively sacrificing performance for cost, which is very clear in their latest model releases. They are not attempting to get to number 1 in benchmarks, and…

Us gov isn't funding ai in any meaningful way?

Not sure what else you're arguing here. Deepseek like all major chinese companies are 1:1 ccp so not sure you're points are.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#560

Post by johnsmith1840 »

raducu wrote: post #362
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy and datacenter scale. US is a near monopoly of this pairing. A crash will result in the removal of the fluff and ocerpricing of it all but the stance is beyond strong. Unless China outcompetes Nvidea AND TSMC AND magically gets 4x cheaper energy they are in a much weaker stance for the long haul.

> AND magically gets 4x cheaper energy they are in a much weaker stance for the long haul. By energy you mean electricity,the nuclear, solar and hydro-- the kind China has installed new 2TW capacity over the last decade while US installed 0.2TW capacity in the same time?

Oil is king
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