571–580 of 1001 posts
You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending. This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2]…
Serious question - why Texas???
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country. If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1]. This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
One-time capital costs that unlock a range of possibilities also tend to be good bets. The Flood Control Act [0], TVA, Heavy Press, etc. They all created generally useful infrastructure, that would be used for a variety of purposes over the subsequent decades. The federal government creating data center capacity, at scale, with electrical, water, and network hookups, feels very similar. Or semiconductor manufacture.…
Yes, a very interesting project; similar power output to an AP1000. Would have really changed the energy landscape to have such a deployable power station. https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/98/rec...
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure…
Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which is ~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is $25B, and add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor. This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training cluster money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake and multiple datacenters running inference (with all of corporate America's data sitting in the cloud).
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure…
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're a…
The argument presented in the quote there is: “everyone in AI foundation companies are putting money into AI, therefore we must be near AGI.”
The best evaluation of progress is to use the tools we have. It doesn’t look like we are close to AGI. It looks like amazing NLP with an enormous amount of human labelling.
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
I think cheap power (whether gas turbines or massive solar farms) trumps any cooling efficiencies gained by locating in a cold climate.