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IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

businessinsider.com

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Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#631

Post by kelnos »

snake_doc wrote: post #552
throwaway31131 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

China added ~90GW of utility solar per year in last 2 years. There's ~400-500GW solar+wind under construction there. 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...

> It is possible

Sure, GP was clearly talking about the US, specifically.

> just may be not in the U.S.

Absolutely 100% not possible in the US. And even if we could do it, I'm not convinced it would be prudent.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#632

Post by kelnos »

intrasight wrote: post #217
ryandrake wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, maybe Sam Altman can fund those power plants. Let me guess: He'd rather the public pay for it, and for him to benefit/profit from the increased capacity.

Big tech is going to have to fund the plants and probably transmission. Because the energy utilities have a decades long planning horizon for investments. Good discussion about this in recent Odd Lots podcast.

I've read a bunch of the opposite: a lot of secret deals between tech companies and utilities, where when details come out, we find that regular ratepayers are going to be paying a decent chunk of the cost.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#633

Post by [deleted] »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #240

"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC…

[deleted]

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#635

Post by dragonwriter »

ojr wrote: post #420

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.

> The US is orders of magnitude stronger than the Roman Empire

This would be trivially true even if the US was currently in its death throes (which there is plenty of evidence that the US-as-empire might be, even if the US-as-polity is not), as the Roman Empire fell quite a while ago.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#636

Post by rvnx »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #597
rvnx wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. If it is not written by someone who has real world experience and deep knowledge it has no more value than a HN comment.

It's a good read and good citations. The core piece as quoted from the abstract: "AGI predictions fail not from insufficient compute, but from fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence demands structurally." Then goes in detail as to what that is and why LLMs don't fit that. There are plenty other similar papers out there.

It was more of a general principle than about specific paper that I mentioned that :)

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#637

Post by b112 »

3form wrote: post #615
b112 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The used market is going to be absolutely flooded with millions of old cards. I imagine shipping being the most expensive cost for them. The supply side will be insane. Think 100 cards but only 1 buyer as a ratio. Profit for ebay sellers will be on "handling", or inflated shipping costs. eg shipping and handling.

I assume NVIDIA and co. already protects themselves in some way, either by the fact of these cards not being very useful after resale, or requiring them to go to the grinder after they expire.

Cards don't "expire". There are alternate strategies to selling cards, but if they don't sell the cards, then there is no transfer of ownership, and therefore NVIDIA is entering some form of leasing model.

If NVIDIA is leasing, then you can't get use those cards as collateral. You can't also write off depreciation. Part of what we're discussing is that terms of credit are being extended too generously, with depreciation in the mix.

The could require some form of contractual arrangement, perhaps volume discounts for cards, if they agree to destroy them at a fixed time. That's very weird though, and I've never heard of such a thing for datacenter gear.

They may protect themselves on the driver side, but someone could still write OSS.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#638

Post by gloosx »

bloppe wrote: post #590
delaminator wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you mind sharing some of these projects? I've found Claude's usefulness is highly variable, though somewhat predictable. It can write `jq` filters flawlessly every time, whereas I would normally spend 30 minutes scanning docs because nobody memorizes `jq` syntax. And it can comb through server logs in every pod of my k8s clusters extremely fast. But it often struggles making quality code changes in a large code…

It is always "I'm producing 300 projects in a nanosecond" but it's almost never about sharing or actually deploying these ;)

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#639

Post by em1sar »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #240

"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC…

[dead]

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#640

Post by Ekaros »

simianwords wrote: post #509
jacquesm wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still don’t get it. What at a personal level is making Sam Altman make a suboptimal choice for himself if it is so obvious it won’t work out for him?

Marketing and name recognition? Used in other areas to generate wealth. Even steering OpenAI or partners of it to acquire right companies could be profitable for him.
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