Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust?

#81

Post by danaris » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #78

danaris wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, you have to define "AGI". Next, you have to have a clear path to reaching it. Then, you have to have the resources to actually walk that path. Only with all three of those can you make any credible claim that AGI is near. As it stands, we have none of them—and the lack of the second is the most damning. It's very, very clear at this point that just scaling up the existing LLMs is not going to reach some critic…

On the other hand approx human brain equivalence in computers has been predicted fairly accurately since about 1990 based on Moore's law type projections - mid 2020s by Moravec, 2029 by Kurzweil. The underlying assumption is once the hardware is widely available, hackers will hack something together.

But Moore's Law went out the window over a decade ago. Oh, sure, we're still getting things smaller and faster—but nowhere near the same rate we were before. Nowadays most (not all, but most) of the advances we're getting are in more and better parallelisation, rather than faster performance on each core.

And my (rough, limited) understanding is that based on much more recent projections, it would take several orders of magnitude more computing power to genuinely simulate a human brain than what we have.

Re: Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust?

#82

Post by tim333 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #81

tim333 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand approx human brain equivalence in computers has been predicted fairly accurately since about 1990 based on Moore's law type projections - mid 2020s by Moravec, 2029 by Kurzweil. The underlying assumption is once the hardware is widely available, hackers will hack something together.

But Moore's Law went out the window over a decade ago. Oh, sure, we're still getting things smaller and faster—but nowhere near the same rate we were before. Nowadays most (not all, but most) of the advances we're getting are in more and better parallelisation, rather than faster performance on each core. And my (rough, limited) understanding is that based on much more recent projections, it would take several orders…

The main Moore's law like metric they track is compute in instructions per second, per dollar. That's kept on a fairly steady exponential for a century or so and doesn't seem to be slowing. (https://www.bvp.com/assets/uploads/2024/03/price-performance...)

We are probably not near simulating a brain but near enough for similar functionality. Moravec estimated it by looking at the retina which was fairly well understood and seeing how much compute was needed for similar object detection etc. in his robots.

Re: Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust?

#83

Post by augstein » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #52

augstein wrote: post #51

Imo most AI compute will happen on-device in the near future.

Except the price of personal computing is skyrocketing due to the build out of these data centres! I'd love to build a personal computer to run local models, but it's just not affordable any more.

It will be, after the bubble bursts and it will be surprisingly cheap.