if someone comes up with an alternative way to use a bunch of that infrastructure to make money, I bet they could get a lot of business when the AI bubble pops and suddenly these datacenters are desperate to find a use for themselves
I believe that’s pretty much what happened after the dot-com crash. A lot of fiber was laid during the bubble, it went dormant after the crash, but it was useful afterward as the internet continued growing.
In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.
You mean like a crazy ai surveillance program? I take it with a grain of salt but I heard ppl say that’s how they caught Luigi. They have some super secret prototype program “eye in the sky” thing and they just said it was a mc d’s worker as cover.
Even if that doesn’t exist yet in the USA, it’s definitely in the UK with all their CCTV stuff.
And we know US law enforcement can use things like Ring doorbells.
Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin
Meanwhile the planet is dying from all the increased emissions from data center usage.
Datacenters aren’t helping, but they’re like 3-4% of emissions. It’s still manufacturing plastic crap and shipping across the ocean with bunker fuel burn causing 60% of it.
But yeah, increased energy usage isn’t helping.
Oh, they totally will. It’ll be another website boom. A lot of the big web presences will be damaged by the bust and hosting costs will fall through the floor. Less barrier to entry for making your little website and some portion of those will become problematicly large due to cheap cost driving bad design and we’ll go through the third or fourth round of this.
Or, for deepest irony, some of the most optimally located datacenters could be converted into steel mills and industrial bakeries.
So you’re saying mining crypto is gonna come back into fashion?
I heard ram pricing is high. There’s their use, an economic one.
I believe most of the companies are doing it to inflate their share prices.
The other companies involved know this as well; they’re just not saying the quiet part out loud.
Nobody wants it to pay off. They want to be the last one standing which will pay off.
The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?
It’s the same thing. Either way, they get free government money and lots of passive income because they don’t actually have to make anything or do anything to make money.
The people, of course
- Krishna was skeptical of that current tech would reach AGI, putting the likelihood between 0-1%.
Altman: “so you’re saying there’s a chance…!”
There is literally a chance if you run into a wall you could pass through it.
Just like there’s a chance you actually won that Canadian lottery you never signed up for.
Everything will be fine as long as they create digital god. Just gotta keep the plates spinning for a few more years… yeah?
No shit
We know. Ffs.
One day we’ll read some of these comments and laugh at how shortsighted they were.
Of course we’ll probably have to read them on a manuscript or smeared on a wall with feces because all the world’s resources will be used by the huge datacenters that power our AI overlords
So then we’re going to drive down the cost of building & developing infrastructure, right?
Based on the type of AI models IBM has published, they are betting on smaller, specialized models that can run locally or cheaper in a data center. Their strategy seems to be similar to that of thr Chinese, just for different reasons.
For the same reasons. The old rules still work, most of the gold in tech industry is in tall RnD later paid off by scaling indefinitely. Things different from that are either intentionally promoted to inflate a bubble, or popular as a result of wishful thinking where that industry will change in favor of the same curve as with oil and gas. The latter just won’t happen.
Data is analogous to oil and gas here. But more like urine in ancient Rome than like something dug up from the ground.
But there’s still interest in making some protections and barriers to collection of said data, because otherwise those collecting it are interested to immediately use it for only their own good and not even of other fish in the pond.
I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.
Just ask for more tax breaks. poof Problem gone.
So IBM (PCs are just a passing fad) has a future prediction? Not sure how much weight I should give this.
It’s misleading.
IBM is very much into AI, as a modest, legally trained, economical tool. See: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite
But this is the CEO saying “We aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.” It’s shockingly reasonable.
It’s simple, you just use the resources people need and charge them more to keep everything affordable per quarter. Run out there’s plenty of those national parks they’ve been hoarding from us.
Don’t worry consumers will pay for all their poor decisions.
Now guess where that money comes from?







