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This guy is peddling the same tired “it’s just like the dot com bubble” talking points that you only draw on if you have no real interest in reality. He’s also the guy who wrote the infamous “advice to a poor black kid” blog. Legendary dipshit

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Data centers use gpu chips and ram chips just like other computers. Are they trying to claim that the millions of chips in these data centers aren't going to become hopelessly dated the way all other computer equipment has?

Why I harsh on the buildup. Chip efficiency keeps improving, shrinking space demand at a rate which already seems be exceeding current design builds. Future data centers will be smaller, localized, networked builds for sustainability and reliability. Feeding frenzy for $ before invest catches on.

I also think the software will improve quite a bit over time. AI ten years from now will make today's versions look like DOS. What's amazing is that the industry has learned this lesson with other technology several times over all ready.

Yup. It’s so not ready for real life complexity that isn’t intimately tied to something already simplistic or deeply code based. Ten years from now 👍, but it currently has zero use for me as I already have a fulltime job and do not have the bandwidth to be some outside actor’s unpaid test monkey.

Guardian has some partnership/agreement/whatever with OpenAI. I simply don't feel you can trust anything the publish about LLMs to be even somewhat accurate. People don't understand, I think, how starved for income a lot of these sites are, and what they'll do to stay in business.

The post-dot com bubble story doesn’t work here. Training ai models at scale is only possible with billions of dollars of funding. Ai data centers are not useful for other stuff at any meaningful scale. A data center will be as expensive to finish building or run in ten years as it is today.

The capex is expensive, but so is running AI GPUs. People want this to be “like the dot com bubble” to not think about how big the misallocation of capital is. All of the current demand is from companies that can’t afford to pay without endless VC dollars or people renting compute to resell to them.

but even if it *is* like the dot com bubble, all that dark fiber was still useful after sitting for years. in ten years today's GPUs in those DCs will be competing with GPUs 6-7 times as powerful.

Bingo. It is much, much, much worse than the dot.com bubble. Huge circular financing of Capex that is being recognised right now in "earnings". So when the bubble pops earnings won't just stop growing, they will massively contract. It's the ultimate example of the Kalecki profits equation in action.

i love how “it’s just like the dotcom bubble” is seen as a defense. Just because we got cheap fiber or whatever doesn’t mean it was okay to waste all those resources in the bubble.

One (of many) things that bothers me about these datacenters is you see "projections" from AI companies like "we'll be profitable in 2030!" (although even that is based on magically discovering new technologies.) - but the GPUs that are core to their buildout will be obsolete by then.

Fair points but specific to GPUs; they’ll still have a lot of utility come 2030. They’ve been a niche element (ex., VDI) in data centers for many years now. So beyond LLMs there are/will be use cases *Note, I’m not discussing the sheer volume of the build outs making sense, just GPUs as a processor

I dunno, if I had a business model which was "version 1 loses money, but version 2 will be great and make lots of money" I'd want to spend as little as possible on gear that will only be used on version 1...

better climate models. new materials science. modeling protein structures. finding new medicines. image processing. like diagnostic images, or telescope images of deep space. finding patterns in large data sets, could be in medical records, or discrimination in criminal sentencing. lots of stuff.

Weird to bring up railways and fiber-optic cables when those things were famously overbuilt at various points and when the expected demand for them didn't appear the companies that laid them down collapsed. And in turn did very real damage to their countries economies.

it looks like Gene Marks also wrote his own wikipedia page. it has no mention of his racist article, and it doesn't explain that he "contributes" to forbes by him paying forbes to host his blog

Step 1: it's not a bubble Step 2: it's a bubble but bubbles build infrastructure we'll use in the future (being said now) Step 3: it was a bubble. The money was wasted. But it was a reset and our economy needs these (can't wait for this one...)

I mean the railroad bubble in the US left behind a bunch of abandoned railways that no one used. States are still removing them when they get in the way. There are also plenty of abandoned factories.

Even fully-functioning data centers are useless shit if they’re surplus to capacity, since the hardware becomes rapidly obsolete and they’re expensive to maintain. It’s not like railroad tracks, which require maintenance but are basically 1850s technology, or roads, which the Romans perfected.

This bubble is much closer to the bitcoin/crypto compute bubbles, but 100x larger. Not excited to see these pop even though they will.

Until recently, The Guardian was one of my last refuge when it came to general press, but under the cover of pluralism, they become more and more an echo chamber for nauseating discourse...

Most of that 17.8 percent consists of people asking Gemini and Co-Pilot, "How do I turn off all your features and get you to leave me alone?"

This. Like when my phone power button was silently changed to summon Gemini and it got used precisely once to prompt "how do I change the power button on a galaxy s21+ back to a power button" Still makes me part of the 17.8%?

I'm shocked by him thinking 18% of people using it is low. What percentage of workers does he think needs an LLM? Personally, I'm thinking 18% is way too high, most of them just have it forced into their MS office and would remove it if they could.

Data centers 'leave behind' outdated, inefficient hardware and acres of concrete that will cost more to get rid of than the land could possibly generate. (Side q: why use 75-year material to house ~3 year tech?)

Only 0.1% of people drive super sports cars, maybe they should invest there. Seems like we are only at the beginning of super sports car adoption.