This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
After .com popped, all the money ran to install fiber data infrastructure - a lot of installs put in more capacity than they projected using for 100 years (glass fibers are cheap, digging trenches for them is expensive). The promise of "fiber to the home" is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of "dark fiber" ready to carry data... someday.
The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.
Counterintuitively, I'm seeing "fiber to the home" deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.
We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.
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.
That's just a conspiracy theory. Luigi is clearly a different person from the images of the shooter.
I know it's just a conspiracy, that's why I take it with a grain of salt. But I could totally see SOMETHING like that existing. But there's too much data to sort through and that's why they need AI
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.
I believe most of the companies are doing it to inflate their share prices.
It's not even about money or financials that add up on balance sheets. It's about market share, political power. When you're Too Big To Fail, balance sheets cease to matter.
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.
Will it, though?
For the vast majority of these companies, probably not.
If the company is AI-only, then if/when the bubble bursts, I suspect it'll go under too. Only the biggest players will survive that, like OpenAI, since so many other services call out to their API.
Companies that can pivot back to core markets will be fine, Google, Microsoft. Shovel sellers will mostly be okay too. What that'll look like for them is a period of huge overvaluation and then a return to sanity, you can see similar histories if you look at the stock price of still extant dotcom bubble companies.
And then the hype will be over, there will be a huge crater left in GDP, retirement accounts, and the larger economy, but some "AI" technology will remain — stuff that is actually useful, like transcription, natural speech, noise removal, automated rotoscoping. But the fantasy of replacing information workers and artists will not come to pass, though they probably won't differentiate for the next several years, as the jobs market is decimated all the same by speculation hangover.
That seems optimistic, but I'll take it.
I hope not but it probably will.
The last one standing will probably get a bailout by corporate Democrats and every Republican.
The last one standing will be "too big to fail" because currently the only reason that the global economy is not in a recession is due to AI spending.
Oh you mean each company promising to spend money on each other without actually doing anything.
Time for a joke.
And economist and an accountant were taking a walk when they noticed a frog. The accountant says to the economist, "I'll give you $100 if you eat that frog." The economist thinks for a moment, then agrees. A little later they come across another frog, and the economist says, "I'll give you $100 to eat that frog." The accountant thinks about it for a second and also agrees. As they continue walking, the accountant says, "So I got to see you eat a frog for $100, and by eating a frog myself, I got my money back, so I understand why I did it. But you had already eaten a frog and had $100, so why did you do it?" The economist replies, "Ah, but this way it's twice as good for the economy!"
Big if, because you expect a US company to win.
All companies are US companies as long as they ~~brive~~ make campaign contributions. Business has no borders.
Worked for the US after WWII.
Well... for a while at least.
Everything will be fine as long as they create digital god. Just gotta keep the plates spinning for a few more years… yeah?
- 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.
The other companies involved know this as well; they’re just not saying the quiet part out loud.
We know. Ffs.
No shit
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.
Don't worry consumers will pay for all their poor decisions.
Now guess where that money comes from?
IBM is in the business of consulting. They don’t want their business model getting usurped. Imagine if everyone had access to a bot that could do IBMs job.
I don’t like AI, but this is one reason I can see him saying that.
Sure but they're in the business of consulting on how to build out that AI platform and the business of providing an AI platform.
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.
