alt Hacker NewsHow bitter is the bitter lesson when throwing more compute js costing billions. Maybe the bitter lesson is more about money now than the hardware. You are scaling up investments not just relying on moores law. But I think there is a path for the less power consuming models that people can run affordably without VC money.
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az226 • last Thursday at 8:31 AM
The bitter lesson is all about more data/compute. Doesn’t matter if it costs more because it’s not as efficient, the scale is what matters at the end of the day. Sure you’d reach farther with both scale and optimization, but raw scale still takes the cake.
Don't forget it isn't just money; there's a whole heap of infrastructure that already exists to make this cheaper (standards for electricity, production scale for said standards, etc) but also socio-economic infrastructure (rule of law, etc). Imagine trying to build the same scale of infrastructure in a country with rampant corruption or in a war zone.
In particular from a strategic level consider all the benefits of Mahan's "Influence of Sea Power"[0] and the benefit nations with suitable sea power / access to global markets has on being able to build the necessary infrastructure at scale quickly in order to support such endeavours. And this isn't just about raw "Sea Power" but all the concomitant requirements to achieve this, in particular the "Number of population", "Character of the people", and "Character of the government".
[0] Alfred Thayer Mahan; "The Influence of Sea Power on History"