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xeryesterday at 10:47 PM4 repliesview on HN

This is great! But what if the US invests 1% of GDP in GPU datacenters and then those are not needed becaues someone created a much more efficient architecture?


Replies

dkuralyesterday at 11:10 PM

Look up Jevons Paradox, when something becomes more efficient, consumption can goes up, often due to price elasticity.

Think of like this: Imagine car prices go from $200,000 to $$20,000 - you wouldn't sell 10x the amount of cars, you'd sell --- In fact I just looked up the numbers - worldwide only 100K or so cars are 200K & higher, whereas roughly 80 million cars are in that affordable category.

So a price drop of 90% allowed sales to go from 0.1M to 80M!! I think this means we need more engines, tires, roads, gas, spare parts.

chpatrickyesterday at 11:29 PM

Then they'll be able to use those datacenters much more efficiently.

wild_eggyesterday at 10:52 PM

More efficiency just means more consumption. Think when they add lanes to a highway, traffic gets better for a little bit but very soon the highway is just as congested as before.

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_boffin_yesterday at 10:50 PM

They will still use capacity. Why would you believe anything different?