alt Hacker NewsI guess gigawatts is how we roughly measure computing capacity at the datacenter scale? Also saw something similar here:
> Costs and pricing are expressed per “token”, but the published data immediately seems to admit that this is a bad choice of unit because it costs a lot more to output a token than input one. It seems to me that the actual marginal quantity being produced and consumed is “processing power”, which is apparently measured in gigawatt hours these days. In any case, I think more than anything this vindicates my original decision not to get too precise. [...]
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/new-new-rules-for-the-new-...
Is it priced that way, though? I assume next-gen TPU's will be more efficient?
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Gigawatts seems like more a statement of the power supply and dissipation of the actual facility.
I’m assuming you can cram more chips in there if you have more efficient chips to make use of spare capacity?
Trying to measure the actual compute is a moving target since you’d be upgrading things over time, whereas the power aspects are probably more fixed by fire code, building size, and utilities.
That these data centers can turn electricity + a little bit of fairly simple software directly into consumer and business value is pretty much the whole story.
Compare what you need to add to AWS EC2 to get the same result, above and beyond the electricity.
> but the published data immediately seems to admit that this is a bad choice of unit because it costs a lot more to output a token than input one
And, that's silly, because API pricing is more expensive for output than input tokens, 5x so for Anthropic [1], and 6x so for OpenAI!
[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
[2] https://openai.com/api/pricing