alt Hacker News> generally it's a commodity
The NVIDIA GPUs, HBM, land-use permits and power-supply agreements xAI nailed down are absolutely not commodities.
I think xAI is a mess. But let’s call a spade a spade, they speculated on AI compute and they are currently right.
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> and power-supply agreements
Don't you mean gas turbine purchases and questionably legal operation? But yeah I feel exactly the same way. The AI part of xAI looks like a mess but it seems that they still managed to score a massive win.
This feels highly revisionist: they bet on becoming a frontier lab and were aiming for AGI.
If they were speculating on compute, it seems highly unlikely they'd have spent the operating costs for the last 3 years of model development and deployment instead of just getting even more compute.
My read is that xAI built a lot of compute for their own use, but they didn't get any adoption so they are reselling the unused capacity to recoup at least some of the costs. So calling it a good bet is kind of misleading