alt Hacker NewsThe primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
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I cannot currently access Fable class models, I am out of usage credits.
Anthropic is removing these larger models from personal plans at the end of the week to focus on selling it to enterprise users.
Putting these more intelligent new models into the hands of more people seems very worthwhile to me.
The most important sentences of the article are:
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
In the Innovation Adoption Curve, we are absolutely beyond the Early Adopters phase and possibly the Early Majority. The growth rates necessarily have to start trending down because there’s no one left to sell to.