alt Hacker NewsAI compute is the new oil–and needs a new market
Comments
More reasons for regulation.
AI companies, LLM makers, AI solution providers, and AI users should be inexcusably responsible for any and all harms caused by their misaligned automations across the chain. This alone will encourage self regulation and fix a broken industry that has too long prospered on fail fast and break things to be more considerate of their actions.
The second form of regulation should be on excessive energy consumption. The US Department of Energy needs to declare energy to be a vital human resource, and exorbitant uses for computing to be curtailed. Bidding on energy prices should be restricted to the excess markets where free market dictates price. And supply will reduce availability.
Long term, this will put the right kind of pressures and halting of demand. It will slow down investment in infrastructure and increase investment in research and development. It will prioritize efficient AI uses over low quality trial and error.
the new oil as in we’re going to make a bunch of products that are needlessly packaged with derivatives of it, leaving behind a toxic mess that will take generations to clean up?
the concern is real because the current market is treating AI as "hand off and controlling all" agent, which is not efficient and not desirable because AI is still not smart enough to take on this initiative yet, and most of the work (especially repeatable ones don't need full AI. I would guess 5-10% of our current spending is actually usefully achieving some positive outcomes, the rest are just wasted. But the global resources pouring into AI field is the real trend.
This caught my eye:
> Architect Financial Technologies, founded in 2023, offers futures in compute linked to the value of chips in America. The firm has also recently launched a platform where model-makers bid to provide “inference”—the useful output produced by an AI model in response to a prompt—rather than the underlying compute capacity.
I think the idea of selling inference is solid, but I’m not convinced Wall Street is going to be doing that. Superscalers are better positioned.
Inference will likely be priced by evals, specific for each workload.
I remember in the 2010s when people were saying Big Data is the new oil
AI has to take us where We want to go before its compute can be considered on par with oil.
infrastructure project big enough to affect qol in neighborhood: checked
corruption: checked
regulatory capture: in progress
Ya, the new oil.
This seems silly. It's analogous to an electricity market where every megawatt is a different voltage, in a different city, might stop working halfway through the job, and only works properly if you buy another 500 megawatts from the same supplier... good luck getting this market off the ground.
We’re trying to get rid of fossil fuels…
[dead]
AI compute is not the new oil. Demand for oil is very inelastic: it's very difficult to increase the thermodynamic efficiency of the physical processes that convert oil into energy. AI compute efficiency, on the other hand, is improving exponentially. AI will end up being just slightly more expensive than the raw electricity required to produce it.
Data center demand right now has much more to do with private credit's demand for new deals, since the binge they went on around the pandemic led to the accumulation of a lot of bad debt and depreciating assets. Data centers are a tool for extracting money from insurance trusts and pension funds to prop up private credit and create debt-driven artificial "revenue" for the hyperscalers and Nvidia.