alt Hacker NewsIm not convinced by the claims of infrastructure only being expensive to build initially. Hardware doesn't last forever especially in a data center, maintenance isn't free, electricity is not going to get significantly cheaper. If models get more efficient we won't need super expensive and expansive hardware build outs, if models keep getting more powerful and needy and are hardware limited, each new hardware generation will stomp over all this expensive and soon to be old hardware in electrical efficiency requiring another massive round of funding that players already holding debt will struggle to afford.
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So much this.
The current-gen hardware is expected to have only 2-3 years of useful life. New tech, and especially new architecture is going to make inference much faster and more efficient in the near future, and the big vendors are going to be more limited by datacenter floor space and power/cooling, so that the hardware will be replaced very quickly by better models.
It hardly seems to be a one time expense. GPUs and networking equipment may have a useful lifespan of only about five years before needing replacement, and it could be expensive to do so.
If new hardware comes online that doesn't allow you to payback your billions in hardware, what then? The level of rigor in the article is low.
If we steel-they the point in the essay, it still doesn't matter because a bubble is setup in the economics of the system, not whether the underlying tech works and/or is profitable. It can both work, be profitable, but have been overcapitalized before the knock on effects are in-place in the rest of the economy. This is a crazy analogy, but what if 1700s earth figured out, theoretically how to build a fusion reactor that could supply all the energy needs of the whole planet. But it cost in their equivalent dollars, 1 quadrillion dollars? You can't even integrate under their money curve to scrape together that many dollars. The only economy you can make about that is in the research side to push the cost down. Then when its dialed in, you can launch that rocket AND the rest of the system has had time at many different levels to integrate AI at various levels. OpenAI dry barebacked its way into the economy and literally screwed everything up. If they really were an altruistic AI safety lab, they should have kept working on ChatGPT, but demoed it to the world including government, so we could as a planet decide where we are taking this.
It is a huge bubble, AI is over capitalized, we have no idea what the knock on effects are and really the only benefit right now is in programming, which is huge and civilization changing. But it also has massive downsides in that it has given the most powerful even longer levers to move the earth.