10 ms·

I agree. This reminds me of ~20 years ago when bandwidth usage was growing incredibly exponentially and everyone thought people in 2024 would be consuming 20TB/

I agree. This reminds me of ~20 years ago when bandwidth usage was growing incredibly exponentially and everyone thought people in 2024 would be consuming 20TB/day. In reality bandwidth growth slowed down massively, to the point now where it is growing at something like 10-50%/yr and everyone went under because there was far too much capacity. There is a finite amount of fabs that can produce GPUs which sets an upper limit on the production. I doubt we are going to see _that_ many more fabs being built. I also think everyone is hoarding as many GPUs as possible, which makes sense for meta/openai/google but probably much less sense for other players with time - nevermind random corporates that are just jumping on the bandwagon. I really think we'll see a small number of players (more than just openai, meta and google) produce most of the foundational models, then everyone will finetune and infer off them (which are many orders of magnitude less). That's not to say there won't be huge demand for GPUs, but I don't think it's going to be that every fortune 500 needs a 10k GPU cluster. The key differentiator IMO with crypto is crypto by its nature has exponentially more computer resource requirement built into (most) of it. I don't know if AI does after a certain point, and I think there are enormous efficiency gains happening which simply doesn't happen in crypto (which you point out).

mistrial9 3y ago
desktop computer use declined in the same time period in most places. The bandwidth expansion for consumers has been on mobile, and secondly specifically for movie viewing. Also consider a long, deliberate and concerted effort by ISPs across the USA to limit bandwidth for commercial reasons e.g. lying about max download speeds repeatedly and on the record, while rate limiting.
- martinald 3y ago
  While desktop usage has declined, smart TVs, "connected" games consoles etc have exploded which take a similar place. And I assume most smartphone bandwidth consumption is on wifi at home, not cellular, though don't know if you are making that point. In the UK which has virtually no bandwidth caps on fixed line broadband bandwidth use isn't growing particularly fast: https://www.linx.net/news/capacity-planning-a-priority-for-linx-networks/ https://www.linx.net/news/capacity-planning-a-priority-for-l..., despite a huge increase in FTTH availability. You can see the same in Amsterdam: https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/total-stats https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/total-stats which is basically flat Y/Y. This may be because of more private peering away from IXs but if there was massive growth you'd see it.
rvz 3y ago
> The key differentiator IMO with crypto is crypto by its nature has exponentially more computer resource requirement built into (most) of it. I don't know if AI does after a certain point, and I think there are enormous efficiency gains happening which simply doesn't happen in crypto (which you point out). This is wrong. Crypto does not need a massive amount of GPUs in a data-center to function and waste lots of resources unlike generative AI and deep learning which for any serious model to be used for inference; it needs tons of data centers and GPUs to serve millions. AI has always required hundreds of millions of dollars a year in inference costs alone as the data scales whilst also requiring lots of energy to output a working model including the risk of overfitting and garbage results.

mistrial9 3y ago

desktop computer use declined in the same time period in most places. The bandwidth expansion for consumers has been on mobile, and secondly specifically for movie viewing. Also consider a long, deliberate and concerted effort by ISPs across the USA to limit bandwidth for commercial reasons e.g. lying about max download speeds repeatedly and on the record, while rate limiting.

martinald 3y ago
While desktop usage has declined, smart TVs, "connected" games consoles etc have exploded which take a similar place. And I assume most smartphone bandwidth consumption is on wifi at home, not cellular, though don't know if you are making that point. In the UK which has virtually no bandwidth caps on fixed line broadband bandwidth use isn't growing particularly fast: https://www.linx.net/news/capacity-planning-a-priority-for-linx-networks/ https://www.linx.net/news/capacity-planning-a-priority-for-l..., despite a huge increase in FTTH availability. You can see the same in Amsterdam: https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/total-stats https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/total-stats which is basically flat Y/Y. This may be because of more private peering away from IXs but if there was massive growth you'd see it.

rvz 3y ago

> The key differentiator IMO with crypto is crypto by its nature has exponentially more computer resource requirement built into (most) of it. I don't know if AI does after a certain point, and I think there are enormous efficiency gains happening which simply doesn't happen in crypto (which you point out). This is wrong. Crypto does not need a massive amount of GPUs in a data-center to function and waste lots of resources unlike generative AI and deep learning which for any serious model to be used for inference; it needs tons of data centers and GPUs to serve millions. AI has always required hundreds of millions of dollars a year in inference costs alone as the data scales whilst also requiring lots of energy to output a working model including the risk of overfitting and garbage results.