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I just hope when (if) the hype is over, we can repurpose the capacities for something useful (e.g. drug discovery etc.)
by oytis 1y ago
I just hope when (if) the hype is over, we can repurpose the capacities for something useful (e.g. drug discovery etc.)
- te_chris 1y agoAs the author says: this capex isn’t a railroad, it’s a very expensive immediately depreciating asset. We should be so lucky
- midnightclubbed 1y agoMaybe there will be a benefit from the additional power generation and infrastructure that will still be available if the data centers don’t need it. Can’t believe I have to state the obvious and say that is only a potential gain if the power/cooling is from renewable sources. But I do
- intended 1y agoThat’s a mighty big if.
- sour-taste 1y agoWe won't. Well lay off engineers to balance the books and destroy unneeded capacity.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoVery Grapes of Wrath.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoA competent government might rent these company’s GPUs to cure major diseases once they’re sitting idle.
- Bluestein 1y ago(or they'll end up mining crypto as the only viable alternative, crashing the whole tent )
- dgfitz 1y agoBitcoin still needs a-minin’.
- Retr0id 1y agoGPUs haven't been useful for bitcoin mining for a long time.
- apwell23 1y agoyearly AI capex is more than NASA and NIH combined
- actionfromafar 1y agoSo, not very much, all things considered.
- lenerdenator 1y agoTell that to Congress.
- esseph 1y agoThat would be $75 billion combined for 2025. A drop in the bucket. -- > From 2013 to 2020, cloud infrastructure capex rose methodically—from $32 billion to $119 billion. That's significant, but manageable. Post-2020? The curve steepens. By 2024, we hit $285 billion. And in 2025 alone, the top 11 cloud providers are forecasted to deploy a staggering $392 billion—MORE than the entire previous two years combined. https://www.wisdomtree.com/investments/blog/2025/05/21/this-is-what-ai-commitment-looks-like-392-billion-and-rising https://www.wisdomtree.com/investments/blog/2025/05/21/this-...
- armchairhacker 1y agoVery cheap game consoles and VR headsets. Unironically that could really help world peace and QOL: less news and doomscrolling, and people would have an outlet for stress, anger, and boredom.
- lenerdenator 1y agoI've never seen a group more easily angered than gamers. "What do you mean the women in this game have proportions roughly equivalent to what's actually possible in nature?!?!"
- miningape 1y ago[flagged]
- woah 1y agoIt's about ethics in game journalism!
- drdaeman 1y agoThat's a subset of gamers, specifically gamers who actively want a hypersexualized characters and still haven't figured out how to ignore the irrelevant products and still chose to be angered if some product doesn't fit their requirements (despite no shortage of games that would fit the bill).
- intended 1y agoThe most trust and safety research I’ve seen - on things like recidivism, ban success, pro social behavior - comes from gaming. Dota, league, he’ll - Roblox, twitch, discord - have some of the most data on how angry humans are when they play vidya.
- tuatoru 1y agoThe data are easily accessible, and the target group has little political power and is seen as problematic and about the only remaining legitimate target for negative discourse. Imagine the reception that studies of female aggression get.
- 827a 1y agoIf you have a GPU which you've used for AI training, but that's no longer valuable, you could sell that GPU; but then you'd incur taxable revenue. If you destroy the GPU, you can write it off as a loss, which reduces your taxable income. Its possible you could come out ahead by selling everything off, but then you'd have to pay expensive people to manage the sell off, logistics, etc. What a mess. Easier to just destroy everything and take the write-off.
- phil21 1y agoCapital equipment is depreciated over time. By the time you're selling it off, it's pennies on the dollar and a small recoupment of cost. Paying 30% (or whatever) taxes on that small amount of income and having 70% remaining is still better than zero dollars and zero taxes. It is a giant pain to sell off this gear if you are using in-house folks to do so. Usually not worth it, and why things end up trashed as you state. If I have a dozen 10 year old servers to get rid of - it's usually not worth anyone's time or energy to list them for $200 on ebay and figure out shipping logistics. However, at scale the situation and numbers change - you can call in an equipment liquidator who can wheel out 500 racks full of gear at a time and you get paid for their disposal on top of it. Usually a win/win situation since you no longer have expensive people trying to figure out who to call to get rid of it, how to do data destruction properly, etc. This usually is a help to the bottom line in almost all cases I've seen, on top of it saving internal man-hours. If you're in "failed startup being liquidated for asset value" territory, then the receiver/those in charge typically have a fiduciary duty to find the best reasonable outcome for the investors. It's rarely throwing gear with residual value in the trash. See: used Aeron chair market.
- triceratops 1y ago> that's no longer valuable, you could sell that GPU; but then you'd incur taxable revenue Unless GPUs are like post-Covid used cars you're going to sell them at a loss which can be written off. Write-offs don't have to involve destroying the asset. I don't know where you got that idea.
- barbazoo 1y agoOn the other hand, drug discovery sounds like it's a candidate for really benefitting from AI. To fuel AI model development, there maybe has to be all the garbage that comes with AI.
- lm28469 1y agoWhat drugs? The leading causes of death are routine induced, 80% of cancers are caused by your environment, &c. We have much better things to do with these billions
- ribosometronome 1y agoDrugs to cure the diseases caused by your environment. It's not as if people are suddenly going to be making perfect decisions (e.g. never getting a sunburn, not eating meat, avoiding sugary foods).
- lm28469 1y agoSo all these things that skyrocketed in the span of 75 years are immutable facts of life, but magic drugs are somehow in the realm of possibilities? What's easier, educate your people and feed them well to build a strong and healthy nation OR let them rot and shovel billions to pharma corps in the hope of finding a magic cure?
- astrange 1y agoSecond one's easier. Technological improvements are always easier than social change. > shovel billions to pharma corps in the hope of finding a magic cure? What do you mean finding? We already found it (GLP-1 inhibitors). Ozempic is even owned by a nonprofit (Novo Nordisk). See, everything's fine.
- ribosometronome 1y ago>skyrocketed in the span of 75 years are immutable facts of life A number of them seem to have skyrocketed with quality of life and personal wealth. I suspect my ancestors were skinny not because they were educated on eating well but because they lacked the same access to food we have in modern society, especially super caloric ones. I don't super want to go back to an ice cream scarce world. Things like meat consumption are linked to colon cancer and most folk are unwilling to give that up or practice meat-light diets. People generally like smoking! Education campaigns got that down briefly but it was generally not because people didn't want to smoke, it's because they didn't want cancer. Vaping is clearly popular nowadays. Alcohol, too! The WHO says there is no safe amount of alcohol consumption and attributes lots of cancer to even light drinking. I suspect people would enjoy being able to regularly have a glass of wine or beer and not have it cost them their life.
- alphazard 1y agoThe rest of the world has not caught up to current LLM capabilities. If it all stopped tomorrow and we couldn't build anything more intelligent than what we have now: there would be years of work automating away toil across various industries.
- Terr_ 1y agoCreating oodles of new jobs in internally QAing LLM results, or finding and suing companies for reckless outcomes. :p
- alphazard 1y agoAs long as liability is clearly assigned, it doesn't have an economic impact. The ambiguity of liability is what creates negative economic impact. Once it's assigned initially through law, then it can be reassigned via contract in exchange for cash to ensure the most productive outcome. e.g. if OpenAI is responsible for any damages caused by ChatGPT then the service shuts down until you waive liability and then it's back up. Similarly if companies are responsible for the chat bots they deploy then they can buy insurance or put up guard rails around the chat bot, or not use it.
- Terr_ 1y ago> As long as liability is clearly assigned, it doesn't have an economic impact In a reality with perfect knowledge, complete laws always applied, and populated by un-bankrupt-able immortals with infinite lines of credit, yes. :P
- sterlind 1y agomy experience using LLM-powered tools (e.g. copilot in agent mode) has been underwhelming. like, shockingly so. like not cd-ing to the wrong dir where a script is located, and getting lost, disregarding my instructions to run ./tests.ps1 and running `dotnet test`, writing syntactically incorrect scripts and failing to correct them, particularly being overwhelmed by verbose logs. sometimes it even fails to understand the semantic meaning of my prompts. whereas my experience describing my problem and actually asking the AI is much, much smoother. I'm not convinced the "LLM+scaffolding" paradigm will work all that well. sanity degrades with context length, and even the models with huge context windows don't seem to use it all that effectively. RAG searches often give lackluster results. the models fundamentally seem to do poorly with using commands to accomplish tasks. I think fundamental model advances are needed to make most things more than superficially automatable: better planning/goal-directed behavior, a more organic connection to RAG context, automatic gym synthesis, and RL-based fine tuning (that holds up to distribution shift.) I think that will come, but I think if LLMs plateau here they won't have much more impact than Google Search did in the '90s.
- baxtr 1y agoRe hype: Why is it that so many people are completely obsessed with replacing all developers and any other white-collar job? They seem to be totally convinced that this will happen. 100% To me, this all sounds like an “end-of-the-world” nihilistic wet dream, and I don’t buy the hype. Is it’s just me?
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago> Re hype: Why is it that so many people are completely obsessed with replacing all developers and any other white-collar job? They seem to be totally convinced that this will happen. 100% Because the only thing that gets the executive class hornier than new iPhone-tier products is getting to layoff tons of staff. It sends the stock price through the roof. It follows from there that an iPhone-tier product that also lets them layoff tons of staff would be like fucking catnip to them.
- astrange 1y agoThe job description of a developer is to replace themselves by automating themselves so they can get promoted/find a new more relevant role. That's the point of compilers and new programming languages. There's no such thing as taking people's jobs, nobody and nothing is going to take your job except for Jay Powell, and productivity improvements cause employment to increase not decrease.
- ivape 1y agoPeople really hate late stage capitalism.
- noitpmeder 1y agoBecause developer and other white-collar job salaries are the top expense of most companies.
- kulahan 1y agoOh boy I can’t wait until we get rid of the highest paying jobs! Your response doesn’t explain why so many people are hyped about it, just why CEOs are.
- whydoyoucare 1y agoAren't advancements in AI actually helping drug discovery?
- jahewson 1y agoThis implies that a human life is valuable but what they spend it doing is not.
- charleshn 1y agoI'm always surprised by the number of people posting here that are dismissive of AI and the obvious unstoppable progress. Just looking at what happened with chess, go, strategy games, protein folding etc, it's obvious that pretty much any field/problem that can be formalised and cheaply verified - e.g. mathematics, algorithms etc - will be solved, and that it's only a matter of time before we have domain-specific ASI. I strongly encourage everyone to read about the bitter lesson [0] and verifier's law [1]. [0] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html [1] https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-verifiers-law https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-...
- oytis 1y agoIt's very different from chess etc. If we could formalise and "solve" software engineering precisely, it would be really cool, and probably indeed just lift programming to a new level of abstraction. I don't mind if software jobs move from writing software to verifying software either if it makes the whole process more efficient and the software becomes better as a result. Again, not what is happening here. What is happening, at least in AI optimist CEO minds is "disruption". Drop the quality while cutting costs dramatically.
- charleshn 1y agoI mentioned algorithms, not software engineering, precisely for that reason. But the next step is obviously increased formalism via formal methods, deterministic simulators etc, basically so that one could define an environment for a RL agent.
- bigyabai 1y agoI'll bet you $1,000*10^32 that AI never formalizes a novel FFT algorithm worth more than a dime.
- puchatek 1y agoIt's unlikely that LLMs are gonna get us there though. They ingested all relevant data at this point at the net effect might very well kill future sources of quality data. How is e.g. stackoverflow gonna stay alive if the next generation of programmers relies mainly on copilot and vibe coding? And what will the LLMs scrape once it's gone?
- tootie 1y agoCloud gaming 2.0
- jandrewrogers 1y agoDuring the 1990s dotcom boom we massively overbuilt fiber networks. It was indiscriminate and most of the fiber was never lit. After the dotcom crash, much of this infrastructure became distressed assets that could be picked up for peanuts. This fueled a large number of new startups in the aftermath that built business models figuring out how to effectively leverage all of this dead fiber when you don't have to pay the huge capital costs of building it out yourself. At the time, you could essentially build a nationwide fiber network for a few million dollars if you were clever, and people did. These new data centers will find a use, even if it ends up being by some startup who picks it up for nothing after a crash. This has been a pattern in US tech for a long time. The carcass of the previous boom's whale becomes cheap fuel for the next generation of companies.
- segmondy 1y agoI can barely get 50Mbps up/down and I only have xfinity in this area. No fiber, I will pay for it, but here we are. 2025 in good ol USA. In an urban area too.
- cute_boi 1y agoYou are lucky to have 50Mbps up. I have rented in 2-3 big cities and the upload speed was maximum 20mbps.
- suddengunter 1y agowow When a few years ago I moved from Eastern Europe (where I had 1GB/s to my apartment for years) to the UK I was surprised that "the best" internet connection I was able to get was about 40MBit/s phone line. But it's a small town, and during past years even we have fiber up to 2GB/s now. I'm surprised US still has issues that you mentioned. Have you considered Starlink(fuck Musk, but the product is decent)/alternatives?
- Fade_Dance 1y agoThe US issues have some key driving factors: One is, of course, the size of the country, but that's hardly an "excuse." It does contribute though. The other big reason is lack of competition in the ISP space, and this is compounded by a distinctly American captured system where the owners/operators of the "public" utility poles shut out new entrants and have no incentive to improve the situation. Meanwhile the nationwide regulatory agencies have been stripped down and courts have de-toothed them, reducing likelihood of top-down reform, and often these sorts of problems inevitably end up running into the local and state government vs national government split that is far more severe in the US. So it's one of those problems that is surprising to some degree, but when you read about things like public utility telephone poles captured by corporate interests, it's also distinctly ridiculous and American, and not surprising at all.
- afiodorov 1y agoI live next to an abandoned building from the Spanish property boom. It's now occupied illegally. Hype's over yet the consequence is staring at me every day. I am sure it'll eventually be knocked down or repurposed yet it'd be better had the misallocation never happened.
- Aeolun 1y ago> It's now occupied illegally. So it’s still being used now. That’s good right?
- tim333 1y agoI bought a flat in the Spanish property boom. It was empty a while with ~80% of flats in the area vacant, then I had a squatter, now kicked out. Now most of the property is occupied and the Spanish government are bringing in huge restrictions to ease the property shortage. These things go in cycles. The boom and bust isn't very efficient but there you go.
- casey2 1y agoDepends if Nvidia is having their partners to destroy their cards to prevent flooding. I really would not put it past them.