5 ms·

In a parallel universe, governments invest in the compute/datacenters (read: infra), and let model makers compete on the same playing field.

websiteapi 11mo ago
why would they do that? not to mention governments are already doing that indirectly by taking equity stakes in some of the companies.
- candiddevmike 11mo ago
  Same reason they should own access lines: everyone needs rackspace/access, it should be treated like a public service to avoid rent seeing. Having a data center in every city where all of the local lines terminate into could open the doors to a lot of interesting use cases, really help with local resiliency/decentralization efforts, and provide a great alternative to cloud providers that doesn't break the bank.
  - websiteapi 11mo ago
    should the government own all types of "public services"? e.g. search index, video serving infra, etc?
    - toxic72 11mo ago
      Public ownership of public services hmm?
      - paulryanrogers 11mo ago
        Smells like socialism. Around here we privatize the profits and only socialize the costs. Like the impending bailout of the most politically connected AI companies.
simonw 11mo ago
If that did happen, how would the government then issue those resources? OpenAI ask for 1m GPUs for a month, Anthropic ask for 2m, the government data center only has 500,000, and a new startup wants 750,000 as well. Do you hand them out to the most convincing pitch? Hopefully not to the biggest donor to your campaign. Now the most successful AI lab is the one that's best at pitching the government for additional resources. UPDATE: See comment below for the answer to this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438390#46439067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438390#46439067
- 3eb7988a1663 11mo ago
  National HPC labs have been over subscribed for decades with extensive queueing/time sharing allocation systems. It would still likely devolve into most-money-wins, but it is not an insurmountable political obstacle to arrange some sort of sharing. Edit: I meant to say over subscribed, not over provisioned. There are far more jobs in the queue than can be handled at once
  - simonw 11mo ago
    Huh, TIL - thanks for the correction. https://www.ornl.gov/news/doe-incite-program-seeks-2026-proposals-computing-innovation https://www.ornl.gov/news/doe-incite-program-seeks-2026-prop... > The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program has announced the 2026 Call for Proposals, inviting researchers to apply for access to some of the world’s most powerful high-performance computing systems. > The proposal submission window runs from April 11 to June 16, 2025, offering an opportunity for scientific teams to secure substantial computational resources for large-scale research projects in fields such as scientific modeling, simulation, data analytics and artificial intelligence. [...] > Individual awards typically range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 node-hours on Aurora and Frontier and 100,000 to 250,000 node-hours on Polaris, with the possibility of larger allocations for exceptional proposals. [...] > The selection process involves a rigorous peer review, assessing both scientific merit and computational readiness. Awards will be announced in November 2025, with access to resources beginning in 2026. Not sure OpenAI/Anthropic etc would be OK with a six month gap between application and getting access to the resources, but this does indeed demonstrate that government issued super-computing resources is a previously solved problem.
wat10000 11mo ago
That seems like a terrible idea. Data centers aren’t a natural monopoly. Regulate the externalities and let it flourish.
- amelius 11mo ago
  Don't forget that the internet exists because of government agencies.
  - Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
    Cool. Time for the government to seize Amazon.
  - wat10000 11mo ago
    I'm not sure how that's relevant here.
echelon 11mo ago
That's malinvestment. Too much overhead, disconnected from long term demand. The government doesn't have expertise, isn't lean and nimble. What if it all just blows over? (It won't? But who knows?) Everything is happening exactly as it should. If the "bubble" "pops", that's just the economic laws doing what they naturally do. The government has better things to do. Geopolitics, trade, transportation, resources, public health, consumer safety, jobs, economy, defense, regulatory activities, etc.
aucisson_masque 11mo ago
I’d rather stay far away from this parallel universe. Why would you want my money to be used to build datacenter that won’t benefit me ? I might use a LLM once a month, many people never use it. Let the one who use it pay for it.
- inerte 11mo ago
  That's like every government initiative. Same as healthcare? School? I mean if you don't have children why do you pay taxes... and roads if you don't drive? I mean the examples are so many... why do you bring this argument that if it doesn't benefit you directly right now today, it shouldn't be done?
  - magpi3 11mo ago
    Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.
    - inerte 11mo ago
      We gave incentives to broadband, why not generative AI?
      - wat10000 11mo ago
        Last-mile services like roads, electricity, water, and telecommunications are natural monopolies. Normal market forces fail somewhat and you want some government involvement to keep it running smoothly. This is not at all true of generative AI.
  - zdragnar 11mo ago
    There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all). What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good? There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.
cambrianentropy 11mo ago
In a completely alternate dimension, a quarter of the capital being invested in AI literally just goes towards making sure everyone has quality food and water.
- dmitrygr 11mo ago
  Without capital invested in the past we wouldn’t have almost anything of modern technology. That has done a lot more for everyone, including food affordability, than actually simply buying food for people to eat once.
- marcellus23 11mo ago
  I'd rather live in a universe where that money is taken out of the military budget.
  - serf 11mo ago
    you'll never win that argument, but I absolutely agree. people have no idea about how big the military and defense budgets worldwide are next to any other example of a public budget. throw as many pie charts out as you want; people just can't see the astronomical difference in budgets. I think it's based on how the thing works; a good defense works until it doesn't -- the other systems/budgets in place have a bit more of a graceful failure. This concept produces an irrationality in people that produces windfalls of cash availability.
- GaryBluto 11mo ago
  As we all know, throwing money at a problem solves it completely. Remember how Live Aid saved Ethiopia from starvation and it never had any problems again?
paulcole 11mo ago
Do you like this idea?
Zigurd 11mo ago
Prediction: on this thread you'll get a lot of talk about how government would slow things down. But when the AI bubble starts to look shaky, see how fast all the tech bros line up for a "public private partnership."
nutjob2 11mo ago
That sounds like a nightmare.
andy99 11mo ago
That could make sense in some steady state regime where there were stable requirements and mature tech (I wouldn’t vote for it but I can see an argument). I see no argument why the government would jump into a hype cycle and start building infra that speculative startups are interested in. Why would they take on that risk compared to private investors, and how would they decide to back that over mammoth cloning infra or whatever other startups are doing?
- Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
  Given where we are posting, the motive is obvious: to socialize the riskiest part of AI while the investors retain all the potential upside. These people have no sense of shame so they'll loudly advocate for endless public risk and private rewards.
JoshTriplett 11mo ago
In a better parallel universe, we found a different innovation without using brute-force computation to train systems that unreliably and inefficiently compute things and still leaves us able to understand what we're building.
zozbot234 11mo ago
Datacenters are not a natural monopoly, you can always build more. Beyond what the public sector itself might need for its own use, there's not much of a case for governments to invest in them.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> governments invest in the compute/datacenters (read: infra), and let model makers compete on the same playing field Hmm, what about member-owned coöperatives? Like what we have for stock exchanges.
sc68cal 11mo ago
Socialized losses, private profits

websiteapi 11mo ago

why would they do that? not to mention governments are already doing that indirectly by taking equity stakes in some of the companies.

candiddevmike 11mo ago
Same reason they should own access lines: everyone needs rackspace/access, it should be treated like a public service to avoid rent seeing. Having a data center in every city where all of the local lines terminate into could open the doors to a lot of interesting use cases, really help with local resiliency/decentralization efforts, and provide a great alternative to cloud providers that doesn't break the bank.
- websiteapi 11mo ago
  should the government own all types of "public services"? e.g. search index, video serving infra, etc?
  - toxic72 11mo ago
    Public ownership of public services hmm?
    - paulryanrogers 11mo ago
      Smells like socialism. Around here we privatize the profits and only socialize the costs. Like the impending bailout of the most politically connected AI companies.

simonw 11mo ago

If that did happen, how would the government then issue those resources? OpenAI ask for 1m GPUs for a month, Anthropic ask for 2m, the government data center only has 500,000, and a new startup wants 750,000 as well. Do you hand them out to the most convincing pitch? Hopefully not to the biggest donor to your campaign. Now the most successful AI lab is the one that's best at pitching the government for additional resources. UPDATE: See comment below for the answer to this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438390#46439067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438390#46439067

3eb7988a1663 11mo ago
National HPC labs have been over subscribed for decades with extensive queueing/time sharing allocation systems. It would still likely devolve into most-money-wins, but it is not an insurmountable political obstacle to arrange some sort of sharing. Edit: I meant to say over subscribed, not over provisioned. There are far more jobs in the queue than can be handled at once
- simonw 11mo ago
  Huh, TIL - thanks for the correction. https://www.ornl.gov/news/doe-incite-program-seeks-2026-proposals-computing-innovation https://www.ornl.gov/news/doe-incite-program-seeks-2026-prop... > The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program has announced the 2026 Call for Proposals, inviting researchers to apply for access to some of the world’s most powerful high-performance computing systems. > The proposal submission window runs from April 11 to June 16, 2025, offering an opportunity for scientific teams to secure substantial computational resources for large-scale research projects in fields such as scientific modeling, simulation, data analytics and artificial intelligence. [...] > Individual awards typically range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 node-hours on Aurora and Frontier and 100,000 to 250,000 node-hours on Polaris, with the possibility of larger allocations for exceptional proposals. [...] > The selection process involves a rigorous peer review, assessing both scientific merit and computational readiness. Awards will be announced in November 2025, with access to resources beginning in 2026. Not sure OpenAI/Anthropic etc would be OK with a six month gap between application and getting access to the resources, but this does indeed demonstrate that government issued super-computing resources is a previously solved problem.

wat10000 11mo ago

That seems like a terrible idea. Data centers aren’t a natural monopoly. Regulate the externalities and let it flourish.

amelius 11mo ago
Don't forget that the internet exists because of government agencies.
- Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
  Cool. Time for the government to seize Amazon.
- wat10000 11mo ago
  I'm not sure how that's relevant here.

echelon 11mo ago

That's malinvestment. Too much overhead, disconnected from long term demand. The government doesn't have expertise, isn't lean and nimble. What if it all just blows over? (It won't? But who knows?) Everything is happening exactly as it should. If the "bubble" "pops", that's just the economic laws doing what they naturally do. The government has better things to do. Geopolitics, trade, transportation, resources, public health, consumer safety, jobs, economy, defense, regulatory activities, etc.

aucisson_masque 11mo ago

I’d rather stay far away from this parallel universe. Why would you want my money to be used to build datacenter that won’t benefit me ? I might use a LLM once a month, many people never use it. Let the one who use it pay for it.

inerte 11mo ago
That's like every government initiative. Same as healthcare? School? I mean if you don't have children why do you pay taxes... and roads if you don't drive? I mean the examples are so many... why do you bring this argument that if it doesn't benefit you directly right now today, it shouldn't be done?
- magpi3 11mo ago
  Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.
  - inerte 11mo ago
    We gave incentives to broadband, why not generative AI?
    - wat10000 11mo ago
      Last-mile services like roads, electricity, water, and telecommunications are natural monopolies. Normal market forces fail somewhat and you want some government involvement to keep it running smoothly. This is not at all true of generative AI.
- zdragnar 11mo ago
  There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all). What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good? There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.

cambrianentropy 11mo ago

In a completely alternate dimension, a quarter of the capital being invested in AI literally just goes towards making sure everyone has quality food and water.

dmitrygr 11mo ago
Without capital invested in the past we wouldn’t have almost anything of modern technology. That has done a lot more for everyone, including food affordability, than actually simply buying food for people to eat once.
marcellus23 11mo ago
I'd rather live in a universe where that money is taken out of the military budget.
- serf 11mo ago
  you'll never win that argument, but I absolutely agree. people have no idea about how big the military and defense budgets worldwide are next to any other example of a public budget. throw as many pie charts out as you want; people just can't see the astronomical difference in budgets. I think it's based on how the thing works; a good defense works until it doesn't -- the other systems/budgets in place have a bit more of a graceful failure. This concept produces an irrationality in people that produces windfalls of cash availability.
GaryBluto 11mo ago
As we all know, throwing money at a problem solves it completely. Remember how Live Aid saved Ethiopia from starvation and it never had any problems again?

paulcole 11mo ago

Do you like this idea?

Zigurd 11mo ago

Prediction: on this thread you'll get a lot of talk about how government would slow things down. But when the AI bubble starts to look shaky, see how fast all the tech bros line up for a "public private partnership."

nutjob2 11mo ago

That sounds like a nightmare.

andy99 11mo ago

That could make sense in some steady state regime where there were stable requirements and mature tech (I wouldn’t vote for it but I can see an argument). I see no argument why the government would jump into a hype cycle and start building infra that speculative startups are interested in. Why would they take on that risk compared to private investors, and how would they decide to back that over mammoth cloning infra or whatever other startups are doing?

Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
Given where we are posting, the motive is obvious: to socialize the riskiest part of AI while the investors retain all the potential upside. These people have no sense of shame so they'll loudly advocate for endless public risk and private rewards.

JoshTriplett 11mo ago

In a better parallel universe, we found a different innovation without using brute-force computation to train systems that unreliably and inefficiently compute things and still leaves us able to understand what we're building.

zozbot234 11mo ago

Datacenters are not a natural monopoly, you can always build more. Beyond what the public sector itself might need for its own use, there's not much of a case for governments to invest in them.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> governments invest in the compute/datacenters (read: infra), and let model makers compete on the same playing field Hmm, what about member-owned coöperatives? Like what we have for stock exchanges.

sc68cal 11mo ago

Socialized losses, private profits