3 ms·
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
by aucisson_masque 10mo 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 10mo agoThat'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 10mo agoHealthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.
- inerte 10mo agoWe gave incentives to broadband, why not generative AI?
- wat10000 10mo agoLast-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 10mo agoThere 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.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoa distinction: the data centers have become the means of production, unlike clothing from a store
- zdragnar 10mo agoHow is that distinct from any of my other examples which listed factories? Very few factories in the US are publicly owned; citing data centers as places of production merely furthers the argument that they should remain private.
- reverserdev 10mo agoLibraries with books are likely considered public goods right? Why not an LLM datacenter if it also offers information? You could say it's the public library of the future maybe.
- llmslave2 10mo agoI have no idea why you're being downvoted because you're right. The entire point of taxation is to spread the cost among everyone, and since everyone doesn't utilise every government service every tax payer ends up paying for stuff they don't use. That like, the whole point...
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo agoYou are already paying for several national lab HPC centers. These are used for government/university research - no idea if commercial interests can rent time on them. The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on.
- nine_k 10mo agoMany more people materially benefit from e.g. good weather forecasts than form video slop generation.
- serf 10mo ago>The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on. these things constitute public goods that benefit the individual regardless of participation.
- fdr 10mo agoThe biggest run classified nuclear stockpile loads, at least in the US. They cost about half a billion apiece. And are 30 (carefully cooled and cabled) megawatts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan_(supercomputer) No chance they're going to take risks to share that hardware with anyone given what it does. The scaled down version of El Capitan is used for non-classified workloads, some of which are proprietary, like drug simulation. It is called Tuolumne. Not long ago, it was nevertheless still a top ten supercomputer. Like OP, I also don't see why a government supercomputer does it better than hyperscalers, coreweave, neoclouds, et al, who have put in a ton of capital as even compared to government. For loads where institutional continuity is extremely important, like weather -- and maybe one day, a public LLM model or three -- maybe. But we're not there yet, and there's so much competition in LLM infrastructure that it's quite likely some of these entrants will be bag holders, not a world of juicy margins at all...rather, playing chicken with negative gross margins.
- nialv7 10mo agoif datacenters are built by the government, then i think it's fair to assume there will be some level of democratic control of what those datacenters will be used for.
- quantified 10mo agoWhat's the democratic control of existing resources? I would make the opposite assumption, it would be captured by the wealthiest interests.
- shimman 10mo agoThis is literally the current system... adding more democratic controls is a good thing, the alternative is that only rich control these systems and would you look at it only the rich control these systems. Uncanny really.
- nine_k 10mo agoCertainly! Your congress representatives would be voting on how to allocate its computing power. (Do you remember who did you vote for last time?)
- GaryBluto 10mo agoSure. Same for healthcare and education right? If you don't have a child or need medical attention, why should you pay for them?