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I believe the same thing but keep repeating the question: Then what are all the datacenters for?
by Traubenfuchs 5mo ago
I believe the same thing but keep repeating the question: Then what are all the datacenters for?
- chris_money202 5mo agoAgents
- harrall 5mo agoI print documents and photos at home regularly but I still contract out to dedicated print shops. The print shop can’t replicate the practicality of local printing and I can’t replicate their scale of investment. Both coexist perfectly.
- nnoremap 5mo agoPrint-outs are a physical good. Tokens aren't.
- bluGill 5mo agoThey are both fungible. You can replace one with the other.
- nnoremap 5mo agoHow does that relate to my comment. I didn't say anything about the fungibility of either. Physical goods have wildly different logistical constraints compared to anything digital. This, and only this, I would argue, makes their production at home attractive to consumers. Tokens just don't have these properties.
- moregrist 5mo agoNon-cynically: the frontier providers have a projection for demand. Cynically: it’s become an executive-level gpu measuring contest. If you’re not making huge commitments on data centers, you can’t be a serious player. Realistically: It’s a mix of the two. The recent Claude caps for agentic usage suggest that demand exceeded their immediate compute supply. That they can alleviate it with additional capacity from the existing and small-ish xAI facility suggests that either demand may not be rising quite as fast as anticipated, that they’re okay in the short term until more capacity comes online, or a mix of both. Open questions: 1. At what price point does demand fall, and are the frontier providers overall profitable before that price point? 2. At what price/performance point do on-prem local models make more sense than cloud models?