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The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity. The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity,
by onion2k 3mo ago
The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
- pitched 3mo agoIn the Innovation Adoption Curve, we are absolutely beyond the Early Adopters phase and possibly the Early Majority. The growth rates necessarily have to start trending down because there’s no one left to sell to.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoI'm not sure if the classic adoption curve applies. Has there ever been a product that vendors were shoving down customer's throats as relentlessly as AI?
- officialchicken 3mo ago"Internet" enabled devices, or "railroads" - for example.
- vitally3643 3mo agoAds
- Schiendelman 3mo agoI doubt it. We're less than six months in to really good coding agents, and they keep improving. Software will eat a lot more of the business world when it's this much cheaper and faster to produce.
- user43928 3mo agoI cannot currently access Fable class models, I am out of usage credits. Anthropic is removing these larger models from personal plans at the end of the week to focus on selling it to enterprise users. Putting these more intelligent new models into the hands of more people seems very worthwhile to me.
- onion2k 3mo agoI don't think Anthropic are doing that because they don't have enough compute capacity. If we had 100* more datacentres the message would still be the same - they're focusing on selling Fable access to enterprise users because that's what makes them more money.
- user43928 3mo agoEither the cost to serve this larger model is so high that they cannot offer any reasonable usage quota for it at subscription prices, or they really do not have the capacity. I think that it might well be true. The Opus models had capacity issues on many occasions too. Can the larger model even be served on all of the hardware they have, or only a subset? It would not surprise me if growing enterprise demand threatens capacity, making it impossible for Anthropic to offer the model in subscriptions at this time, even though they could do so at a profit.
- surgical_fire 3mo agoDo you pay API prices? Or are you on some of those plans that are deeply unprofitable? I am not even sure if API prices are actually profitable, but they certainly aren't as unprofitable as the subscription plan users. Either way, that's why you don't have access. It has nothing to do with capacity constraints.
- user43928 3mo agoWe do not know whether subscription plans are unprofitable at all. Some estimates suggest that this is the case only for the heaviest users. Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable. Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
- leonidasrup 3mo agoThe most important sentences of the article are: "Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed." This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.