When critical infra becomes centralized then the reliability expectations shift from good enough to essential. Its normal that outages stop being simple issues and become production blockers
This is mainly a cost structure because AI replaces variable labor costs with costs of GPUs, energy, infra etc... ; so at current prices running models at scale can easily be more expensive than human pay for the tasks with a low marginal value. If that doesn’t change as expected the economics of automation becomes less intersting.
This seems a classic capital cycle problem, with huge upfront investment, unclear pricing power and everyone scaling supply at once and so that combination usually doesn’t ends with great returns
It seems that AI is stopping being just a compute problem and becomes now an energy problem
Power infrastructure scales really slower than chips so this could become a real important constraint.
This seems to escape a surprising number of people.
... even when unsubtly reminded. Maybe we need a website with a decent set of infographics that show the various inter-dependencies of the world economy, and an overlay showing the timings of these inter-dependencies.
The 1.6T number is nice but also eye-catching and what matters most is how few parameters are active in practice, that’s what brings the most of the efficiency
That shows wealth can go up without people feeling better, if most gains come from assets then it mainly helps those who already have those assets while others mostly see higher costs
31/1 is kind of wild and its hard to justify corn ethanol on efficiency alone; so it looks like this exists mainly because of the policy and not because it’s actually a good way to produce energy
Solar scaling this fast looks to be less about the green against fossile but to be more about changing the cost structure of energy => fossil fuels are strongly marginal-cost, solar is capex heavy with almost zero marginal cost so that change alone has big impacts for how energy comes into the inflation
Double whammy, we could say? This is a lesson for any positive change: ethics only brings you so far, but find the economical way to do it and the change will work by itself.
Finding the economical way to do it costs a lot of money. The economies of scale that solar needed to reach before it became the low cost option were built on enormous subsidies from Germany, China and others.
Then let's also add the state-owned coal/fossil companies kept artificially afloat, producers tax expenditures, publicly funded rail transport or handling infrastructure or water systems, subsidized coal electricity prices... then indeed we can discuss apples to apples.
can't help but wonder if the aggregate of the solar PV subsidies made in the last 25 years are higher or lower than the aggregate of energy price subsidies made when the Ukraine and/or Iran wars made fossil fuel prices spike...
True, but ethics got us to the point where solar was economical. It's never just been about ethics, it's been about getting it to this point where it's cheaper.
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