As I was using LLMs at work (I never use LLMs for personal projects), a question occurred to me:
What in the fuck are these new data centers supposed to actually do?
The enterprise users are all in on having LLMs write 300% of the code. And yet, both OpenAI and Anthropic are still giving these “$200 gets you $10 000 in API costs” subscriptions to every victim of AI psychosis.
Why do we have RAM, hard disk, SSD, GPU and CPU shortages and no “token shortage”?
I mean, we all know the answer, these are the offerings for the robot god, but like how in the fuck are they still obtaining loans for this shit?
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Big corporations are not in the business of selling things and making profits. Their whole line of business is gaming financial markets.
In that regard, datacentres don’t need to do anything. It just needs to demonstrate some material ‘investment’ into Making AI Happen, presenting a potential for super duper revenues in the glorious future, and thereby securing outlandish valuations today.
I could have gone with destroying excess capital to preserve the status quo, but this stage and with this administration in the US going for subtlety seems unnecessary .
I remember seeing an interview of Satya Nadella saying that he has thousands of GPUs he’s just sitting on, waiting to get enough power infrastructure to plug then in, so in short, they’re hoarding.
A few things:
- I think nation states anticipate this new wave of machine learning will enable unfathombly large surveillance and a new age of hurk cyber warfare.
- Some investors seem to believe that basically all fields will adopt “ai” with the same enthusiam and level as software. The film industry alone would need a hideous amount of computer hardware if that disturbing fantasy of everyone living in their own solipsistic culture bubble came to life.
- Humanoid robot wierdos are anticipating applying deep learning and computer vision to copy movements etc from humans with camera’s strapped to their faces (part of the reason glasses are being pushed again). Some of the anticipate enormous fleets of robots doing everything from manufacturing to warfare. This would need a lot of compute
- Nobody actually has any idea how to direct businesses or run nations, and a considerable amount of people at just following everyone else because everyone else can’t be wrong.
Oh also it’s entirely possible to make huge amounts of money in a bad idea as long as you get out first. I suspect a lot of investors and banks are anticipating being that person. Capitalism is hilarious.
You mean the government surveillance centers? All questions like there’s while you still can.
Seems like a bit of an overkill.
Also to be honest an AI surveillance state seems like a rather silly thing. Those ratting you out have to be your co-workers, your neighbors, your friends, better yet, your family.
Automating that out is sort of like digging out belamorkanal with a robotic digger. The canal isn’t the thing. The thing is making people dig it - and making other people decide who digs.
Maybe it’s to keep the existing assets from cratering in value. Storage and RAM prices have gone up in value, if all those assets returned to their sane values then many more loans would be upside down.
I think it is a combination of VCs really believing this is the next big gold rush and radical innovation which will change the world plus a few true believers who think we need all the … compute (I dislike the word) to run the acausalrobotgod who will fix all our problems (and ‘We’ need to prepare so China doesnt build it first).
To go back to the first group, when they say ‘dont get left behind’ they are bot addressing you or me, but other capitalists (as in people with money, not just people who believe the ideology is best)
Edit: wow this question attracted a lot of conspiracy theorists.
I’m purging the worst of the conspiracy theorists (which I’m sure they’ll love)
I considered posting a reminder that we do analysis here, not weirdo daydreaming, but fuck it anyone who doesn’t know where the line is deserves a ban
Im amazed how many people think the surveillance state would need AI as an excuse to build data centers.
(And not that this is the was AI is going as govs tend to have infinite money and very bad quality control (at least nowadays). Seems like people have their timelines wrong).
But I’m also getting annoyed in general (not here) with how many people are going ‘everyone who disagrees with me is actually a bot/everything I wish wasnt true is AI now’.
It’s a bubble in a specific subcategory of commercial real estate, and commercial real estate usually eats shit first when a recession hits. The tech essentially serves the same purpose as American consumer credit did in the runup to 2008, just one step removed.
My personal conspiracy theory is the AI companies are being used as a front for a new Manhattan Project for the surveillance dragnet. All those flock camera feeds gotta go somewhere. Imagine being able to look up who, what, where, and when (and infer why) for any person or place in the US, linking online interaction to physical places in near-real time.
Here’s who it’s being built for.
ETA: What I see happening over the next decade, the AI bubble ‘pops,’ government quietly absorbs the (by then) mostly complete facilities and hardware as part of the bailout, then news outlets go silent about data centers and ICE activity while we fall deeper into a fascist hellpit.
Imagine Hitler’s reign, but this time there will be no Anne Frank’s.
tante thinks come the bubble pop, surveillance bureaucracy will buy the now cheap rigs, cos they have a use for that much ML compute
I think you’re right. There is this constant need for governments and the elite in general to keep tabs on the population. They need to detect dissidents that arranges protests, generate push back, are whistleblowers and just people who are somehow a threat to their power structures. Our online activities through phones and computers are presumably already surveilled and is used to profile us. Your LG tv is listening to everything you say by the way and I’m sure they are not alone. That combined with camera footage of physical activity/presence just fortifies their hold on the population further.
specially any progressive movement needs to outmunevered and quashed before it gets too large. both the DINOs and gop do not want a united front of voters against them.
The dinosaurs are back and are out to get us? fuck, I thought things were bad enough
mass surveillance, and dynamic pricing/ad targeting.
They are for training new models, not running existing ones
Because the rich people that have invested into it want AI to be too big to fail. That way we’re forced to keep moving forward on AI, and the rich can achieve their dream of not paying workers.
My theory is that the data centers are just shell companies for farming tax credits. The various gov officials are all NDA’d and can’t won’t say what kind of deals they cut nor the kickbacks they’re harvesting.
They pre buy the memory stock years in advance with IOU money.
Paying contractors
Im like 99% sure those are the only people profiting here. Data center electricians make bank to do mostly brain dead copy-paste underground
An electrician acquaintance of mine was on a gig early in the year essentially building open-air server racks that were then covered with huge tents, a la Tesla’s long-standing “temporary” structure in Fremont. I would never have believed him if he hadn’t taken pictures and video.
Basically the sole silver lining I see in our slopocalypse is that some portion of the fortunes being incinerated is moving money from finance parasites back to actual people. Some of it.
