eicker comments on AI is forcing Big Tech to do something it’s never done: Spend more than it earns, and Wall Street hates it

[–] eicker@lemmy.world 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

Maybe, but »excessive investment« and »failed technology« aren’t the same thing: Railroads, fiber optics and the dot com era all burned absurd amounts of capital, yet the infrastructure outlived the investors. AI could follow the same pattern: terrible returns for today’s shareholders, enormous value for tomorrow’s economy.

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[–] zurohki@aussie.zone 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, but the AI infrastructure is made out of compute hardware that's going to need replaced in 6 years. Not rails that will still be useable in 50 years.

We aren't building lasting infrastructure other than the actual buildings.

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[–] eicker@lemmy.world 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

I’d argue the models and software are the real long term assets. GPUs depreciate like any other hardware, but a better training pipeline, inference stack, proprietary data, and a model with millions of paying users can survive multiple hardware generations. The chips are replaceable. The ecosystem and customer relationships are much harder to replicate.

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[–] melfie@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah, there’s a lot of innovation going on to run powerful models on modest hardware and the state of the art for running local models is changing all the time. If the trend continues, models hosted in a data center will only be for niche use cases.

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[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 point 2 months ago

That would certainly be the good ending, I won’t hold my breath for it

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