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[–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

What’s gonna be hilarious is when there’s a revolution in how training, storages and utilization of the models’ neural networks are understood and require drastically less computing power and these data centers get abandoned, companies collapse, an economic collapse analogous to the dotcom boom actually happens, but utilities remain high in cost and still no one can afford shit because the wealthy once against failed to invest in the right industries and future technology like renewables. We could be the world leader in renewables if we moonshot developing tech that relied on resources we actually have domestically and what we can trade responsibly without putting national security at risk, but instead we are still reliant on a dying fossil industry and have guaranteed a near future economic collapse.

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  • This will happen even before any further technology comes along as the AI business model is fundamentally flawed. They're gambling on earning huge fortunes, but will earn peanuts as they can't capture the value generated by AI. AI is just another commodity, and people will use the cheapest tool that does the job. They won't care that company X spent 100s of billions of dollars on their frontier model when a free or cheap model elsewhere is good enough for the task. No customers are paying for that investment - just colossal debt piles and investors desperate to be in at the ground floor. The big AI companies are already well into nonsense circular deals passing each others IOUs with headline figures in the many billions. It's all a slow motion car crash.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    but instead we are still reliant on a dying fossil industry

    That's no coincidence. Fossil fuel industry saw datacenter power needs was their way to stay relevant for years to come.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Yep, and that’s a big national security risk. We may have massive oil reserves and processing but it’s for light sweet crude and the us doesn’t have the heavy dark stuff we need presently, so without building the infrastructure to process what we have differently, including any liquefied natural gas, we would run out of stocks in 10-15 years should we get cut off globally for reasons of war or finding ourselves sanctioned for bad behaviors. It’s a gamble they’re willing to take, and it likely will pay off for the wealthy, and they won’t care if it fails for reasons I listed because they’re already wealthy and insulated somewhat from global events - but the less wealthy leaders who live within the US might not fare so well should it come to a breakdown of those systems and mass panic.

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