In my sci-fi story there is a massive data center and I thought about making it "10km wide" but then scaled it back a bit because that seemed absurd. (A 4km data center full of ants is still very exciting.)

This is the data center Zuckerberg wants to build.

I worry that when these guys become CEO and stop working building things and writing code they can fall for some of their own hype.

What (if anything) do you think a data center of this size could do that current centers cannot?

@futurebird keep people investing ever more in NVidia, OpenAI and friends

In my sci-fi story there is a massive data center and I thought about making it "10km wide" but then scaled it back a bit because that seemed absurd. (A 4km data center full of ants is still very exciting.)

This is the data center Zuckerberg wants to build.

I worry that when these guys become CEO and stop working building things and writing code they can fall for some of their own hype.

What (if anything) do you think a data center of this size could do that current centers cannot?

In my sci-fi story there is a massive data center and I thought about making it "10km wide" but then scaled it back a bit because that seemed absurd. (A 4km data center full of ants is still very exciting.)

This is the data center Zuckerberg wants to build.

I worry that when these guys become CEO and stop working building things and writing code they can fall for some of their own hype.

What (if anything) do you think a data center of this size could do that current centers cannot?

@futurebird the fuck of fucks

In my sci-fi story there is a massive data center and I thought about making it "10km wide" but then scaled it back a bit because that seemed absurd. (A 4km data center full of ants is still very exciting.)

This is the data center Zuckerberg wants to build.

I worry that when these guys become CEO and stop working building things and writing code they can fall for some of their own hype.

What (if anything) do you think a data center of this size could do that current centers cannot?

@futurebird it's probably a vanity project with no specific purpose, but there are two things for which additional size helps that we can think of (and for which power usage helps - you should really rank data centers by how much power they draw, not least because that's public information and most other stuff isn't)...

@futurebird Most of these guys didn't write code, or if they did, it wasn't very well-written. I had to help undo a CEO's code once. Twas a job.

@steter @futurebird My CEO fixes bugs.

@ben @steter @futurebird In the sense of sending insects to be neutered?

That’s where mothballs come from.

In my sci-fi story there is a massive data center and I thought about making it "10km wide" but then scaled it back a bit because that seemed absurd. (A 4km data center full of ants is still very exciting.)

This is the data center Zuckerberg wants to build.

I worry that when these guys become CEO and stop working building things and writing code they can fall for some of their own hype.

What (if anything) do you think a data center of this size could do that current centers cannot?

@futurebird Just today I was reading Wikipedia article of matrioshka brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain which also mentions Jupiter brain.

In my sci-fi story there is a massive data center and I thought about making it "10km wide" but then scaled it back a bit because that seemed absurd. (A 4km data center full of ants is still very exciting.)

This is the data center Zuckerberg wants to build.

I worry that when these guys become CEO and stop working building things and writing code they can fall for some of their own hype.

What (if anything) do you think a data center of this size could do that current centers cannot?

@futurebird the first is training ever-larger ML models (not likely to actually be useful, size isn't really what makes them useful past a certain point, but companies want to believe it is because size is something capital is good at)

the second is storing ever-more surveillance data

@ireneista @futurebird This reminds me of how someone actually produced a 400B. I doubt even the big companies can even run that usefully on their GPU centers even with all the crazy amounts of GPUs they throw at it. (I mean they can get it to run, yes, but not at useful capacity or speed at scale.)

I suppose they think this is good still because the large ones can be distilled down, but that's like making a lower quality MP3 out of a higher quality OGG Vorbis file -- lossy, then lossy again.

I keep wondering what's going to happen when all the VC people start finally deciding they want to see an actual return already on the incredible amounts they're shelling out for all this and all these companies suddenly find that they have sunk way too much into this and lost it all.

@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird there's no need to guess, this has happened before with "AI". funding will dry up and it'll be a topic tech people avoid for fear of being laughed at as unserious. at least, that's the path things are currently on if nothing changes it.

(this is a public place so we should clarify that we don't claim to know when this will happen. could be years. "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.")

@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird in the dot-com bubble (which, for young 'uns, came decades after the AI Winter we just mentioned), people thought Yahoo was profitable because it had strong revenue...

but that revenue was mostly ads that other tech startups were buying with VC funding... so at some point the finance types stopped believing that that counts as real, and everything went poof all at once.

@ireneista @futurebird What I wonder is what keeps it afloat in the meantime? They can't be seeing truly 100% loss. I think there may be some trickery going on (perhaps even straight up scammy stuff) kind of like the day trading stuff they do with bitcoins that make them profitable for those who know how to do that (and have the capitol and lack of morals to make it work.) At least I think that's what they're doing? I'm not sure entirely how it works, just that since the costs to actually do mining are more than the actual results from doing it, they aren't making money that way...

@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird when the Silicon Valley Bank thing happened a year or two ago, it came to light that some VCs had been telling the startups they funded to buy stuff from other startups they funded, and it was very eye-opening for us personally to realize that that's a thing.