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.
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@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...
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@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.
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@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.
@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird
we of course have zero evidence about where or to what extent anything like that is happening today, we only mention it because it's a nice simple mechanism of deception that could plausibly produce some of what we're seeing. financial manipulation can take a lot of forms and we're not experts on it, we just enjoy having a concrete example. -
@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird
we of course have zero evidence about where or to what extent anything like that is happening today, we only mention it because it's a nice simple mechanism of deception that could plausibly produce some of what we're seeing. financial manipulation can take a lot of forms and we're not experts on it, we just enjoy having a concrete example.@ireneista @nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird Ed Zitron makes a pretty strong case that what's happening is actually pretty close to what you're suggesting, where basically the only money most of these companies make on AI is from selling to each other, e.g. much of Anthropic's revenue coming from Cursor, much of Microsoft's AI related revenue coming from OpenAI, etc.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ -
@ireneista @nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird Ed Zitron makes a pretty strong case that what's happening is actually pretty close to what you're suggesting, where basically the only money most of these companies make on AI is from selling to each other, e.g. much of Anthropic's revenue coming from Cursor, much of Microsoft's AI related revenue coming from OpenAI, etc.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/@csgordon @ireneista @futurebird The part that confuses me is this is a feedback loop that can't amplify. The best case scenario in such a loop would be for the funds that went in to stay the same. Except with all the costs, it's much more realistic that each time there is an overall loss that just keeps adding up more and more.
So they'd only do that if they're seeing an overall gain somewhere else somehow -- or at least the promise of one in a very near future (these people don't play the long game.)
I keep thinking there must be something more scammy going on. Maybe something like moving investments around and even possibly manipulating markets so they can do the equivalent of stock day trading in an unregulated market.
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@csgordon @ireneista @futurebird The part that confuses me is this is a feedback loop that can't amplify. The best case scenario in such a loop would be for the funds that went in to stay the same. Except with all the costs, it's much more realistic that each time there is an overall loss that just keeps adding up more and more.
So they'd only do that if they're seeing an overall gain somewhere else somehow -- or at least the promise of one in a very near future (these people don't play the long game.)
I keep thinking there must be something more scammy going on. Maybe something like moving investments around and even possibly manipulating markets so they can do the equivalent of stock day trading in an unregulated market.
@nazokiyoubinbou @csgordon @ireneista @futurebird
So they'd only do that if they're seeing an overall gain somewhere else somehow
They are. In their stock prices. Microsoft’s market capitalisation was around $800bn when I started working there and around $2tb when they bubble started to take off in earnest. It’s briefly passed $4tb last week.
Stock is basically a private currency. You can create more of it, which causes inflation (the stock value goes down) and sell it for other currencies (both state-backed currencies and other companies’ stock, the latter of which lets you eventually buy them entirely).
The MSFT stock price has gone up by more than the total profit the company made over that period. Why worry about people buying your products when people are willing to buy the money that you print?
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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?
Data centers of this size allow you to take down much more compute and network power with a single drone/hurricane/flood/bomb/pick-your-poison.
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Data centers of this size allow you to take down much more compute and network power with a single drone/hurricane/flood/bomb/pick-your-poison.
huh?
