Great content and writing! Not just informative, fun to read too.
The woes facing the AI tech industry in America appear to be fatal, although of course miracles can happen. The capital costs are astronomical just for the silicon, and the energy to run it all at scale simply isn't there. That last problem can't be overcome with anything less than an all-of-government approach that will cost an additional astronomical sum across a decade: the equivalent of a Marshall Plan, but for the USA.
China may one day be the world's data center. I know that sounds crazy, but here's why. China today produces more electricity than the next four countries combined - far more than the USA. But that's just the warmup. Every year for the next five years, China is bringing on the equivalent of the entire UK power grid. A single dam they're building in the Himalayas will produce more electricity than the nation of Germany. And the majority of the new power they're building is renewable.
China will be ready if the world wants it to build the AI infrastructure and software. They have the capital, the resources, the energy, the scale, the supply chains and they have the people. Right now, not in five years. American AI, in contrast, will have to bring in the AI money-shot of all money-shots to have even a hope of competing with that.
There's a reason why China pumps out so many great models, completely free. Versus the ones in the US (the EU isn't even a player at this point anymore) that are mostly closed weights.
It undercuts directly the US-dominance in AI (where it was 2 years ago) and democratizes access. And what would you need? Cheap chips to run it on. And who makes these? I'll let you take one guess...
They definitely learned something from open source and how it cut Microsoft dominance in -for now- server software. On that same note, they learned also from Dubai, Signapore etc with their newly Hainan island. Which will be another part of the multi-pronged trade war.
But maybe the US will still pull ahead because they have the energy constraints, so they will need to focus more on "Green IT" - ie: do more with less. Much like how nature works: restrictions breeds innovations.
My head hurts, the numbers are so large it is hard to comprehend.
My personal visual on this - cause it’s simple.
A merry go round has one kid on it, pushing with his foot and riding for a bit. Another child jumps on and now they go twice as fast, whooping and hollering as they go.
FOMO spreads to the play ground, the kids are jumping on as fast as they can. It speeds up and spits a few kids off, slows down and few more jump on.
But now it’s spinning so fast they all have to hang onto each other, the force is strong. They link arms and spin faster.
Now what happens when the weakest link lets go, there arms are too tired, the others must carry the weight, now another lets go , the group has two to support now.
It’s spinning so fast, the ambulance is just waiting at the edge of the playground. Nothing more can be done except to wait for the wreckage.
Me I am in another playground. No merry go rounds here.
😉 Yeah, and I'd pretty much add all the lolbertarians into the same package. Unfair to some, but it is well past time to let all those enlightment fictions go to their grave.
From the time Tom Woods debated Vox Day and couldn't understand his unlimited migration objection to free trade to the way every time someone posts a picture of a Cathedral the vile lie that it was built by slaves is brought up, I'm done. They can't think a nation.
I've read quite a few of these articles recently, and from our understanding of economics and technological advancement versus current application of available tech, this looks like absolute suicide. The only way that it could make sense is if there are factors here that we don't know about and I think I may know what one of them could be.
We're looking at these data centers as individual units for use by individual companies, but if you look at them from the perspective of nodes in a unified system, then there's some logic to these actions.
I'm not speaking from any expertise, and absolutely no certainty on this conclusion, but I think they're building a neural network for a single AI. One all encompassing AI platform that we know nothing about just yet. What Musk referred to in an interview a few years ago as the elites “AI God”.
Again, probably wrong about this assumption, but this is the only thing that could make these moves make sense to me.
It is a very interesting theory, but LLMs are fundamentally buggy messes prone to allucination and fabrication, that can be contaminated by tiny quantities of missinformation, so why would anyone try to supersize such a primitive and early stage of a technology? There is the assumption that better AI has already been developed in black projects, but the corrupt state of the MIC and science itself doesn't augur well for it.
A toxic mix of stock pumping fraud and decadent elite techno mysticism as the religion of progress is coming up for an extintion event is just as likely, though the utterly preposterous, financially suicidal dimensions of the bubble argue against it.
That's my problem with it too. The Ole Pump n Dump mentality doesn't work when looking at these actions. They know something we don't and are acting on that knowledge is the only thing that makes sense to me, and with the MIC being involved covertly, I doubt it is anything that is in the public interest.
Best advice I can give there is to never assume that the people making decisions of this magnitude are the ones that we know about. Everything else is just speculation until they're finished.
By their choice of top level subordinates, the real order givers look very unimpressive also. And the strategic incompetence falls right at their feet.
Don't let conspiracy analysis turn into learned helplessness, find strength to mock them, at least!
Fair lol There isn't much of a direct correlation between intelligence and financial success. There have been direct lines drawn between psychopaths and extreme wealth though
Interesting thesis :) I am in agreement that there has to be something us peons are missing, so looking at it from a macro perspective is definitely the way to go, since the surface level obviously makes zero sense as No1 has so wonderfully elucidated!
Reminds me a bit of "Letter 44" wherein the plot involves countries fighting wars against each other in order to build up our global fighting capabilities, because the powers that be know that there's an alien threat headed our way and the only way to defeat them is to be better fighters at a globe spanning level.
Maybe these AI nodes are something similar, not looking inwards but preparing to look outwards or communicate/fight with something "not us" that we now have existential knowledge about at the elite level? No price would be too large if it saves civilisation.
Rightly so. This whole AI mania is just nuclear level clown world. ☢️🤡 A little unimportant detail did tickle my Braun, though... All these tech billionaires talking like men that know better but are stuck on a runaway train, I'll take that as further confirmation they are nothing but frontmen for bigger interests, the MIC and banking cartels trying to horn on on the technologies that come from the black projects. 🤔🫢🐸
Great read. It’s so easy to lose perspective because the numbers are so large and they keep changing. Your article helped zoom out to see just how large and opaque this whole thing really is. The sense of humor throughout really resonates too, and it’s a special kind of skill to write humor well. Merry Christmas, brother!
And please remind us…… Exactly what does humanity really need AI for?
Sorry if I missed that memo. I don’t remember Sam Altman or Yuval Harrari inviting me to participate in a focus group, so they could listen to my perspective on their mental illness and why I want no part of what they insist is so wonderful and “good for me”.
Fascinating reading, not the first I've read on the topic but definitely one of the better ones.
“Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI will then buy Nvidia’s chips with that money.” Note that the US government does this all the time. The US gives billions to, say, Ukraine, which it in turn is expected to use to buy US-made weapons. Can we conclude anything about the way in which these companies view themselves, given the manner in which they have chosen to “invest”?
Perhaps they have managed to grow a new money tree in the basement, an offspring of the US government's Magic Money Tree. Or, more likely, they believe the US government will be an eternal spring from which money will flow toward them.
If we want to pull a bit more on that thread, we can try to peer into the future and guess at what they believe the government/corporate interface will grow to resemble in the next few years. Or guess at exactly what (nefarious?) purposes all this capacity will be put to—a purpose that someone perhaps believes the government will be the largest customer for.
Then there is the commenter elsewhere here who suggested looking at this from a system-wide standpoint as perhaps a neural network for a single AI. Interesting thought.
As an aside, this seems like it might be the death knell for Bitcoin. I can’t see how it can outbid AI, and when mining dies, so does Bitcoin.
These data centres may also be used as the backbone of a total surveillance system. That Orwellian one that seems to be pointed to a lot. Bringing that "government is the biggest customer" more into light. I have seen somewhere recently that, when asked about the increases in electricity costs, the US secretary of energy said the worry was more about where they were going to get it as opposed to the cost. The limiting factor may well be the energy side of well, pretty much everything.
Yes, that use case is exactly along the lines of my thinking. And I agree about the energy concern--they can print money, but they can't print energy. Raising the spending will only increase the price, at least in the near-term.
I have believed for some time that energy constraints are ultimately what will slow this freight train down. There just isn't enough energy to power all these futuristic fever dreams, especially if they still intend to depend mainly on renewables. (And I formed that belief even before all these AI Data Center plans started surfacing.)
Bitcoin mining is self-correcting, in that if there are fewer miners, the relative rewards go up per miner, so the incentives to start mining again continuously balance themselves. This is probably a good thing in the long run as Bitcoin mining has been getting more and more concentrated in fewer but larger pools, so anything that redresses that to avoid the 51% hashrate ownership is a welcome development.
ok, your points are undisputable. But what if we were missing the point? First, I think there is not only 1 reason, but a conjunction of multiple vectors from which a resultant vector line will come out. On the one hand there is the need to keep the spice flowing. Capital accumulation due to the last +100 years FED owners financial monopolist Behemoth need to find an issue or be lost by inflation and other "leaks", legal or illegal. Its like Veblen's claim of the leisure class. A Coca Cola fountain or a pink Maseratti look ridiculous for the most but have a sense for a few. This is Inmobilized capital, in marxist terms, where human labour goes to die. A second vector is financial bubbles, and this looks as a big one. Another vector is the debt foundations of this system. What if the FED owners were behind the Big tech names (are they are behind the Big everything) actually easing them the lease for AI hangars? The spice keeps flowing but... And this is my last vector for today... not for what you make think... The bubble will pop, sure, and the data hangars will be sucked as collateral by the FED owners (13 banks, remember? 1913, remember?) just like David Rogers Webb reminds in his Great Taking. After 1913 the FED built huge machine gun fortified vaults to put things inside once the expected default of everything came up with the fabricated Great Depression. This was the biggest wealth transfer and wealth deprivation in the US history (I dont claim in world history because the British plunder of India, China or Africa were probably worst). Final vector, those depots are thought to put something inside... thought by those who dont need more money but total control and slavery.
This will be included in a future "The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire."
It will be popular reading in Russia, China, India, and lessor BRICS.
I just hope out billionaire titans have an ace up their sleeves... Besides exiting the US or burrowing in their high tech bunkers.
WTF, I always wanted to know what it felt like to be a citizen of late Western Rome. Byzantium hung on for another millennium or so. Is there a modern Byzantium?
Now how & when do I short SMH? Not shaking my head, the Semiconductor ETF.
I was short CRWV a while ago via put options. Closed that out. Now waiting for it to be overextended again to short. Probably will be another month or so. That is a better candidate than semiconductors in my opinion.
In Nov I made a small score buying Puts on SMH. On the 2d go round early in Dec I gave back almost half the gain.
I'll consider CRWV. It has a wide 52 week H/L 187.00/33.52. Of interest to math-stat nerds is that the geometric mean (79.17) is close to its 84.83 close.
Yep, I'd rather see it get a bit frothy before shorting via Puts.
Before AI I was incapable of "making art" like this:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/give-an-image-of-bloated-trump-TQGu_X8TQJ.QAOLGGE8bjA#0
Screw the costs... I want to be an "artist". It's the "new Math" that sadly doesn't add up.
Now 2+2 can be...whatever. Money/costs? Pfft!
Reality will become ever more just subjective opinion.
The West's war with Russia has kind of an AI quality about it.
Just construct an alternative reality. The bodies pile up...
Our AI masters will erase more jobs and people will have even
more reasons to find the exits with Fentanyl. My oldest grandparents
were born in 1890/93. Their biggest worries probably involved
dodging the ubiquitous horseshit in the streets. Good times.
Great content and writing! Not just informative, fun to read too.
The woes facing the AI tech industry in America appear to be fatal, although of course miracles can happen. The capital costs are astronomical just for the silicon, and the energy to run it all at scale simply isn't there. That last problem can't be overcome with anything less than an all-of-government approach that will cost an additional astronomical sum across a decade: the equivalent of a Marshall Plan, but for the USA.
China may one day be the world's data center. I know that sounds crazy, but here's why. China today produces more electricity than the next four countries combined - far more than the USA. But that's just the warmup. Every year for the next five years, China is bringing on the equivalent of the entire UK power grid. A single dam they're building in the Himalayas will produce more electricity than the nation of Germany. And the majority of the new power they're building is renewable.
China will be ready if the world wants it to build the AI infrastructure and software. They have the capital, the resources, the energy, the scale, the supply chains and they have the people. Right now, not in five years. American AI, in contrast, will have to bring in the AI money-shot of all money-shots to have even a hope of competing with that.
There's a reason why China pumps out so many great models, completely free. Versus the ones in the US (the EU isn't even a player at this point anymore) that are mostly closed weights.
It undercuts directly the US-dominance in AI (where it was 2 years ago) and democratizes access. And what would you need? Cheap chips to run it on. And who makes these? I'll let you take one guess...
They definitely learned something from open source and how it cut Microsoft dominance in -for now- server software. On that same note, they learned also from Dubai, Signapore etc with their newly Hainan island. Which will be another part of the multi-pronged trade war.
But maybe the US will still pull ahead because they have the energy constraints, so they will need to focus more on "Green IT" - ie: do more with less. Much like how nature works: restrictions breeds innovations.
I hear 2-3 times as much silver gets used in industrial products as gets mined each year.
I wonder if silver is a good investment.
;-}
Well, I’ve been pounding that drum for quite some time now, didn’t I? 😉
My head hurts, the numbers are so large it is hard to comprehend.
My personal visual on this - cause it’s simple.
A merry go round has one kid on it, pushing with his foot and riding for a bit. Another child jumps on and now they go twice as fast, whooping and hollering as they go.
FOMO spreads to the play ground, the kids are jumping on as fast as they can. It speeds up and spits a few kids off, slows down and few more jump on.
But now it’s spinning so fast they all have to hang onto each other, the force is strong. They link arms and spin faster.
Now what happens when the weakest link lets go, there arms are too tired, the others must carry the weight, now another lets go , the group has two to support now.
It’s spinning so fast, the ambulance is just waiting at the edge of the playground. Nothing more can be done except to wait for the wreckage.
Me I am in another playground. No merry go rounds here.
"I once dared to read a YouTube comments section about cryptocurrency."
You may never recover.
Our gracious host's starting opinion on the human condition was probably low enough he'll be fine in a short time. I hope. 😉😁🤪
Watch out! I'm very bullish on human ingenuity! However, the crypto crowd... That's a whole different animal altogether.
😉 Yeah, and I'd pretty much add all the lolbertarians into the same package. Unfair to some, but it is well past time to let all those enlightment fictions go to their grave.
From the time Tom Woods debated Vox Day and couldn't understand his unlimited migration objection to free trade to the way every time someone posts a picture of a Cathedral the vile lie that it was built by slaves is brought up, I'm done. They can't think a nation.
I've read quite a few of these articles recently, and from our understanding of economics and technological advancement versus current application of available tech, this looks like absolute suicide. The only way that it could make sense is if there are factors here that we don't know about and I think I may know what one of them could be.
We're looking at these data centers as individual units for use by individual companies, but if you look at them from the perspective of nodes in a unified system, then there's some logic to these actions.
I'm not speaking from any expertise, and absolutely no certainty on this conclusion, but I think they're building a neural network for a single AI. One all encompassing AI platform that we know nothing about just yet. What Musk referred to in an interview a few years ago as the elites “AI God”.
Again, probably wrong about this assumption, but this is the only thing that could make these moves make sense to me.
It is a very interesting theory, but LLMs are fundamentally buggy messes prone to allucination and fabrication, that can be contaminated by tiny quantities of missinformation, so why would anyone try to supersize such a primitive and early stage of a technology? There is the assumption that better AI has already been developed in black projects, but the corrupt state of the MIC and science itself doesn't augur well for it.
A toxic mix of stock pumping fraud and decadent elite techno mysticism as the religion of progress is coming up for an extintion event is just as likely, though the utterly preposterous, financially suicidal dimensions of the bubble argue against it.
That's my problem with it too. The Ole Pump n Dump mentality doesn't work when looking at these actions. They know something we don't and are acting on that knowledge is the only thing that makes sense to me, and with the MIC being involved covertly, I doubt it is anything that is in the public interest.
Do they know or do they assume or do they hope? The people involved don't really overwhelm me with their competence and strategic insight...
The One thing that is certain is that it will be bad for society as a whole.
Best advice I can give there is to never assume that the people making decisions of this magnitude are the ones that we know about. Everything else is just speculation until they're finished.
By their choice of top level subordinates, the real order givers look very unimpressive also. And the strategic incompetence falls right at their feet.
Don't let conspiracy analysis turn into learned helplessness, find strength to mock them, at least!
Fair lol There isn't much of a direct correlation between intelligence and financial success. There have been direct lines drawn between psychopaths and extreme wealth though
Interesting thesis :) I am in agreement that there has to be something us peons are missing, so looking at it from a macro perspective is definitely the way to go, since the surface level obviously makes zero sense as No1 has so wonderfully elucidated!
Reminds me a bit of "Letter 44" wherein the plot involves countries fighting wars against each other in order to build up our global fighting capabilities, because the powers that be know that there's an alien threat headed our way and the only way to defeat them is to be better fighters at a globe spanning level.
Maybe these AI nodes are something similar, not looking inwards but preparing to look outwards or communicate/fight with something "not us" that we now have existential knowledge about at the elite level? No price would be too large if it saves civilisation.
Let's hope it is something like that and not the ineptitude of our rulers/elites...
The sarcasm is off the chart on this one, No1. 😉🤣
Rightly so. This whole AI mania is just nuclear level clown world. ☢️🤡 A little unimportant detail did tickle my Braun, though... All these tech billionaires talking like men that know better but are stuck on a runaway train, I'll take that as further confirmation they are nothing but frontmen for bigger interests, the MIC and banking cartels trying to horn on on the technologies that come from the black projects. 🤔🫢🐸
Great read. It’s so easy to lose perspective because the numbers are so large and they keep changing. Your article helped zoom out to see just how large and opaque this whole thing really is. The sense of humor throughout really resonates too, and it’s a special kind of skill to write humor well. Merry Christmas, brother!
This deserves a Pulitzer.
Beautifully said!
And please remind us…… Exactly what does humanity really need AI for?
Sorry if I missed that memo. I don’t remember Sam Altman or Yuval Harrari inviting me to participate in a focus group, so they could listen to my perspective on their mental illness and why I want no part of what they insist is so wonderful and “good for me”.
Fascinating reading, not the first I've read on the topic but definitely one of the better ones.
“Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI will then buy Nvidia’s chips with that money.” Note that the US government does this all the time. The US gives billions to, say, Ukraine, which it in turn is expected to use to buy US-made weapons. Can we conclude anything about the way in which these companies view themselves, given the manner in which they have chosen to “invest”?
Perhaps they have managed to grow a new money tree in the basement, an offspring of the US government's Magic Money Tree. Or, more likely, they believe the US government will be an eternal spring from which money will flow toward them.
If we want to pull a bit more on that thread, we can try to peer into the future and guess at what they believe the government/corporate interface will grow to resemble in the next few years. Or guess at exactly what (nefarious?) purposes all this capacity will be put to—a purpose that someone perhaps believes the government will be the largest customer for.
Then there is the commenter elsewhere here who suggested looking at this from a system-wide standpoint as perhaps a neural network for a single AI. Interesting thought.
As an aside, this seems like it might be the death knell for Bitcoin. I can’t see how it can outbid AI, and when mining dies, so does Bitcoin.
I’d say none of this bodes well for our future.
These data centres may also be used as the backbone of a total surveillance system. That Orwellian one that seems to be pointed to a lot. Bringing that "government is the biggest customer" more into light. I have seen somewhere recently that, when asked about the increases in electricity costs, the US secretary of energy said the worry was more about where they were going to get it as opposed to the cost. The limiting factor may well be the energy side of well, pretty much everything.
Yes, that use case is exactly along the lines of my thinking. And I agree about the energy concern--they can print money, but they can't print energy. Raising the spending will only increase the price, at least in the near-term.
I have believed for some time that energy constraints are ultimately what will slow this freight train down. There just isn't enough energy to power all these futuristic fever dreams, especially if they still intend to depend mainly on renewables. (And I formed that belief even before all these AI Data Center plans started surfacing.)
Bitcoin mining is self-correcting, in that if there are fewer miners, the relative rewards go up per miner, so the incentives to start mining again continuously balance themselves. This is probably a good thing in the long run as Bitcoin mining has been getting more and more concentrated in fewer but larger pools, so anything that redresses that to avoid the 51% hashrate ownership is a welcome development.
“Cloud computing” meant looking at the sky.
Beautiful :)
ok, your points are undisputable. But what if we were missing the point? First, I think there is not only 1 reason, but a conjunction of multiple vectors from which a resultant vector line will come out. On the one hand there is the need to keep the spice flowing. Capital accumulation due to the last +100 years FED owners financial monopolist Behemoth need to find an issue or be lost by inflation and other "leaks", legal or illegal. Its like Veblen's claim of the leisure class. A Coca Cola fountain or a pink Maseratti look ridiculous for the most but have a sense for a few. This is Inmobilized capital, in marxist terms, where human labour goes to die. A second vector is financial bubbles, and this looks as a big one. Another vector is the debt foundations of this system. What if the FED owners were behind the Big tech names (are they are behind the Big everything) actually easing them the lease for AI hangars? The spice keeps flowing but... And this is my last vector for today... not for what you make think... The bubble will pop, sure, and the data hangars will be sucked as collateral by the FED owners (13 banks, remember? 1913, remember?) just like David Rogers Webb reminds in his Great Taking. After 1913 the FED built huge machine gun fortified vaults to put things inside once the expected default of everything came up with the fabricated Great Depression. This was the biggest wealth transfer and wealth deprivation in the US history (I dont claim in world history because the British plunder of India, China or Africa were probably worst). Final vector, those depots are thought to put something inside... thought by those who dont need more money but total control and slavery.
Great article..
Ai now eating Bitcoin was an interesting tidbit..
Thanks!
Grand Slam Reporting!!!
Loved it - I have a sarcastic sense of humor.
This will be included in a future "The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire."
It will be popular reading in Russia, China, India, and lessor BRICS.
I just hope out billionaire titans have an ace up their sleeves... Besides exiting the US or burrowing in their high tech bunkers.
WTF, I always wanted to know what it felt like to be a citizen of late Western Rome. Byzantium hung on for another millennium or so. Is there a modern Byzantium?
Now how & when do I short SMH? Not shaking my head, the Semiconductor ETF.
I was short CRWV a while ago via put options. Closed that out. Now waiting for it to be overextended again to short. Probably will be another month or so. That is a better candidate than semiconductors in my opinion.
In Nov I made a small score buying Puts on SMH. On the 2d go round early in Dec I gave back almost half the gain.
I'll consider CRWV. It has a wide 52 week H/L 187.00/33.52. Of interest to math-stat nerds is that the geometric mean (79.17) is close to its 84.83 close.
Yep, I'd rather see it get a bit frothy before shorting via Puts.
For more information : https://no01.substack.com/p/trumps-pump-and-dump-scheme-analysed