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An interesting article on the economics of AI Chips by Mihir Kshirsagar
This week, Open AI announced a multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom to develop custom AI chips for data centers projected to consume 10 gigawatts of power. This investment is separate from another multibillion-dollar deal OpenAI struck with AMD last week. There is no question that we are in the midst of making one of the largest industrial infrastructure bets in United States history. Eight major companies—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, and others—are expected to invest over $300 billion in AI infrastructure in 2025 alone. Spurred by news about the vendor-financed structure of the AMD investment and a conversation with my colleague Arvind Narayanan, I started to investigate the unit economics of the industry from a competition perspective.
What I have found so far is surprising. It appears that we're making important decisions about who gets to compete in AI based on financial assumptions that may be systematically overstating the long-run sustainability of the industry by a factor of two. That said, I am open to being wrong in my analysis and welcome corrections as I write these thoughts up in an academic article with my colleague Felix Chen.
Here is the puzzle: the chips at the heart of the infrastructure buildout have a useful lifespan of one to three years due to rapid technological obsolescence and physical wear, but companies depreciate them over five to six years. In other words, they spread out the cost of their massive capital investments over a longer period than the facts warrant—what The Economist has referred to as the "$4trn accounting puzzle at the heart of the AI cloud."
Center for Information Technology Policy (Princeton University)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 21, @09:39PM (9 children)
>how did such a viewpoint of the alleged lifestyle superiority of agriculture become established? My take on both is poisoning attacks in the distant past. Distant rulers of the past needed propaganda to enforce their rule, such as proclamation of military victories or the benefits of being cogs in their machines and that propaganda took on a life of its own
It's even simpler than that: "others" were branded heathen savages, ungodly, names not worthy of recording in the family tree of a Christian bible (this was going on in my family in the 1800s.)
If they're not "one of us" they're just animals, to be feared and culled or exploited. How do you define "one of us" beyond the obvious racial card when it's available? Lifestyle: are they churchgoing? Do they toil in the same fields as hard as you do? Are they "honorable before God and the Law?" If not, they shall be outcast. So it is written (as read to the illiterate masses.)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 21, @11:00PM (4 children)
Sounds pretty complicated for an "even simpler than that"? Especially since my scenario explains yours, but yours doesn't explain mine.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 21, @11:17PM (3 children)
Sorry, incase you missed it: The Church handled it.
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(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday October 22, @02:11AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 22, @02:39PM (1 child)
>Sorry, in case you missed it, rulers did it first, thousands of years earlier.
I believe those rulers mostly claimed to be God, which has a critical flaw exposed when God gets killed. The Church is a little more devious in their presentation of being God's ordained proxy.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @01:42AM
In other words, a great example of the point I made all along. Religion is yet another area where knowledge poisoning happened and it was started in the same era by the same people as the other two examples I gave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @01:07AM (3 children)
Same for that human distance running thing. It's better for war, not really better for hunting for food. Most "primitive" human tribes use their brains to catch food and don't run for hours.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 22, @02:19AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, @04:16PM (1 child)
The hunter/gatherer lifestyle is terrible. You need farming and agriculture so that one person can produce enough food to support way more than a few other people.
A hunter gatherer society wouldn't be able to sustain a lot of nice stuff back in the past (if living in towns and cities back then was so terrible and worse than being a hunter-gatherer there wouldn't be so many people living in towns and cities); and in the modern day like the SN website, the Internet, vaccines, antibiotics, hospitals, solar panels. etc.
It also would be unlikely to lead towards humans developing space colonies and related tech, which would arguably be necessary to significantly delay the extinction of humans.
To try to achieve modern tech capabilities with just food produced via hunter-gatherer style stuff would likely cause even greater devastation to flora and fauna. Imagine how many pigs and chickens you'd have to hunt in the forests. How many berries etc would you have to forage and gather.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @01:40AM
Recall my thing about scale? If you don't need to support way more than a few people or the need to support fancy infrastructure, then farming and agriculture just doesn't have that much of a draw. Similarly, a low grade hunter/gatherer presence would have relatively low environmental impact (unless you are a large, tasty animal).
Keep in mind that the propaganda greatly predates the space age. Ancient cities of Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia touted their advantages long before.