Where Are All the Data Centers?(wheresyoured.at) |
Where Are All the Data Centers?(wheresyoured.at) |
You want to build another cookie cutter McMansion, pay through the hoops, break dirt at 6mo and be done in a year.
You want to build a an X over Y apartment building across the street from the other one, pay through the hoops, break dirt at 2yr, be done in 3yr.
You want to build the first X over Y pods and bugs apartment in a given jurisdiction you will be stuck in permitting hell paying through hoop after hoop after hoop, sometimes the same hoop more than once, for 3-5yr right off the bat while the system fights with you.
You can't imagine how terrible anything industrial is. The system is basically only set up to be able to easily approve housing and retail and "easy" still takes years. The amount of money it takes to get something popular approved is insane never mind how much something unpopular like a data center would cost.
Of course every party is playing fast and loose with terminology and capacity. Investors like "we have <big number> and we're adding even more" capacity much more than "we already had <big number> and we've only added <small number> but god willing we'll have <really huge number> in 5yr if we don't go bankrupt first"
The tech is astonishing and Ed spends 98% of his writing acting like the industry is a scam.
It's also annoying how he keeps using the term "bubble" as a sleight-of-hand synonym for, I don't know, "useless and fake". Tulip valuations vastly outgrew their actual value and never made it back up. The Dot Com bubble was just early and investment outpaced real-world adoption. Nobody looks back on dot com and thinks claims like "nearly all commerce and social interaction will move online" are silly because that's exactly what happened. AI investment might be at outsized levels right in this moment, it remains to be seen, but even if it doesn't get any better from here it's already insanely useful. That won't "pop" in any meaningful way that he predicts.
EDIT: To say nothing of the overwrought 2023-era comparisons to cryptocurrency. It was obvious at the start that crypto was a solution in search of a problem, shaded by the fact that most advocates benefited strongly from convincing everyone else how valuable of an idea it was. Anybody has been able to spend 20 minutes with free ChatGPT for years now and immediately start to grasp the real-world applications of tech that genuinely replaces a substrate of knowledge work.
IMO it seems like most AI intelligence is just a Clever Hans situation: the AI produces a stream of responses, and the human selects the one that is correct, then they conclude that the AI is intelligent.
See data centres being constructed in areas with green energy, forcing countries to revert to petro and update power grids to accommodate FUTURE "needs" and governments discounting power bills due to... yeah, due to what, actually?
Also watch power bills rising in USA due to faulty leadership, and power lines above-ground constantly at risk during the climbing number of destructive hurricanes.
Think bigger and with broader out-reach: All of these companies are forging deals left and right, and - let me guess - some as part of threat-package deals "suggested" by the present US trade administration.
Soon, very soon, many of these US/EU-data centres will be forcefully discontinued as part of growing EU-independence. And good riddence, too.
Yes, I think AI is an industry in need of a prodcuct, and they are minions of the anti-christ of Capitalism and Consumer-Slaverism. This is already a failed project, as it is done without the ethics of collectivity (to the benefit of "more than me"), to paraphrase Kierkegaard. Me, you and All. Only power and enrichment in this end-time, when care could have leveled the plane and touched us all equally GOOD.
The way I think about it is that a lot of what we considered knowledge work isn't anymore. In "the before times", I would have considered it knowledge work to know how to dig into an unfamiliar code repo or long document and produce a useful summary of the information within, or identify which parts of a codebase are applicable to a given problem I'm trying to solve. AI turns semantic search up to 11; you can point it at an unfamiliar repo and say "what do I have to touch to make this work" and get a 90% accurate result. That's insane magic. I think if the bar is to consider it not a replacement for knowledge work as long as there is a human in the loop, then we're not there yet, but it keeps eating away at more and more of the basic pieces.
That's where I put it personally, because of humans' limited amount of useful focus during a work day.
Anything that requires human attention will take some of that resource, and don't think models' rate of improvement will be fast enough to overcome that in the near future. Reviewing an output that is 99%, 99.9%, or 99.99% correct all take about the same amount of time, so the output needs to be correct enough not to need review before any knowledge work is replaced.
I would have personally gone for 75%, 85% and 95%, which are all still best case scenario answers.
Had I taken on chatbot advice on electronics or chemistry I’d have died every couple of weeks (doing some hands-on real world R&D in my basement as a distraction from software).