The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance
Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for the GPUs - the largest line item.
What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol
In addition to your points, this is why I always laugh when people do backward comparisons. What characteristics do they share in common? Very little.
Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions.
Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective.
FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.
Unclassified public cloud GPUs are completely useless when your warfighting workloads are at the SECRET level or above.
I think it’s maybe plausible that private compute feels similar in the next do-or-die global war.
[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979
The modern concept of GDP didn't exist back then, so all these numbers are calculated in retrospect with a lot of wiggle room. It feels like there's incentive now to report the highest possible number for the railroads, since that's the only thing that makes the datacenter investment look precedented by comparison.
We're talking about the period before modern finance, before income taxes, back when most labor was agricultural... Did the average person shoulder the cost of railroads more than the average taxpayer today is shouldering the cost of F-35? (That's another line in Paul's post.)
What that means for the US is this: if the US had to fight a conventional war with a near-peer military today, the US actually has the ability to replace stealth fighter losses. The program isn't some near-dormant, low-rate production deal that would take a year or more to ramp up: it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete training and global logistics system, all on the front burner.
If there is any truth to Gen Bradley's "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics" line, the F-35 is a major win for the US.
That's amazing. I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that.
I wonder if there's a way to get close to that, for things that aren't new and don't have a lot of active orders. Like have all the equipment setup but idle at some facility, keep an assembly teams ready and trained, then cycle through each weapon an activate a couple of these dormant manufacturing programs (at random!) every year, almost as a drill. So there's the capability to spin up, say F-22 production quickly when needed.
Obviously it'd cost money. But it also costs a lot of money to have fighter jets when you're not actively fighting a way. Seems like manufacturing readiness would something an effective military would be smart to pay for.
It's more than just the US though. It's the demand from foreign customers that makes it possible. It's the careful balance between cost and capability that was achieved by the US and allies when it was designed.
Without those things, the program would peter out after the US filled its own demand, and allies went looking for cheaper solutions. The F-35 isn't exactly cheap, but allies can see the capability justifies the cost. Now, there are so many of them in operation that, even after the bulk of orders are filled in the years to come, attrition and upgrades will keep the line operating and healthy at some level, which fulfills the goal you have in mind.
Meanwhile, the F-35 equipped militaries of the Western world are trained to similar standards, operating similar and compatible equipment, and sharing the logistics burden. In actual conflict, those features are invaluable.
There are few peacetime US developed weapons programs with such a record. It seems the interval between them is 20-30 years.
Until we run out of materials
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/minerals-magnets-and-military-capa...
As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?
With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either.
Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.
Then from 1971 (when the USD became completely unbacked) to present, it increased by more than 800 points, 1600% more than our baseline. And it's only increasing faster now. So the state of modern economics makes it completely incomparable to the past, because there's no precedent for what we're doing. But if you go back to just a bit before 1970, the economy would have of course grown much larger than it was in the past but still have been vaguely comparable to the past centuries.
And I always find it paradoxical. In basic economic terms we should all have much more, but when you look at the things that people could afford on a basic salary, that does not seem to be the case. Somebody in the 50s going to college, picking up a used car, and then having enough money squirreled away to afford the downpayment on their first home -- all on the back of a part time job was a thing. It sounds like make-believe but it's real, and certainly a big part of the reason boomers were so out of touch with economic realities. Now a days a part time job wouldn't even be able to cover tuition, which makes one wonder how it could be that labor cost practically nothing in the past, as you said. Which I'm not disputing - just pointing out the paradox.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
It is notable that the median monthly rent was $35/month on a median income of $3000, so ~15% of income spent on rental housing. But it's interesting reading that report because a significant focus was on the overcrowding "problem". Housing was categorized by number of rooms, not number of bedrooms. The median number of rooms was 4, and the median number of occupants >4 per unit (or more than 1 person per room). I don't think it's a stretch to say that the amount of space and facilities you get for your money today is roughly equivalent. Yes, greater percentage of your income goes to housing, and yet we have far more creature comforts today then back in 1950--multiple TVs, cellphones, appliances, and endless amounts of other junk. We can buy many more goods (durable and non-durable) for a much lower percentage of our income.
There's no simple story here.
I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI. They can converse in natural language, recall any common fact off the top of their heads, do research online and synthesize new information, translate between different human languages (and explain the nuances involved), translate a vague hand wavey description into working source code (and explain how it works), find security vulnerabilities, and draw SVGs of pelicans on bicycles. All in one singularly mind-blowing piece of tech.
The age of computers that just do what you tell them to, in plain language, is upon us! My God, just look at the front page! Are we on the same HN?
The big difference is that the current AI bubble isn't building durable infrastructure.
Building the railroads or the interstate was obscenely expensive, but 100+ years down the line we are still profiting from the investments made back then. Massive startup costs, relatively low costs to maintain and expand.
AI is a different story. I would be very surprised if any of the current GPUs are still in use only 20 years from now, and newer models aren't a trivial expansion of an older model either. Keeping AI going means continuously making massive investments - so it better finds a way to make a profit fast.
Maybe? It seems as if the tech is starting to taper off already and AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do. If that's the case the industry is probably in trouble, or the world economy.
Like Madoff, they’re desperate to pump their Ponzi scheme for as long as they can.
I think they have been gaslighting us from the beginning.
It also makes it more dramatic, consider the programs on the list and what they have in common.
* The Apollo program. A government-funded science project. No return on investment required.
* The Manhattan Project. A government-funded military project. No return on investment required.
* The F-35 program. A government funded military project. No return on investment required.
* The ISS. A government funded science project. No return on investment required.
* The Interstate Highway System. A government funded infrastructure project. No return on investment required.
* The Marshall Plan. A government funded foreign policy project. No return on investment required.
The actual return on investment for these projects is in the very long term of decades; Economic development, national security, scientific progress that benefits the entire country if not the entire world.
Consider the Marshall Plan in particular. It's a massive money sink, but it's nature as a government project meant it could run at losses without significant economic risk and could aim for extremely long term benefits. It's been paying dividends until January last year; 77 years.
And that dividend wasn't always obvious; Goodwill from Europe towards the US is what has prevented Europe from taking similar actions as China around the US' Big Tech companies. Many of whom relied extensively on 'Dumping' to push European competitors out of business, a more hostile Europe would've taken much more protectionist measures and ended up much like China, with it's own crop of tech giants.
And then there's the two programs left out. The railroads and AI datacenters. Private enterprise that simply does not have the luxury of sitting on it's ass waiting for benefits to materialize 50 years later.
As many other comments in this thread have already pointed out: When the US & European railroad bubbles failed, massive economic trouble followed.
OpenAI's need for (partial) return on investment is as short as this year or their IPO risks failure. And if they don't, similar massive economic trouble is assured.
Just confirms my suspicion HN is not a forum for intellectual curiosity. It's been entirely subsumed by MBAs and wannabe billionaires.
No. Re-read the comment.
I specifically say "No return on investment required" not "Has no return on investment". It didn't matter whether these projects earned back their money in the short term, or whether it takes the longer term of many decades.
The ISS hasn't earned back it's $150 billion, and it won't for a pretty long time yet. Doesn't mean it's not a good thing for humanity. Just means that it'd be a bad idea to have the project ran & funded by e.g. SpaceX. The project would've failed, you just can't get ROI on $150 billion within the timeframe required. SpaceX barely survived the cost of developing it's rockets. (And observe how AI spending is currently crushing the profitability of the newly-merged SpaceX-xAI.)
I'm not even saying "AI doesn't provide anything to humanity", I was saying that AI needs trillions of dollars in returns that do not appear to exist, and so it's likely to collapse.
Tulips: weeks
GPUs: 6 years
Fiber: 20-50 years
Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years
Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.
the only reason any “maintenance” on them is expensive is corruption which at municipal level rivals current administration in some places
LLMs+Data centres on the other hand...
Likewise I don't think it makes sense to compare post-ChatGPT hyperscaler data center construction with all 19th-century US railroad construction. Why not include the already considerable infrastructure of pre-AI AWS/Azure? The relevant economic change isn't "AI," it's having oodles of fast compute available online and a market demanding more of it. OTOH comparing these data centers to the Manhattan Project is wrong in the opposite direction: we should really be comparing a specific headline-grabber like Stargate.
This categorization is just a confusing mishmash. The real conclusion to draw here is that we tend to spend more on long-term and broadly-defined things than we do on specific projects with specific deadlines. Indeed.