> once built, railroads provided economic value right off the bat
replyIf they were laid on a sensible route, completed on budget and time, and savvily operated. Many railroads went bust.
Equating this buildout with LLMs is also a category error. Waymo (self-driving cars) depends on the same infrastructure, and there are a variety of other robotics programs which are actually functioning, you can see them in operation. They all require a lot of GPUs to train and run the models which operate the robotics.
replyIs Waymo a good example when Google has third world people sitting at a screen operating the vehicle on the other side of the world, how can it performance be trusted?
replyIt's not clear that Waymo is an improvement over existing infrastructure so much as ensuring that fewer humans benefit from each car ride (which was already pathetically low).
replyIt’s an improvement over spending 1b/mi building public transit in HCOL car dependent areas
replyWhat % of GPUs are running self driving software or robotics?
replyAnd what is the ROI on either of those right now?
The answers to both of those questions are pretty guarded trade secrets. Amazon and Google just to name a couple examples are very profitable companies and I would not bet on them investing all this money without real use cases where profit is likely. Amazon is adding thousands of new robots to their factories every year.
replySo your argument basically boils down to, the datacenter build out is not a waste of resources because if it was, these companies wouldn’t be building them.
replyGot it.
I mean, your argument is that Google has had increasing revenue and profit for a decade, to the point that they have $400B in revenue + profit this year, and that they are going to lose money because they plan to spend $180B on capital projects for new data centers next year, because you know their business better than they do.
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