> Trillion-dollar companies can easily outbid the entire consumer market
replyI don't think this is true. I think prices are rising at the consumer and prosumer level because that's what's required for the mass market to collectively outbid the handful of trillion-dollar companies, at least for the limited share of production they can sustainably demand. This process can continue pretty much indefinitely.
> But one of the really neat things about AI is that there is no limit in sight to the scaling incentive.
replyHow you can be so confident? I can imagine there is some limit and with each scaling iteration gain you achieved will decrease so that further iterations would be more and more look pointless
I'm sure a limit will come around eventually. But plans are afoot to build city-sized data centers, and even then that's not enough to sate the AI superscalers' ambitions, hence Elon's talk about putting data centers in space. This is a level of compute scaling unheard of in our lifetime, and we're still a long, long way off from AGI. So while the juice may theoretically not be worth the squeeze at some point, with the current capacity we have there is no end within sight to the incentive to build more. It will take a number of years at least, and who knows how much environmental/economic destruction, before the dropoff in return on capex begins in earnest.
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