His analogy is that most people don’t generate their own electricity. They connect to a grid and pay for what they use. AI is heading the same way. The problem is that building that grid — the data centers, power lines, cooling systems and chips needed to make AI a utility — is proving harder, pricier and slower than almost anyone expected.
Really? The AI boom not being as easy as the tech bros promised is a surprise to “almost anyone”? Is almost everyone going to be surprised when “next quarter’s” AGI is punted out another quarter for the 12th quarter in a row?
It’s going to come as a big shocker to “almost anyone” now that this article has taken the bold step to publish on such a controversial view
They really are jumping the gun here. They need to prove that AI is as necessary and as useful as a utility. So far, they haven’t
The fact that they’re pushing for AI to be a utility when the fucking internet isn’t is just absurd.
Any of the companies framing it as a utility hope you don’t think too deeply about it.
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you know they are desperate; trying to get right wing governments to buy in thier “surveillance AI” , plus trying to get them quickly approve the datacenters before people catch on that its polluting and just stealing resources from the locals. and the AMount of AI “STARTUP tech” events have also dramatically increased, 100% of tech conferences are just peddling some form of AI or another.
Trying and succeeding, Palantir and other companies have their hands all over the US government. And if you thought this government cared about things like “environment” or “people” –other than their votes– I have news for you…
Exactly!
AI is as useful and necessary as 3D video, cryptocurrency, NFTs, The Cloud, and all the other fads. Note that all the fads have stuck around in one manner or another. LLMs will too.
For the 3D video one, VR headsets perfected it. It’s actually awesome now. And looks the best on the newest devices like the Vision Pro.
But, VR devices are slow to catch on.
Anyway. I say this to just note that 3D movies and video has continued to improve despite the format supposedly being dead in the eyes of your average consumer. Apple currently has the largest 3D movie selection ever assembled from one vendor. And it’s the only place to watch 3D in 4K. Blu-ray does not have a standard/specification that supports it.
3D movies have been around for many many decades. And only recently have they become “perfected” from a visual fidelity POV. The hardware form factor needs more refinement though. I’m just reinforcing your point about how at least one of the technologies has not and will not go away.
AI is as useful and necessary as 3D video, cryptocurrency, NFTs, The Cloud, and all the other fads. Note that all the fads have stuck around in one manner or another. LLMs will too.
Agreed I see some strong use for AI… just not everywhere, everything like it’s being shoved down our throats.
I think it would be funny to use as the boundary areas of a video game where AI just starts generating stuff, but it degrades and gets more and more weird the further out you get from the boundaries.
AI being used as a tool for conglomeration? Absolutely.
AI used as a “tool” to make “art”? Fuck outta here.
or become a “Writer”
The cloud is kind of an odd one out here, cloud providers are bringing in like half a trillion dollars a year from willing customers
3D video did serve as a legitimate stepping stone for things like Virtual Reality headsets and heads up displays for vehicles, so I don’t think it was a total waste.
The rest of the buzzwords are relatively obscure in the grand scheme of progress though (unless by The Cloud you mean VPS services/storage solutions, which are almost ubiquitous)
3D video isn’t a stepping stone for VR. It’s just one application that VR excels at.
It’s like saying photographs are a stepping stone for screens.
Image projection where the brain combines two separate images into one cohesive picture by filling in the gaps is absolutely 3D video’s territory, and expansion on that concept was at the very least utilized in the development of VR headsets.
Now, they aren’t one to one, of course, but lessons learned from 3D video were certainly used in modern VR development (and perhaps adjacent to 3D video’s at the time).
most of the AI video making seemed to have vanished, because it got too expensive to make a 5 second video.
Can someone explain the two claims made in the title, in summary?
The tech bros are dreaming that everybody will use cloud based AI for everything. And people will need tokens for that, so that’ll become the new currency.
But there aren’t close to enough data centers to do that, or even enough under construction. They’re having racks in tents powered by jet engines now because building date centers is expensive and slow. Much slower than they’re hyping and certainly not enough to catch up with tech bro dreams.
not only that states are beginning to block some of the construction, the ones that havnt been completely bought off that is. they fear thier own eleciton seats, since both ds and rs hate the datacenters.
I wonder if it’s just a matter of time though.
Remember how computers used to be as big as a room and even then only stored 2mbs back when they were new? But then became more portable and accessible? It makes me wonder if, in a few decades, it’d be possible that happens with data centers in the future.
We can’t do that though since we’re already at the edge of the atomic (physical) silicon etching size limit. So no more steady increases in power, or decreases in size, unlike the last 30 years where we could do both. My hot take is that silicon chips as they are now defined are already at the end of the road.
But in the same way we’re now carrying a supercomputer in a pocket or purse. And they’ll be a successor to LLM that’s much more efficient. Most likely every laptop or phone puts those data centers to shame in a few decades.
Wouldn’t that still eventually allow for an era(s) of monetizing token usage for universal applications? Even if it gets better over time and continuously replaces itself over decades
Probably more for corporate use, digital autonomous companies and the like. If your home router is smart enough to do your taxes, you don’t need much cloud computing. Although tech firms will try to get everything turned into a cloud subscription of course.
