This. I’m on X myself a lot (because everyone else in my circles is, not because I wanted) and it’s just such a bubble. Sometimes I want to just quit it all and touch grass
Haha, I felt the same and never did anything about it. Then this Charlie Kirk fellow got shot and I’d coincidentally clicked on For You on Twitter (I know, first mistake, never do this) moments after and a vague tweet about “can’t believe this something something” had a bloody video of a man getting shot dead in the fucking neck. I remember wondering if I wanted to go through a week, maybe a month, of people tweeting about a guy getting shot and realized I really didn’t.
Stopped. Thanks to that gore poster, I suppose.
But I went back to look maybe a week ago and when I did it was incomprehensible. It was full of in-jokes and references that made no sense to me. Dunks and subtweets that were context free. Strangely a short period away made the whole thing look like an alien culture.
Getting to know the neighbours is what helped me in getting out, so perhaps it could help you as well.
Among those with whom I established any contact there's a:
-Doctor in training
-Teacher
-Small business owner doing house renovations
-Telecom company sales representative
-Taxi driver
There's hardly any overlap between them in terms of what they do for a living and it's like that naturally in every place that's not close to some kind of large business like a factory.
Right now, we can’t request even a single (1) non-beefy non-GPU VM in us-east on Azure. That’s been going on for over a month now, and that’s after being a customer for 2 years :(
The cloud is also not fulfilling its end of the promise anymore - capacity on-demand. We’ve been struggling for over a month to get a single (1) non-beefy non-GPU instance on Azure, since they’ve been having just insane capacity issues, where even paying for “provisioned” capacity doesn’t make it available.
And now, on cloud it’s the same but much more expensive and worse performance. We’ve been struggling for over a month to get a single (1) non-beefy non-GPU VM allocated on Azure, since they’ve been having insane capacity issues, to the extent that even “provisioned” capacity cannot be fulfilled ;-(
One gameserver was 40vCPU and 256G of RAM, we had about 30-50 before we’d see some issues in some regions. (this is from memory now unfortunately).
Sao Paulo and Tokyo being the worst, but Singapore, Australia and Mumbai also had issues at various times.
The other places where we hit hard limits was Los Angeles, but we had more than a hundred instances then.
The issue with the hard limits is that it’ll be one zone thats exceeded and the API will fail, so you have to retry with another zone in the same region, but you don’t get to practice building your autoscaler before you actually need it.
Oh interesting. Yeah, and I’m guessing you don’t get much prior visibility into available stock, since that would also expose info to their competitors.
That is a lot lower than I expected, but I also imagine that’s a sizable order that they like getting.
If you're a top X customer running in a smaller region of AWS or GCP, yes, you need to do capacity planning with your TAM. You get to a point where quota increase requests are not auto-approved.
The whole business model even for OAI/Anthropic is unsustainable.. they are already running it at a huge loss atm, and will do for the foreseeable future. The economics simply doesn't work, unfortunately or not
OAI/Anthropic/Big AI players today never ever need to become profitable... The same way roads never need to become profitable by themselves. This per token charge is like tolls, it has nothing to do with the costs.
AI, just like cloud was before this, is being treated as "infrastructure". The reason people invest in roads is not to make money from the road itself, but rather recuper all the losses from the new extremely profitable businesses that will come on top of this infrastructure. To the stock ticker, this looks like a boom+bust cycle. But really, it's a bust+boom cycle as far as the investors are concerned. Saudi Arabia don't give a hoot about transformers, but they know if they invest their large amounts of capital in the new infrastructure - huge models in expensive datacenters using cities worth of power, they can invest in the many new hyper profitable businesses on top. Also helps that it locks in demand for oil, I guess :P
A similar example for cloud would be the gajillion cloud SaaS, DevOps, cloud security whatever businesses that only exist today because the whole cloud infra segment ran unprofitable for a long time and created the infrastructure for all this.
These new businesses will not be multi hundred-billion dollar businesses, no. They will all be million dollar businesses. But you'll have a million such businesses. Everyone that's stuffing money into AI today is hoping that there will be a huge product layer [1] on top of this new infrastructure once it's all consolidated at a few major players allowing "infra" costs to drop considerably, which they can milk.
The stock of all these companies going high is just wall st making it easy for people to buy debt from this infrastructure. If they're indisciplined, they will co-mingle this debt with normal people's daily lives debt and sell it as one, and everything gets affected badly. If they're not, then the stock market will complain, but normal folks will be kind of OK.
[1] well, everyone has this same idea, meaning there also a lot of short term investors trying to make gains while openai/nvidia/etc are on their way up, sort of like greater fool investing, but let's ignore them for the purposes of this argument.
[Note] of course, whether cloud/ai/whatever are actually useful infra that deserves to be force-created is up for debate.. many disagree, not me though.
I don't even know where to start with this. Comparing private companies to roads? This makes no sense right? These companies, like roads never have to turn a profit?
It might sound weird, but yes. The economic perspective is the same.
You're making a huge upfront unprofitable investment into something, so that a lot of insanely profitable investments can be made 10 years in the future, that uses the result of todays investment as infrastructure.
Whether it's as important as roads, all of that is not relevant from an economic standpoint -- I'm just explaining the rationale behind the investments today.
> These companies
It's useful to mentally think of it as an implicit "team effort" among all relevant, rich companies. Openai (just an example) themselves are being "allowed" by everyone else in the "team" to not make money, because everyone knows that at the end there will be a gajillion new product companies they can all make their money back on. Openai/stargate is in that sense just a "front" for this massive infrastructure investment. Sama/Microsoft themselves will make money that way, either by building those products (just think of the ai integrations in MS enterprise in 10 years...) or by investing in others building those products. Defense folks have investments into this for the same reason.
That's why I said it's similar to roads, no one expects to make money from roads. But on those nice roads amazon will create a 1-day delivery product, charge you 10$ a month for it, and investors will make money from that [1].
[1] yes yes this specific example is bunk and historically wrong, but wanted to drive home the parallel with a small example
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