I found the OP insightful and worth a read. Thank you for sharing it on HN.
The only aspect that is poorly analyzed by the OP is business model viability. All players are investing insane amounts of money in infrastructure with the expectation that their future profits will justify all that investment. The winner or winners in the AGI race, they believe, will find the proverbial "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
The OP glosses over questions of business model viability with a brief qualitative discussion and very little hard data. For example, to earn an annual return > 10% on every trillion dollars of capital sunk into infrastructure, the owners of that infrastructure must earn free cash flow (operating profit less investment) in excess of $100 billion per year in perpetuity. Is that feasible? Why? How?
Definitely. The question is: Is it enough to recoup the enormous capital costs and justify the level of investment they've received. I think there's a decent chance that it will be. But maybe not. And the longer they keep focusing on training new models more so than on inference, the more uncertain I become that it's all going to work out.
Honestly at this point with training costs I don't see how it could ever pay itself back unless you get RSI, in which the talk of money really isn't the main problem any longer.
We're in a situation where AI isn't going to go away, but whatever financial mode we're in right not is not going to work.
cs702 · · focus · HN ↗
The only aspect that is poorly analyzed by the OP is business model viability. All players are investing insane amounts of money in infrastructure with the expectation that their future profits will justify all that investment. The winner or winners in the AGI race, they believe, will find the proverbial "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
The OP glosses over questions of business model viability with a brief qualitative discussion and very little hard data. For example, to earn an annual return > 10% on every trillion dollars of capital sunk into infrastructure, the owners of that infrastructure must earn free cash flow (operating profit less investment) in excess of $100 billion per year in perpetuity. Is that feasible? Why? How?
The OP does not really consider such questions.
BenzeneDream · · focus · HN ↗
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
We're in a situation where AI isn't going to go away, but whatever financial mode we're in right not is not going to work.