Thread

Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center

155 points · 153 comments · simonpure

WokeUp420 · 1790259618 · focus · HN ↗
The number of datacenters needing to come online doesn't add up to me. It's suspicious
1. echelon · 1790260049 · focus · HN ↗
  When our spot instances go away and don't come back, that's a sign that there's not enough capacity.
  There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.
  Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.
  Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.
  The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.
  Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.
  The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.
  Everything is going to be AI soon.
  1. simianwords · 1790270352 · focus · HN ↗
    On HN there are a lot of people who truly believe that this whole thing is hype and the bubble will burst and things will go back to how it was before.
    The real answer to “how many data centers do we need” is hard. Anyone giving confident answers to this should be suspicious.
    The easy type of answer you get from those kind of people will always be “we are building too much”. They’d have said that 3 years back and have no shame in admitting it.
    The thing is, you can overestimate or underestimate. Both have cons. The people sincerely believing this is all hype will always underestimate because all their epistemic muscle haven’t been used.
    beepbooptheory · 1790279670 · focus · HN ↗
    To be charitable to your hypothetical HN naysayers, isn't the question more like "how many more data centers do we need right now?" as well as "why is the answer a shitton for all these guys?". It doesn't really feel like this is a debate about speculation or the quantitative "too much" of it, but more of the "why at all?"
    It just seems like the AI guys could easily win this debate if they could just articulate the why of it beyond just the near-parodic "everything will be AI in the future!". Like why not be a positive articulator and defender of what the extreme influx of datacenters will bring to the people? Don't you think that would be at least a stronger argument to make here? Why police the ideology or scare people with your position when you could, I don't know, win their hearts and minds?
    Isn't that why you (presumably) like AI? Because it brings good things to people?

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