In Race To Build AI, Tech Plans a Big Plumbing Upgrade (nytimes.com) 25
If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.
Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.
The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.
Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.
The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.
Yeah (Score:2)
It's a plumbing upgrade alright.
Remember it's net-zero right! (Score:2)
Does anyone believe that these companies actually use 100% renewable energy?
They claim to. Highly doubtful given that they do not include the energy used to build out the electrical grid, windmills, solar panels, etcl used to power the data center.
So we're about to have a massive demand increase (Score:2)
And what exactly are we getting for it? I mean sure, LLMs have some really great uses for scientific endeavors, but let's face it all the buzz is around replacing jobs.
You're not just getting replaced with a machine, they're g
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You're not just getting replaced with a machine, they're going to take your water & electricity.
Yep, sounds like a real winning strategy overall! Way to ensittify a whole society.
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for electricity & water (yes, you can recycle that water, but data centers prefer not to because, well, it's cheaper to just use subsidized water). This while several electric grids are having a hard time keeping up and the entire American Southwest in in a massive drought. And what exactly are we getting for it? I mean sure, LLMs have some really great uses for scientific endeavors, but let's face it all the buzz is around replacing jobs. You're not just getting replaced with a machine, they're going to take your water & electricity.
Yeah, but there's a lot less moral ambiguity when a disgruntled former employee comes in and shoots up a building full of computers.
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So they can channel more crap? (Score:1)
Yep, more "plumbing" is urgently needed. After all, "AI" cannot do anything but better crap. Makes sense to allow it to spew that faster. Maybe also change all water fountains to do Gatorade while you are at it...
The Dot-Com boom (Score:2)
Greed and failure are constant companions. Expect history to repeat itself.
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Thanks for asking. I'll help you out with these kinds of questions anytime.
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It was a big thing for a while, and it enabled a lot of things, both good and bad. Then the AI boom happened and it turned into a toxic radioactive cesspool and became useless and dangerous.
Thanks for asking. I'll help you out with these kinds of questions anytime.
It didn't take AI to turn the internet into a toxic, radioactive cesspool. Social media did that. And I think you'll find the most egregious social media companies may have been gathering data for AI, but the tear-down moment for the Internet came well before the AIs were unleashed on us.
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Nothing came of Dot-Com. That's all long dead commercially. What came next was Smart Phones, and Apps.
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Wikipedia and TheWayBackMachine is what Dot-Com gave us.
Twitter, Gmail and Facebook were built for Smart Phones.
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The internet predated the dot com boom.
Dot com was about the idea that you could use the Internet to sell stuff. That completely died and nobody ever does it. After that brief interlude we went back to waiting for progressive JPEGs to load on the Louvre website.
So many billions spent on garbage """technology""" (Score:1)
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I used to think that cryptocurrency was the biggest troll-meme of the 21st century, but now I see that it's amateur night compared to the overblown, over-hype crap-ware they inaccurately and inappropriately call 'AI'. Wasting trillions of dollars and countless amounts of non-renewable resources on nonsense like this just goes to show how ridiculous the human species can be.
I don't remember who was credited with this quote, but someone once said, "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without society in between." Our headlong rush to AI seems to pretty much demonstrate that. No real controls. No real guardrails. Just throw resources at it in a wild hope that we'll create something better, or at the very least, generate some profit for people who already have way too much. What a time to be alive.
Interesting (Score:3)
Given how most of the career AI professionals nor trying to sell something seem to think we've already reached the limit with these LLMs, that now the industry wants to sink a fortune into them. This looks more like the cryptocurrency bubble with every passing day.
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This looks more like the cryptocurrency bubble with every passing day.
It does, doesn't it? Looks like a combination of extremes of greed, cluelessness and lack if ideas. Well, the big crash is sure to come here and maybe it will take some of the dusty, incompetent and all about crappy "players" with it. Then it would have at least one positive effect.
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This looks more like the cryptocurrency bubble with every passing day.
It does, doesn't it? Looks like a combination of extremes of greed, cluelessness and lack if ideas. Well, the big crash is sure to come here and maybe it will take some of the dusty, incompetent and all about crappy "players" with it. Then it would have at least one positive effect.
I'm gonna have a nice hard "tee hee" session when somebody comes up with some novel approach to AI that blows the current LLMs out of the water that can run on the average CPU/GPU of a semi-serious gaming rig after these techbros have spent billions on upgrading data-centers to build a better electronic idiot. It'd be the most hilarious possible outcome, and we all know whoever is writing this timeline loves the biting sarcastic outcomes.
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While unlikely, that is the only way we could get "AI" that has some worth beyond producing better crap and somewhat better search results. LLMs cannot cut it and will never cut it.
The hottest, driest places?! (Score:2)
If only they could put that much money and (Score:2)