Every engineer on Google is now measured on how much AI they use on their products. This is the predictable result.

There's already a huge number of AI generated channels in youtube. The only difference is that they're uploaded by channel owners. What's is gonna happen very quickly (if not already) is that Youtube itself will start "testing" AI content that it creates on what will look like new channels. In a matter of a few years they'll promote this "content" to occupy most of the time and views in the platform.

And then they'll start feeding in data like gaze tracking, and adjust the generated content in real time to personalize it to be maximally addictive for each viewer.

Rentals don't have deductible interest but have depreciation, which can be even better.

Yes, I moved already using this method. People complaining of low rates just don't have any financial skills.

The problem with AI is that the media and the tech hype machine wants everyone to believe that it is more than a glorified randomized text generator. Yes, for many problems this is just what you need, but not to create reliable software. Somehow, they want everyone to go into a state of disbelief and agree that it is a superior intelligence or at least the clear sign of something of this sorts, and that we should stop everything we're doing right now to give more money and attention to this endeavor.

> power seems like a weird metric to use

Because this technology changes so fast, that's the only metric that you can control over several data centers. It is also directly connected to the general capacity of data center, which is limited by available energy to operate.

To expand on rahimnathwani's comment below - the big capital costs of a data center are land, the building itself, the power distribution and the cooling.

You can get a lot of land for a million bucks, and it doesn't cost all that much to build what's basically a big 2-story warehouse, so the primary capital costs are power and cooling. (in fact, in some older estimates, the capital to build that power+cooling cost more per year than the electricity itself)

My understanding is that although power and cooling infrastructure are long-lived compared to computers, they still depreciate faster than the building, so they dominate costs even more than the raw price would indicate.

The state of the art in power and cooling is basically defined by the cost to feed X MW of computing, where that cost includes both capital and operation, and of course lower is better. That means that at a particular SOTA, and at an appropriate scale for that technology, the cost of the facility is a constant overhead on top of the cost of the equipment it houses. To a rough approximation, of course.

And cooling capacity.

That would be true for general purpose servers. But what they want is lots of special purpose AI chips. While is still possible to use that for something else, it's very different from having a generic server farm.

LAN party at the end of the universe?

Yes, it will be worth something. But when the value is less than its cost, you have a loss - and nobody runs a service at a loss.

Scam Altman wants the US to build a lot of energy plants so that the country will pay the costs and OpenAI will have the profits of using this cheap energy.

There is the opportunity cost of using a whole datacenter to house ancient chips, even if they're still running. You're thinking like a personal use chip which you can run as long as it is non-defective. But for datacenters it doesn't make sense to use the same chips for more than a few years and I think 5 years is already stretching their real shelf life.

There are many ways of spending money in the population that don't include just "distribution of money", as it's portrayed nowadays. Child care, free and high quality schools, free transportation, free or subsidized healthcare, investment is labor-intensive industries, these are all examples of expenditures that translate in better quality of life and also improve competitiveness for the country.

That has literally nothing to do with the point I have argued.