100%. Trump’s going to do his tariff thing and we all understand that. But the sovereignty threats were an outrage, and most of the Canadian response is motivated by a sense of deep betrayal.
I’m vague on a specific reason for this feeling because there are a few to choose from and no one overpowers the other, but the emotion that comes to mind when I read this is disgust. As a society I feel we will look back on the subsidized opulence of this moment with total and utter contempt.
I know exactly the feeling you mean. I get a much stronger feeling of that when I talk with friends who frequently take a plane for a 250 mile trip which has a world-class comfortable high-speed train connection with very frequent trains, each taking less than 3 hours. I'm sure you have friends who would do this in this situation - do you feel the same disgust when you hear them talking about such choices?
I still haven't seen a single person who actually cares about the environment and has willingly made significant sacrifices for it, who clamors about the environmental cost of AI. Every time I see someone do it it's someone who never cared about this before, and still doesn't really. Who buys plenty of new clothes and furniture, loves a good burger, has the latest iPhone, flies 4 times per year.
Maybe you're the unicorn in which case fair enough, you've earned the right to feel disgusted.
That as well. But everyone reading GP’s posts knows in their bones that it’s unsustainable. It’s economically unsustainable and environmentally unsustainable, and in that context it strikes me as pure hoarding behaviour. Taking as much as they can for themselves before the house of cards crashes down.
I have no sympathy for OpenAI or Anthropic as corporations, but if these are the new tools of the trade, then platform abuse like GP is bragging about serves only to destroy the livelihoods of the rest of us who are content to use our fair share.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the bill always comes at the end.
I mostly hate it because the token crunch is now coming for us regular users because of people like this. A few people always ruin it for the rest of us.
Yea. It’s greed, pure and simple. And also a major misstep on the part of the inference providers to offer these subsidized plans and not anticipate these slop mills.
Yes but if there are three banana shops around and there are five banana addicted people living nearby the number of bananas available on average for every person is not 15.
In other words, if all ai companies need more compute that a single provider can provide, then there's just not enough of it. So the question "why everyone partners with everyone" must have a different answer.
It's not really "creating more compute" it's just a natural outcome of everyone desperately grabbing whatever becomes available. The dynamics make sense for all parties involved.
Firstly, it's very clear now that everyone is seriously crunched for capacity (like, each of the hyperscalers' backlogs -- i.e. capacity for which payment is committed, but as yet unsatisfied -- are in the double-digit billions.)
So as the compute providers bring more capacity online, everyone with demand wants to get a slice of that. Like, why would anyone NOT dive in and try to secure some capacity for themselves? Especially when the rate of capacity growth is constrained by the availability of GPUs and energy and data center buildouts, which is measured in years.
On the flip side, why would the compute providers NOT want multiple customers? It creates competition and drives prices up.
There are likely other forces at play too. For one, none of the parties - the model providers and the compute providers, with some of them like Google being both -- wants to get too dependent on any of the other parties, but they also want to secure a slice of each others' future growth, so they're all partnering with each other. Obviously, Google wants Gemini to win and Microsoft wants Copilot to win, but as a hedge, they'll be happy hosting their competitors' products and taking a cut.
This is partly the origin of the "circular investments" concerns. The scale at which this industry is growing, all these players have enormous mountains of money that they must invest to secure their future, but they are also the only players that can operate at this scale, and so the only place they can invest that money in is each other.
Pay no mind to this miserable mob. You do good work. It’s thorough and balanced. They don’t realize it because they don’t actually read anything you write.
Many of them might have been troubled by the fact that they couldn’t afford a tractor. Many small farms became a few big ones, and so it will go in software.
reply