> “Two generations out, people forget what the world was like. Forgetting like this on a civilizational level is probably adaptive”
We are forgetting the lessons of WWII, and the world is now stocked with thousands of nuclear weapons each hundreds of times more powerful than Hiroshima.
I don’t think we as a civilization can afford this kind of amnesiac adaptation anymore.
We've also lost everybody who remembers the lessons of the 30's.
There's a saying that people get more conservative as they age. But the Greatest Generation, those that experienced the 30's and WW2 tended in the opposite direction, voting more left as they aged.
There’s so much data center capacity being built all over the Earth. Thousands of large projects across US / China / Europe / Middle East. It would be astonishing if something that’s never been done before could be so cost-competitive immediately.
Starlink wasn’t the first time LEO communications constellations were attempted. Multiple 1990s projects did it (Iridium, GlobalStar…) and went bankrupt.
It took 30 years to make the concept work. SpaceX investors seem to be assuming the space data center business will be immediately viable.
Based on very specific assumptions: “…the world in which AI demand is so overwhelming as to exceed the already formidable datacenter capacity additions” — but also this same world is one where GPU chip supply is abundant, there just isn’t enough data centers to put them in.
This does not seem like the likeliest scenario to me.
Agreed, how could we not have datacenter capacity for the GPUs when Meta has shown that you can go from a bare field to an operational datacenter in about 3 months by using tents instead of buildings?
How hard would it be to weatherproof a GPU computing rack? Like how much more cost would it add? So theoretically you could even forgo tents. Just have them at field. Technically you could even maybe run them in freeports. Thus saving any tariff costs...
You don't even have to weatherproof the rack, putting racks into shipping containers is already done to some extent (and multiple deployments are to my knowledge working fine). It is often also marketed as "module data centers".
The main problem here is that it reduces efficiency (cooling a large datacenter is more efficient per Watt of dissipated heat than a shipping container) and increases initial cost (building in a shipping container is not actually as easy as doing it in a normal-ish building).
Portability (when offline, you can put a shipping container like this on a truck and cart it around) and availability (no need for a new/refit building, only power is required and could be included in the container with a generator (gas/diesel)) are the main reasons for accepting a higher TCO here.
We raised most of the capital before we had any traction. We raised on a rolling basis and had millions in the bank before we had even published the open-source repository. Ultimately we raised based on the team's background + vision.
The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago. TensorZero powered tens of trillions of inference tokens per month. TensorZero is not widely used but it was used by a couple of extreme-scale users.
Thank you, appreciate the response. It’s a great part of the HN community that there’s almost always someone around with the first-hand experience and facts.
I used it, but only briefly to evaluate it. It had some overlap with a tool I built myself, was curious if any of the extra features would be useful.
Ultimately I found the data model and UI to be both cumbersome and unintuitive. Langfuse ended up being the observability tool I went with instead over the one I built (and still use today).
Thiel is firmly in the "rules for thee but not for me" camp which means any authoritarianism he isn't in control of is even worse than a democracy. Ironically many people feel this way but most just don't have the wealth to try their hand at oppression.
So Orbán is not far-right, but somehow American far-right politicians and influencers like J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson loved him as a shining example of the kind of nationalist illiberal state they want to create. Hmm.
When the humans have a track record of corruption, it might make sense for a company to seek parallel opinions from a LLM so they can at least flag suspicious human decisions.
Assuming BNP Paribas leadership wants to stop the corruption of course.
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