Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by IamLoading 507 days ago
if you say, i wanna build 5 nuclear reactors and I need 200 billion $$. I would believe it because, you can ballpark it with some stats.

For tech like LLMs, it feels irresponsible to say 500 billion $$ investment and then place that into R&D. What if in 2026, we realize we can create it for 2 billion$, and let the 498 billion $ sitting in a few consumers.

3 comments

I bet the Chinese can build 5 nuclear reactors for a fraction of that price, too. Deepseek says China builds them at $2.5-3.5B per 1200MW reactor.
Don’t think of it as “spend a fixed amount to get a fixed outcome”. Think of it as “spend a fixed amount and see how far you can get”

It may still be flawed or misguided or whatever, but it’s not THAT bad.

It seems to mostly be hardware.