Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Havoc 251 days ago
It's an interesting thought experiment, but not sure it's the entire story.

Imagine at the start of the electrification era people went "We'd need to build loads of cables and power plants and stuff that's expensive, lets just stick to steam power".

It's not a bet on this making sense via pedestrian business economics but rather that it'll be a game changer.

...whether that pans out is a technological and societal question, not an economic one in my mind
1 comments
JumpCrisscross 251 days ago
> Imagine at the start of the electrification era people went "We'd need to build loads of cables and power plants and stuff that's expensive, lets just stick to steam power"

False dichotomy. There are literally infinite options between ignoring AI and spending a quarter of a trillion on it annually.

link
tim333 251 days ago
The electrification era was quite gradual compared to this. Generators invented around 1870, 70% of US houses hooked up by 1930, so about sixty years. Altman and friends seem in an awful hurry.
link
JumpCrisscross 251 days ago
> Altman and friends seem in an awful hurry

Fibre and railroads, again, are really good comparisons. Both involved busineasses built on advancing technology. If you built your network before signalling, your costs were immediately higher than a competitor who rolled out more slowly. Similarly, do we really think Nvidia has had its last say in GPUs?

link