[jsnell]

Every part of this is nonsense.

Spending a lot (on capex or opex) certainly is not providing any kind of signaling benefit at this level. It's the opposite, because obviously every single financial analyst in the market is worried about the rapid increase in capex. The companies involved are cutting everything else to the bone to make sure they can still make those (necessary) investments without degrading their top-line numbers too much. Or in some cases actively working to hide the debt they're financing this with from their books.

Even if we imagined that the author's conspiracy theory were true, there would still be massive incentives for optimization because everyone is bottlenecked on compute despite expanding it as fast as is physically possible. Like, are we supposed to believe that nobody would run larger training runs if the compute was there? That they're intentionally choosing to be inefficient, and as a result having to rate-limit their paying customers? Of course not.

The reality is that any serious ML operation will have teams trying to make it more efficient, at all levels. If the author's services are not wanted, there are a few more obvious options than the outright moronic theory of intentional inefficiency. In this case most likely that their product is an on-edge speech to text model, which is not at all relevant to what is driving the capex.

[exasperaited]

> Spending a lot (on capex or opex) certainly is not providing any kind of signaling benefit at this level.

It's not providing any benefit now but there's still signalling going on, and it absolutely provided benefit at the beginning of this cycle of economy-shattering fuckwittery.