[thelastgallon]

A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost, while watts are constrained by the laws of physics, photons/electrons, supply chain of electricity and all that fun stuff in the real world.

[jerf]

A dollar is still a useful unit as "the fraction of the economy that can be controlled by currency". It's true that printing a huge pile of it and throwing it at GPUs wouldn't instantly convert into more GPUs, but it would meaningfully represent that other things are being squeezed out to allocate more resources to GPU production even so. That such reallocation is inefficient, arguably immoral, and highly questionable in the long term versus other options wouldn't stop that from being ture.

[QuarterReptile]

>dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost

If the abstraction works better for you this way, call them interchangeable units of American and Chinese insolvency. Or incremental forfeiture of domestic ownership.

[ElFitz]

> A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost

It’s still a useful proxy for resources allocation and viability.

[tucnak]

..unless you're actually reasoning at nation-scale where OP's points apply

[ElFitz]

I wouldn’t agree. Even at national scale, these projects cost resources. And the resources of all agents (org, countries) are constrained.

While we could reason in "performance / watt" and "performance / people", "performance / whatever other resource involved", and "performance / opportunity cost of allocating these resources to this use case and not another", "performance / whatever unit of stable-ish currency" is a convenient and often "good enough" approximation that somewhat encapsulates them all.

A simplification, like any model, but still useful.