[dghlsakjg]

The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them).

I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.

[delecti]

I agree that AI will probably have bigger effects that we could possibly predict right now. But unlike past booms/bubbles, I suspect the infrastructure being built now won't be useful after it resolves. The railroads, interstate system, and dotcom fiber buildout are all still useful. AI will need to get more efficient to be useful as established technology, so the huge datacenters will be overbuilt. And almost none of the Nvidia chips installed in datacenters this year will still be in use in 5 years, if they're even still functional.

[Danox]

The era of the AI data center will be brief because the models will get better and the computers will get more powerful, particularly on the desktop, laptop and phone/tablet . The transition will be like going from mainframe computers to personal computers.

[hnthrow0287345]

No one's going to be able to afford that if you hollow out the consumer base by replacing people with AI

[dralley]

Early railroads didn't have a lot of standardization, so plenty of that investment did get deprecated

[whattheheckheck]

All of the trucks and carts and tools to build the railroads dont exist anymore. Just like the gpus wont either

[delecti]

In that analogy, the GPUs are like if the railroad tracks only lasted 5 years.

[whattheheckheck]

The curated training datasets are the railroads

[crote]

> I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term.

The big difference is that the current AI bubble isn't building durable infrastructure.

Building the railroads or the interstate was obscenely expensive, but 100+ years down the line we are still profiting from the investments made back then. Massive startup costs, relatively low costs to maintain and expand.

AI is a different story. I would be very surprised if any of the current GPUs are still in use only 20 years from now, and newer models aren't a trivial expansion of an older model either. Keeping AI going means continuously making massive investments - so it better finds a way to make a profit fast.

[TeMPOraL]

GPUs are consumables, not infrastructure. Model weights are the lasting thing.

It's always like that with software. You can still run an OS or a program made 20 years ago, in some cases that program may in fact have no modern replacements available (think niche domains) - meanwhile, in those 20 years, you've probably churned through 5-10 generations of computing hardware.

[wr2]

This is completely false - GPUs are not consumables, they are factors of production.

Models are technologies. Without the GPUs the technology is not accessible.

You sound like someone who thinks they have a strong understanding of economics when they don't.

[ben_w]

I had to look up "factors of production" to see what this was about.

Looks to me like, as with a drill bit, a GPU could be reasonably classified as either a consumable or a factor of production.

This is because GPUs wear out and fail; the smaller the features, the faster electromigration kills them.

[ezst]

And I'm not an AI doomer, but hell no, give me another space program/station over this every single time and pretty please. We are not pioneering new engineering science or creating a pipeline of hard research and innovation that will spread in and better our everyday lives for the decades to come. We are overbuilding boring data centers packed with single-purpose chips that WILL BE obsolete within a couple years, for what? For the unhinged hope that LLM chatbots will somehow develop intelligence, and/or that people by the billions will want to pay a hefty price for dressed-up plagiarism machines. There is no indication that LLMs are a pathway to meaningful and transformative AI. Without that, there is no technical merit for the data centers being built currently to constitute future-proof infrastructure like highways and railroad networks did. There is no economical framework in which this somehow trickles down to or directly empowers the individual. This is a sham of ludicrous proportions, a sickening waste.

[dTal]

>There is no indication that LLMs are a pathway to meaningful and transformative AI.

Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI. They can converse in natural language, recall any common fact off the top of their heads, do research online and synthesize new information, translate between different human languages (and explain the nuances involved), translate a vague hand wavey description into working source code (and explain how it works), find security vulnerabilities, and draw SVGs of pelicans on bicycles. All in one singularly mind-blowing piece of tech.

The age of computers that just do what you tell them to, in plain language, is upon us! My God, just look at the front page! Are we on the same HN?

[ezst]

> Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI

The onus of the proof regarding their meaningful and transformative nature is on you.

The largest niche LLMs have so far managed to carve for themselves is software code, with the jury still on the fence as whether the productivity needle actually moved in one direction or the other, and the other, literal jury, enshrining the fact that vibe-coded software is not copyrightable and becomes a public good, that should give pause to any company living of selling software or software-related services as whether they want to poison their well.

Web search hasn't been disrupted very much either with users being quick to realise how hallucinogenic LLM summaries are (with the fact that it's baked in the tech and practically unsolvable being one of the reasons I don't consider LLMs a significant stepping stone towards actual AI).

The age of computers that respond to voice orders was 10 years ago, with Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, nobody could care less then, and the fact the same systems became less capable after re-inventing themselves on top of LLMs probably won't have people care more now.

[dTal]

We are in such different universes that I fear that this will not be a productive discussion; to my eyes LLMs are the most obviously socially transformative technology in my lifetime, up there with "internet" and "smartphones".

You say the largest niche is software production. Okay, let's talk about that. If the jury is still out then the jury is asleep. When ChatGPT first came out - the GPT3 days, years ago, before "vibe code" was even a term - an artist friend of mine who never wrote a line of code in his life straight-up vibe coded 3d visuals to accompany a performance of the band he was in. In Processing, which he'd never heard of until ChatGPT suggested it to him. Do you realize what this means? Normies can use computers now. Actually use, not just consume. You can describe what you want and the computer will do it - will even ask you for clarification if your specification is too ambiguous. Hell, it will even educate you about the subject matter, meeting you at exactly your level, in your favorite writing style.

If you are still thinking in terms of whether vibe coded software is "copyrightable" or whether LLMs are useful for "selling software", you are a blacksmith scoffing that cars are pointless because they don't need horseshoes. Your entire framework is obsolete.

[kiba]

You are so focused on productivity that you missed the boat on the shape of the problem.

Vibe coded app are just throwaway codes that you don't understand and can't maintain. Most of our technology isn't creating new things but incremental improvement.

You are so focused on productivity when programming 's bottleneck is never about how many features you implement but how much you can understand your codebase.

Nobody cares about your internet slops but they care about verification of facts which unfortunately require human judgement.

LLM are just a different version of library code we already have, except without quality control by default.

[throwaway27448]

Is there really that much inefficiency in our distribution of goods and services such that AI could have this much impact?

[fyrn_]

I think the bet is more labor replacement, not saying that's particularly reasonable either

[operatingthetan]

>I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.

Maybe? It seems as if the tech is starting to taper off already and AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do. If that's the case the industry is probably in trouble, or the world economy.

[EFreethought]

> AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do

I think they have been gaslighting us from the beginning.

[bigfatkitten]

Bernie Madoff and his ilk made way for Sam Altman and his friends.

Like Madoff, they’re desperate to pump their Ponzi scheme for as long as they can.