[joelthelion]

I see it the other way around. In a few years, algorithmic and hardware improvements will likely make these huge datacenters mostly obsolete.

Americans will get to enjoy their rusty infrastructure and polluted air, and Europe will have lean and clean infra to support just what's needed.

[atleastoptimal]

That's like saying that improved gas mileage and energy efficiency will make oil obsolete.

In certain domains there are no ceilings to return on compute. For example, offensive/defensive cybersecurity, it will be an arms race of who has more compute to patch up against more sophisticated attacks, and who runs more sophisticated attacks

>Americans will get to enjoy their rusty infrastructure and polluted air,

America has very high air quality and fairly good infrastructure given their population density.

[joelthelion]

ICE Cars have been around for 100+ years. We have a good understanding of their achievable efficiency, including theoretical guarantees.

LLMs on the other hand have only been around for a few years. Large technological breakthroughs are much more likely.

In addition, I don't think the future is billions of people chatting with ChatGPT all day. LLMs can write deterministic code for many things, and in the end, we only need their "intelligence" and brittleness in relatively few scenarios. So, with good optimization, we shouldn't need so many huge data centers.

On the topic of clean air, the US is relatively spared at the moment because past governments were more reasonable. But just wait a couple of years under the current leadership and you'll see. Just from this morning, look at the top comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214017

[drstewart]

Exactly. The same way the US is winning the EV / solar race - let China build obsolete factories that require way more investments that will be obsolete soon because of automation, then swoop in to build just what's needed and dominate. China will be left with scarred ugly landscapes while the US wins, as you'll no doubt agree

[joelthelion]

AI isn't a necessity in the same way that EV / solar is, we can afford to take it slow and see what sticks. Also, EV/Solar are a much more mature technology than AI, so huge technological leaps are less likely.

[Aldipower]

Meanwhile American AI is trained continuously on European data folks willingly gift to the big three AI companies.

[u8080]

Yeah, right, like they've already done that with social networks and chipmaking.