The problem is that once built, railroads provided economic value right off the bat.

I would love to hear about the economic value being generated by these LLMs. I think a couple years is enough time for us to start putting some actual numbers to the value provided.

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JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> once built, railroads provided economic value right off the bat

If they were laid on a sensible route, completed on budget and time, and savvily operated. Many railroads went bust.

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lukeschlather 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Equating this buildout with LLMs is also a category error. Waymo (self-driving cars) depends on the same infrastructure, and there are a variety of other robotics programs which are actually functioning, you can see them in operation. They all require a lot of GPUs to train and run the models which operate the robotics.

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Danox 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Is Waymo a good example when Google has third world people sitting at a screen operating the vehicle on the other side of the world, how can it performance be trusted?

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throwaway27448 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not clear that Waymo is an improvement over existing infrastructure so much as ensuring that fewer humans benefit from each car ride (which was already pathetically low).

	▲	rangestransform 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s an improvement over spending 1b/mi building public transit in HCOL car dependent areas

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therobots927 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What % of GPUs are running self driving software or robotics?

And what is the ROI on either of those right now?

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lukeschlather 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The answers to both of those questions are pretty guarded trade secrets. Amazon and Google just to name a couple examples are very profitable companies and I would not bet on them investing all this money without real use cases where profit is likely. Amazon is adding thousands of new robots to their factories every year.

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therobots927 3 hours ago | parent [-]

So your argument basically boils down to, the datacenter build out is not a waste of resources because if it was, these companies wouldn’t be building them.

Got it.

	▲	lukeschlather an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, your argument is that Google has had increasing revenue and profit for a decade, to the point that they have $400B in revenue + profit this year, and that they are going to lose money because they plan to spend $180B on capital projects for new data centers next year, because you know their business better than they do.