GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest.

The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance

Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for the GPUs - the largest line item.

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gravypod 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The side effects of spending funds on these mega projects is also something to consider. NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies.

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41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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rayiner 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great point!

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wr2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also railways would always have alternative uses at that time - e.g. logistics in warfare.

What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol

In addition to your points, this is why I always laugh when people do backward comparisons. What characteristics do they share in common? Very little.

	▲	jamesknelson an hour ago \| parent [-]
		GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers. Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions. Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective. FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.