Recently, these have been mid. A lot of investments and talks about your fund rather than built things, and now something that is obviously not even optimistic at all (China GDP projected to decrease like what??? this is what prompted me to leave this comment...)
I feel like there is a disconnect between the original purpose of this newsletter and what has been posted recently.
I say this as a fan, not as a hater. I used to love these and save them to my Notion for later referencing...
This is one of my favorite newsletters and I read a lot. I’m a techno-optimist and serial entrepreneur who’s been in AI and emerging technology a long time.
If you think autonomous military-grade weapons are good news, Packy and Dan, you’re fucking losing it. That entire section sounds like you’re psychotic. There is no good and complete argument for building factories of machines designed to efficiently and automatically kill human beings. I’m sure those innovations will make you and some of the most wicked human beings on this planet, those who profit off fear and war, even more wealthy.
I feel like money and power is changing you. Out of all of the innovative things happening across our world this week, technology capable of wiping out entire cities of people within minutes is in the top five things to celebrate? That’s sick.
This sounds like a great idea - and the economics can work - but there are major quibbles.
1) The compute resource cost is actually only on par with the infrastructure cost. In particular, you need cooling for most compute. This means air conditioning and often, water or even helium, to cool those big shiny CPU/GPUs. Generators are extremely frickin' expensive and cooling is a very expensive ongoing cost, especially if you don't have a nice heat sink like a pool of water to dump it into.
2) And then there's the social value of the compute - bitcoin mining is profitable but it is extremely hard to justify any of it as being social additive. AI to put people out of jobs? Could be an issue too.
Carbon offsets: sorry, but this entire field is almost as full of grifts as crypto. Forests? Turns out they really just sequester carbon until the next forest fire. AI LLM search up "phantom credits"...
I'm not going to lie, what is this really?
Recently, these have been mid. A lot of investments and talks about your fund rather than built things, and now something that is obviously not even optimistic at all (China GDP projected to decrease like what??? this is what prompted me to leave this comment...)
I feel like there is a disconnect between the original purpose of this newsletter and what has been posted recently.
I say this as a fan, not as a hater. I used to love these and save them to my Notion for later referencing...
This is one of my favorite newsletters and I read a lot. I’m a techno-optimist and serial entrepreneur who’s been in AI and emerging technology a long time.
If you think autonomous military-grade weapons are good news, Packy and Dan, you’re fucking losing it. That entire section sounds like you’re psychotic. There is no good and complete argument for building factories of machines designed to efficiently and automatically kill human beings. I’m sure those innovations will make you and some of the most wicked human beings on this planet, those who profit off fear and war, even more wealthy.
I feel like money and power is changing you. Out of all of the innovative things happening across our world this week, technology capable of wiping out entire cities of people within minutes is in the top five things to celebrate? That’s sick.
Re: flared natural gas for compute resources
This sounds like a great idea - and the economics can work - but there are major quibbles.
1) The compute resource cost is actually only on par with the infrastructure cost. In particular, you need cooling for most compute. This means air conditioning and often, water or even helium, to cool those big shiny CPU/GPUs. Generators are extremely frickin' expensive and cooling is a very expensive ongoing cost, especially if you don't have a nice heat sink like a pool of water to dump it into.
2) And then there's the social value of the compute - bitcoin mining is profitable but it is extremely hard to justify any of it as being social additive. AI to put people out of jobs? Could be an issue too.
Carbon offsets: sorry, but this entire field is almost as full of grifts as crypto. Forests? Turns out they really just sequester carbon until the next forest fire. AI LLM search up "phantom credits"...