Comment by stephc_int13

Not nearly as badly if you keep them cool.

> changing 2027 to 2030 doesn't make the math much better

Could you show me?

Early turbines didn't last that long. Even modern ones are only rated for a few decades.

Yeah - I think that the extremely fast depreciation just due to wear and use on GPUs is pretty unappreciated right now. So you've spent 300 mil on a brand new data center - congrats - you'll need to pay off that loan and somehow raise another 100 mil to actually maintain that capacity for three years based on chip replacement alone.

There is an absolute glut of cheap compute available right now due to VC and other funds dumping into the industry (take advantage of it while it exists!) but I'm pretty sure Wall St. will balk when they realize the continued costs of maintaining that compute and look at the revenue that expenditure is generating. People think of chips as a piece of infrastructure - you buy a personal computer and it'll keep chugging for a decade without issue in most case - but GPUs are essentially consumables - they're an input to producing the compute a data center sells that needs constant restocking - rather than a one-time investment.

Do we actually know how they're degrading? Are there still Pascals out there? If not, is it because they actual broke or because of poor performance? I understand it's tempting to say near 100% workload for multiple years = fast degradation, but what are the actual stats? Are you talking specifically about the actual compute chip or the whole compute system -- I know there's a big difference now with the systems Nvidia is selling. How long do typical Intel/AMD CPU server chips last? My impression is a long time.

If we're talking about the whole compute system like a gb200, is there a particular component that breaks first? How hard are they to refurbish, if that particular component breaks? I'm guessing they didn't have repairability in mind, but I also know these "chips" are much more than chips now so there's probably some modularity if it's not the chip itself failing.

I'm not sure.

Number of cycles that goes through silicon matters, but what matters most really are temperature and electrical shocks.

If the GPUs are stable, at low temperature they can be at full load for years. There are servers out there up from decades and decades.

> That which survived, at least. A whole lot of rail infrastructure was not viable and soon became waste of its own. There was, at one time, ten rail lines around my parts, operated by six different railway companies. Only one of them remains fully intact to this day. One other line retained a short section that is still standing, which is now being used for car storage, but was mostly dismantled. The rest are completely gone.

How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable? If they lasted (say) 50 years instead of 100, because that much rail capacity was (say) obsoleted by the advent of cars and trucks, that's still pretty good.

If 1/10 investment lasts 100 years that seems pretty good to me. Plus I'd bet a lot of the 9/10 of that investment had a lot of the material cost re-coup'd when scrapping the steel. I don't think you're going to recoup a lot of money from the H100s.

Yeah, I can rent an A100 server for roughly the same price as what the electricity would cost me.

At the rate they are throwing obstacles at the promised subway which they got rid of the 3rd Ave El for maybe his/her grandkids will finish the trip.

The track bed, rails, and ties will have been replaced many times by now. But the really expensive work was clearing the right of way and the associated bridges, tunnels, etc.

last month HN was talking about a win95 with floppy drivers handling rail in Germany no less

Agreed - I don’t think they are particularly brilliant as a category. Hereditary kleptocracy has limits.

But… I don’t think there’s an example in modern history of the this much capital moving around based on whim.

The “bet on red” mentality has produced some odd leaders with absolute authority in their domain. One of the most influential figures on the US government claims to believe that he is saving society from the antichrist. Another thinks he’s the protagonist in a sci-fi novel.

We have the madness of monarchy with modern weapons and power. Yikes.

I rejoined an previous employer of mine, someone everyone here knows ... and I found that half their networking equipment is still being maintained by code I wrote in 2012-2014. It has not been rewritten. Hell, I rewrote a few parts that badly needed it despite joining another part of the company.

Google was founded in 1998 and IPOed in 2004. If OpenAI was feeling confident they'd find ways to set up a company and IPO, 9 years after founding. It's all mostly fictional money at this point.

[dead]

>I don't see why these companies can't just stop training at some point.

Because training isn't just about making brand new models with better capabilities, it's also about updating old models to stay current with new information. Even the most sophisticated present-day model with a knowledge cutoff date of 2025 would be severely crippled by 2027 and utterly useless by 2030.

Unless there is some breakthrough that lets existing models cheaply incrementally update their weights to add new information, I don't see any way around this.

They aren't. They are obsequious. This is much worse than it seems at first glance, and you can tell it is a big deal because a lot of effort going into training the new models is to mitigate it.

Not necessarily? That assumes that the first "good enough" model is a defensible moat - i.e., the first ones to get there becomes the sole purveyors of the Good AI.

In practice that hasn't borne out. You can download and run open weight models now that are spitting distance to state-of-the-art, and open weight models are at best a few months behind the proprietary stuff.

And even within the realm of proprietary models no player can maintain a lead. Any advances are rapidly matched by the other players.

More likely at some point the AI becomes "good enough"... and every single player will also get a "good enough" AI shortly thereafter. There doesn't seem like there's a scenario where any player can afford to stop setting cash on fire and start making money.

Do you mean pre-profit/without ever making a profit? I found an article about their IPO:

> Pets.com lost $42.4 million during the fourth quarter last year on $5.2 million in sales. Since the company's inception in February of last year, it has lost $61.8 million on $5.8 million in sales.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pets-com-raises-82-5...

They had sales, they were just making a massive loss. Isn’t that pretty similar to AI companies, just on a way smaller scale?

We haven’t seen AI IPOs yet, but it’s not hard to imagine one of them going public before making profit IMO.

What you're missing is how that value comes about. People seem to think it's an infinite fountain but it's more like strip mining the commons.

We also know that AI hype is holding up most of the stock market this point, including the ticker symbols which you don't think of as being for "AI companies". Market optimism at large is coming from the idea that companies won't need employees soon, or that they can keep using AI to de-leverage and de-skill their workforce

They're not claiming that it's like the dot com boom because no one is actually making money. They're claiming that this is more like the dot com boom than the housing bubble, which I think is true. The dot com crash didn't cause Jane-on-the-street to lose her house while she worked a factory job, though the housing crisis did have those kinds of consumer-affecting outcomes.

1. Claude Code is claimed to have hit €500m ARR in 3 months.

2. What is the Claude Code profit for the same period?

3. What is the Claude Code profit per request served when excluding fixed expenses such as training the models?

You have a good point. Pets.com would have fared much better if investors gave them several billion dollars in 1998, 1999 and then again in 2000

By the time it catches up with them they will have IPO’d and dumped their problem onto the public market. The administration will probably get a golden share and they will get a bail out in an effort to soften the landing for their campaign donors that also have huge positions. All the rich people will be made whole and the US tax payer will pay the price of the bail out.

And Microsoft or whoever will absorb the remains of their technology.

Sell to Microsoft and be absorbed there (and Anthropic to Amazon).

> but what will OpenAI do?

Will get acquired at “Store Closing” price!!