Comment by forty
1 day ago
What if we run out of GPU? Out of RAM? Out of electricity?
AWS is already raising GPU prices, that never happened before. What if there is war in Taiwan? What if we want to get serious about climate change and start saving energy for vital things ?
My guess is that, while they can do some cool stuff, we cannot afford LLMs in the long run.
> What if we run out of GPU?
These are not finite resources being mined from an ancient alien temple.
We can make new ones, better ones, and the main ingredients are sand and plastic. We're not going to run out of either any time soon.
Electricity constraints are a big problem in the near-term, but may sort themselves out in the long-term.
> main ingredients are sand and plastic
kinda ridiculous point, we're not running into gpu shortages because we don't have enough sand
We already had a sand shortage. In 2019...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
Even funnier, there are legitimate shortages of usable sand.
That’s my point: the key inputs are not materials but the high tech machinery and the skills to operate them.
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If the US is ready to start a war against Europe to invade Groenland, it's certainly because they need more sand and plastic? Of course in weight it's probably mostly sand and plastic but the interesting bit probably needs palladium, copper, boron, cobalt, tungsten, etc
Well, also for military purposes.
And general imperialism.
Greenland is Trump’s Ukraine. He’s jealous of Putin, that is all.
There is nothing in Greenland worth breaking up the alliances with Europe over.
Trump is too stupid to realise this, he just wants land like it’s a Civ game.
PS: An entire rack of the most expensive NVIDA equipment millions of dollars can buy has maybe a few grams of precious or rare metals in it. The cost of those is a maybe a dollar or two. They don’t even use gold any more!
The expensive part is making it, not the raw ingredients.
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