Comment by DoctorOetker
3 hours ago
it is instructive to calculate the size and requirements for a system that can pretrain a 405B parameter transformer in ~ 17 days.
a different question is the expected payback time, unless someone can demonstrate a reasonable calculation that shows a sufficiently short payback period, if no one here can we still can't exclude big tech seeing something we don't have access to (the launch costs charged to third parties may be different than the launch costs charged for themselves for example).
suppose the payback time is in fact sufficiently short or commercial life sufficiently long to make sense, then the scale didn't really matter, it just means sending up the system described above repeatedly.
I mean yeah if you consider the "scale" to not be a problem there are no problems indeed. I argue that the scale actually is the biggest problem here... which is the case with most of our issues (energy, pollution, cooling, heating, &c.)
The real question is not scale, but if it makes financial sense, I don't have sufficient insight into the answer to that question.
Either it does or it doesn't make financial sense, and if it does the scale isn't the issue (well until we run into material shortages building Elon's Dyson sphere, hah).