Comment by dofm
3 days ago
> Why would Anthropic pay through the nose and make such desperate moves for compute?
That's pretty consistent with them having not been able to get the physical data centre capacity they have supposedly had built actually online, I think?
More to the point, Anthropic appears to mostly be capable of serving its customers, doesn't it? It's not so resource-starved that people aren't able to use it at all.
So what does it tell you that only 300 megawatts was enough to make a very meaningful difference to that?
If Anthropic's fortunes can be meaningfully changed by only 300MW which allowed them to uncap their customers, what is the case — even including OpenAI and Google -- for the demand for the 23GW of unbuilt AI data centre build commitments out there?
Satya Nadella himself said there will be some oversupply.
What if there is actually lots of oversupply?
My instinct is that the internet/software/IT industry sees its own demand for Anthropic and OpenAI and is misleading itself into thinking that this is representative of customer demand in the rest of the industry, let alone others, when what possible other human industry tasks are there that match the compute demands of writing software?
Another way to look at it: if the general demand for AI compute is so insatiable, how in this world of existing insatiable demand did xAI have spare capacity to lease? Why does Meta have spare capacity to lease?
The issue here is very evidently one of allocation. But allocation tends to get solved over time. That could leave quite a lot of very big data centres relatively empty.
If you get a little into grounded scifi the buildout seems more realistic. Robotics are making great strides while this buildout is happening. Imagine the implications of a human shaped robot? Now it isn't just knowledge work but literally every job on earth that is on the table. Now you can't get enough of that compute as you chew through obsoleting 8 billion humans from their current levels of participation in the economy.
> Imagine the implications of a human shaped robot?
Now imagine an army of those that can't function without access to a couple of cloud providers.
That simply won't happen. It's a massive vulnerability both in terms of downtime and poisoning, and it's a problem in terms of latency.
Serious robotic compute will be much, much closer to the robot. If not we're all screwed.
Open alternatives / routers stand ready to serve routed requests.
That’s why Altman is burning the excess on those research projects.
Your take is spot on. Inb4 boosters like echelon come in.
Oversupply is always going to happen- humanity over invests. When has it ever underinvested? Lmao.
It underinvests in quality politicians.
I mean I do think there’s some likely extra demand, though I think it’s likely some demand will fall away from data centres to the desktop.
(And what you imply is also true, isn’t it - OpenRouter and equivalents will address this demand while also resolving some underlying underutilisation)
But the claims of awful shortages feel wrong when there’s little evidence of radical undersupply for the two big firms who are offering heavily subsidised plans.
It all seems pinned on the idea that some compute-guzzling application users clearly don’t have right now will emerge.