Comment by simianwords
3 days ago
On HN there are a lot of people who truly believe that this whole thing is hype and the bubble will burst and things will go back to how it was before.
The real answer to “how many data centers do we need” is hard. Anyone giving confident answers to this should be suspicious.
The easy type of answer you get from those kind of people will always be “we are building too much”. They’d have said that 3 years back and have no shame in admitting it.
The thing is, you can overestimate or underestimate. Both have cons. The people sincerely believing this is all hype will always underestimate because all their epistemic muscle haven’t been used.
To be charitable to your hypothetical HN naysayers, isn't the question more like "how many more data centers do we need right now?" as well as "why is the answer a shitton for all these guys?". It doesn't really feel like this is a debate about speculation or the quantitative "too much" of it, but more of the "why at all?"
It just seems like the AI guys could easily win this debate if they could just articulate the why of it beyond just the near-parodic "everything will be AI in the future!". Like why not be a positive articulator and defender of what the extreme influx of datacenters will bring to the people? Don't you think that would be at least a stronger argument to make here? Why police the ideology or scare people with your position when you could, I don't know, win their hearts and minds?
Isn't that why you (presumably) like AI? Because it brings good things to people?
The people who say it is a bubble say "Once it pops, we will get major recession and everyone will suffer. We are already im fascist -autoritarian phase and economic hardship will make it worst."
> They’d have said that 3 years back and have no shame in admitting it.
3 years back, we had strong push for absolutely unprepared AI into areas where it sux. All the while onslaught of lies about its capabilities and hype.
In the meantime we had "artists are all obsolete suckers hahaha" and "humans are obsolete" and "AI will raise your kids so that you dont have to interact with them".
And we had "we the AI company will destroy us" as if it was a good thing.