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Comment by henry2023 | Hacker News Reader

henry2023

The US is bound by energy and China is bound by compute power. The one who solves its limitation first will end this “Scarcity Era”.

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China is installing something like 500 GW of wind and solar per year now. Even if they're only able to build and otherwise access chips that have half the SoTA performance per watt, they will win.

Performance per dollar may be more important than performance per watt here, though

A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost, while watts are constrained by the laws of physics, photons/electrons, supply chain of electricity and all that fun stuff in the real world.

> A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost

It’s still a useful proxy for resources allocation and viability.

..unless you're actually reasoning at nation-scale where OP's points apply

I wouldn’t agree. Even at national scale, these projects cost resources. And the resources of all agents (org, countries) are constrained.

While we could reason in "performance / watt" and "performance / people", "performance / whatever other resource involved", and "performance / opportunity cost of allocating these resources to this use case and not another", "performance / whatever unit of stable-ish currency" is a convenient and often "good enough" approximation that somewhat encapsulates them all.

A simplification, like any model, but still useful.

A dollar is still a useful unit as "the fraction of the economy that can be controlled by currency". It's true that printing a huge pile of it and throwing it at GPUs wouldn't instantly convert into more GPUs, but it would meaningfully represent that other things are being squeezed out to allocate more resources to GPU production even so. That such reallocation is inefficient, arguably immoral, and highly questionable in the long term versus other options wouldn't stop that from being ture.

>dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost

If the abstraction works better for you this way, call them interchangeable units of American and Chinese insolvency. Or incremental forfeiture of domestic ownership.

Win what exactly?

China's domestic chips are increasingly close to state-of-the-art. The US electrical grid is... not.

US energy is constrained by the utility monopolies/oligopolies which have to extract more rents, specifically by increasing costs. Their profit is a percentage of cost, these perverse incentives + oligopolies will make it increasingly expensive to make anything (including AI) in US.

Or simply by the fact that increasing production takes time? Any power plant takes years to build?

Years, is like a lifetime for AI at this point...

> increasing production takes time?

This is true of nearly everything (except money). I'm not sure of the point you are trying to make.

The timelines on adding power generation are not at all compatible with the demand uptick AI is generating.

You can have all the money you want, if you want a gW of power added tomorrow, it won't happen.

Not solar. China and to a lesser extent India are pumping out huge solar farms in months.

Sure but they're not adding the battery equivalent needed for 24/7 operation. So if the demand can be when the sun shines, this will work, otherwise it won't

The dynamics vastly favor China, part of the reason the US sprinting towards "ASI" isn't totally boneheaded is that the US and its industry needs a hail mary play to "win" the game, if they play it safe they lose for sure.

I'd be fine with a world without AI, honestly. Nobody really wins this race except the very wealthy. And I don't think it's really going to play out the way the wealthy think it will. It's more like a dog catching a car than it is a race.

> It's more like a dog catching a car than it is a race.

What does this mean? I didn't understand the analogy.

A car caught by a dog has no purpose. The activity concludes with no output.

"The dog that caught the car" refers to how dogs sometimes chase cars. Suppose the car stops and the dog catches up - what is it going to do? It has no plan, it has no purpose, it isn't going to bite the car, it isn't going to get anything out of catching the car. The car may even run it over. I intended it basically as "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", or "be careful what you wish for".

My observation is that the dog sniffs all the tires, picks one tire, lifts one leg and does the deed. I don't know if its a way of marking territory or domination. We need a dogatologist to explain what it means.

That was quite the unexpected anticlimactic ending. I’m sure Terry Pratchett would be proud.

We did it reddit!

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