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Comment by dumberquestions | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the technical aspect is true, performance has been growing fairly consistently, but the financial aspect, or more accurately the logistical aspect, is plausible; with competition as fierce as it currently is, for how long can they keep growing at the same pace? People can't afford RAM anymore and datacenter build outs aren't particularly popular, OAI has been doubling compute capacity every 7 months for the past 3 years, it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long, something has to give.

And this is not to say that the tech isn't revolutionary or the demand isn't there, it's simply just currently too competitive, and to avoid getting into anti trust trouble they need to involve the government.

Note this being a plausible doesn't necessarily make it true, for all I know they could have witnessed some safety incident and decided they need a pause, or maybe it's both reasons.

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I just find it strange how multiple people throw completely different arguments just to land on same conclusion.

Your argument seems to mix a few arguments like: OpenAI has so much demand and it has made so much compute that it is a bad thing (?!). It can't go on (why?) hence the capabilities are stalling (how?).

Then you also say that it is too competitive which is a totally different argument to compute.

So in this thread we have multiple vectors of arguments like

- high competition

- high demand for compute (not sure how this hurts OpenAI but whatever)

- capability has stalled

I never mentioned capability stalling, my point is that if you extrapolate the same rate of growth just a few years into the future, you quickly reach logistical impracticality, I don't think It's hard to deduce that AI compute can't keep doubling every 6 months for long.

The other part is that this is happening because the foundational model business is both extremely successful and competitive, if it wasn't as successful the market demand would've been saturated by now, and if it wasn't as competitive a single monopoly could've paced things more reasonably from the beginning.

They have so much demand because they are giving so much away for free.

I used 76 million sol tokens on Saturday, I have 45% still left on the week and I still have two full resets to use before October. For $20.

I used $61 dollars in Fable 5.1 credits too this weekend because I have to use that up this week. I paid nothing for those besides my $20 a month subscription.

How much would I pay at the actual API price? Nothing. Zero. My demand would drop to zero because I would just use the cheaper alternatives.

If a doughnut shop is giving away free doughnuts 24/7 my demand for doughnuts is going to go way up too. Through the roof actually because I know a doughnut shop can't give away doughnuts forever. Giving away free fancy doughnuts is not a sustainable business model.

"it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long"

I mean, my uneducated guess is that it's probably within the laws of physics for us to have at least 100x as much compute in the world as there is now. There would be a lot of engineering challenges, but I think it's physically possible. If so, OAI could double for at least a few more years.

At the current rate of 3.4x per year in the US, you get 100x the current capacity in just 3 more years and 9 months, that's not physically impossible yet, but just looking at the impact today makes it hard to imagine the impact 100x would have, and I find it very plausible for top labs to prefer making some sort of truce instead of keeping up this pace.

I can't speak for every country, but I feel the irresistible force of datacentre construction will eventually get mired in the the immovable objects of British NIMBYism and high electricity prices.

I've seen more local opposition to datacentres than anything else, and the fact we have discretionary planning (which can't be abolished for political reasons, despite it amounting to putting economic sanctions on ourselves) means there's a lot of stakeholder vetos in the system.

Well, that's fine. The great thing about them is you can build them anywhere in the world and people can just access them over the internet.

It probably does make sense to build them close to the natural gas wells or other sources of power anyways.

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