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Comment by pianopatrick | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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