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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”

I also find this whole "its so good, its scary" flex a little less impressive when you consider they access to millions of GPUs?

The AI buildout has been one of, if not the largest, focussed capital investment in history. The 2 big AI labs are the final customer for something like 20-33% of all datacenter compute in the pipeline.. up to 70% when you look at hyperscaler "AI revenue" from the big 3.

I don't think any single entity has had remotely this much compute available in history.

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Yeah, the compute is definitively another way to make them slow down, just cap the amount of TFLOPS available and things will slow down.

Obviously this will have huge impact on some companies valuations, but you can have one's cake and eat it too.

IIUC it's an open question whether they have the electricity to actually run all the "compute" they own on paper.

That aside, I'm not sure why it's particularly interesting they have all this "compute" (let's just assume for the sake of argument it's all "live"--that is they can actually run workloads on all of the "compute" they have on paper). So what if it's the biggest amount ever? Why would that be meaningful? Is there some economically viable problem you're aware of that is somehow dominant in that way?

Well yes, we used to talk about "supercomputers" in the hands of state actors for cracking into enemy systems and places like science labs for working on big hard problems of DNA, the universe, and the like.

So I think part of what is going on now is not just the method (LLMs) but the means (supercomputer levels of compute) at unprecedented scale of concentration.

This is a good point.

However, if I put my sci-fi hat on for a second, it's not so far fetched that we figure out a way to compress models to a size where it wouldn't need all that compute.

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