There’s a saying I’ve heard that this reminded me of, “if you owe the bank two dollars, that’s your problem, but if you owe the bank two billion dollars, that’s the bank’s problem.” I think it’s relevant because it shows how responsibility shifts as things scale. If you owe the bank a little money then you are just a regular customer and you deal with the bank’s policies. But if you are a big player then it’s up to the bank to negotiate with you and come to mutually agreeable terms.
These companies that have many big data centers are now big players. If they are stressing the grid they will need to be part of the solution in expanding the capacity and infrastructure, either by paying more to the electric companies or by including power infrastructure in their vertical integration. Microsoft has the right idea by investing in Three Mile Island, I think other big players will do similar things.
Unlike banks, grids have an obvious solution to this problem: stop supplying these players with energy when the grid is at significant risk of a black out.
I think many people read my statement and flipped who I thought the banks vs customers are. If you owe the bank $2 billion, that’s their problem- meaning they are exposed and could fail if they don’t negotiate to cover that exposure. If an AI company needs a bunch of power and can’t compute without it, then they are exposed and need to negotiate to make sure the power companies can supply it- they are no longer regular customers.
In my thought process, an analogous statement might be, “if you ask for 10 kilowatts from the power company, that’s the power company’s problem. If you ask for 10 megawatts, that’s your problem. If you (an AI company) ask for a historic amount of power and your business fails if you don’t get it, then it’s your responsibility to ensure the grid can supply that much power.
Every problem has an ‘obvious’ solution on the surface after thinking for ten seconds.
Data centers/supercomputers/similar facilities have agreements to ensure uninterrupted power.
The grid would sooner cut off residential power than risk running foul of SLAs.
Most developing countries are very familiar with this, the technical term ‘load shedding’ having entered common parlance because of the frequency of power cuts faced by consumers.
Banks have an obvious solution as do grids. Build their reserves and infrastructure and scale to their biggest customers. A stressed scale out system just requires more scaling. It feels weird to say any other solution, especially when the customer is a paying customer.
The data center is paying the grid’s bills as well.
And that single customer is paying more than likely millions of other customers.
Notably, if the grid has a good PR/marketing department, those customers are a lot more likely (individually) to take a black out ‘for the greater good’ than the data center.
See California’s rolling blackouts, etc. in the past.
I think you might misunderstand your analogy. If you owe the bank two billion dollars it's their problem because a missing 2 billion dollars is large enough to be painful for the bank.
I think you and the original metaphor maker are still not seeing the failure of the analogy. The bank with a $2B default gets bailed out by taxpayers and the billion dollar borrower gets bailed out through bankruptcy court—also the taxpayer. The person borrowing $2 screws themselves, and the same person borrowing $2 gets to bail out the bank and billion dollar borrowers.
And the bank stands to lose far more money than the company they have lent to who will just fold.
In renewable energy it is actually common for the funding institutions to be paid a cut of the profits and to have no recourse to repossess assets. They take all the risk because they provide all the funding. The job of the actual developer is to provide a project worth funding.
In a vacuum, your bank metaphor is solid. The problem is that these energy demands don’t exist in a vacuum, nor do the consequences of consumption.
To expand upon your bank metaphor, let’s say the bank are energy utility companies, and the customer that owes $2bn is Company A. Yes, this is the bank’s problem in a vacuum because it needs to remain solvent for its other customers (provide energy) while still collecting on its owed debt (the power bill from Company A). However, the bank also has an obligation to reduce the total amount of currency that changes hands in the first place (reducing energy use) or finding more efficient ways of exchanging that currency (renewable energy). With that broader scope in mind, Company A charging $2bn in debt isn’t just a problem for the bank, but a problem for that bank’s customers, and any customers of any other banks that do business with the affected bank.
In other words, the problem isn’t merely hyperscalers and generative models gobbling up vast amounts of power or purchasing nuclear power plant capacity, it’s that we sorely needed that capacity to wind down total fossil fuel usage and to focus on efficiency of resource usage until we addressed the climate crisis. That’s where I (at least) have a beef with the current state of datacenters, hyperscalers, and generative models. So long as compute remains insanely cheap and “infinite” in scale, we lack any incentive other than financials to reduce consumption or increase efficiency. And financial incentives only work as long as the penalty is significantly more expensive than the insurance.
The best outcome for all of us is for tech companies to get into power. Tech got into telecom (dark fiber, undersea cabling) and provide free services (youtube, gmail, etc), which used to cost a lot historically. Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. We can do video conferences with upto 100 people worldwide for free.
If tech companies get into power and break down the regulatory capture of utilities, they can make money off of energy storage and virtual power plants while providing free power for people.
The geometric decreases in cost that you cite (in terms of communications and SaaS) are due primarily to Moore's Law. Unfortunately there is no similar law affecting power generation costs.
If tech companies got into power, the inevitable result would be that they embrace and extend the regulatory capture of utilities, with the explicit goal of maximizing their profit at the expense of human needs. As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on, to the extent that it serves as an impediment to this paramount goal.
Solar has its own Moore’s Law called Swanson’s Law which shows that solar has been decreasing geometrically in price.
In power generation there is little appetite for innovation from producers since they are either monopolies or government agencies. So instead all innovation has been going to local generation like solar and wind.
>As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on
As if any tech company would build anything but solar. You don't need to bend the rules here and you don't need too much storage either. You just need cheap land, a fuckton of solar to get your peaks to your base consumption and you already do 60% of energy renewable. Anything above that is battery storage and more land.
It's such a no brainer in cost and from an operations PoV the only thing that is easy enough to go into power.
I imagine they will just finance their own small nuclear reactor plants probably through power purchase agreements in whatever states which will allow them to do so. Those states will be where the new data centers and jobs go.
They're not going to build a second grid, or power plants for everyone else. That's an awful business. These companies are in good businesses. They don't want to get into an awful business.
There's so much wealth to be created given the multiplier these SMNR companies are likely to have. And the tech companies will invest in the SMNR companies they purchase power from. Some of them are already invested.
Hopefully, they'll have enough scale that whatever they need to do makes it cheaper for the grid at large.
I think this is what you are saying, but to clarify, they will not own the power infrastructure. Execs from Google and Microsoft have already said this[0]
Microsoft have already entered into an agreement with Constellation Energy which pays to restart one of the reactors at three mile island. This comes with a 20yr purchase of the power from that plant.
There aren't many usable and idle nuclear power plants sitting around. It's extremely likely, as you point out, that states will soon be competing for jobs by offering land for both data centers as well as new power plants.
The best estimates I've seen but new construction of nuclear plants at 5-7 years. If this could safely be sped up then I assume big tech is already working to make it happen.
Of note, there are already some third parties/regulators working to stop big tech from capturing large shares of existing power generation[1]
I believe Microsoft is currently doing just that, reserving the output of Three Mile Island. The article was here on HN around a week ago.
I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that, and I can see the communication of demand changes back to generation being useful to those running the plant(s).
Microsoft's commitment allows Constellation Energy to restart the 819 MW nuclear fission reactor at Three Mile Island. This reactor operated without problems for approximately 45 years and was switched off in 2019.
Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source mature enough to be widely adopted. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. Having used fission reactors for 70 years, we know how to build them and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). For example, Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100% of their capacity.
In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline.
Furthermore, even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar and wind. As a last resort, fossil fuel backup plants can be built, but building them is costly and using them is dirty. See Germany's power grid for an embarrassing real-world example.
Solar + wind + batteries is an intrinsically unreliable, unacceptable solution. Please see Yann LeCun's comments, reflecting Meta's view on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
It wasnt tech companies that "got into telecoms", it was telecoms that overbuilt infrastructure which tech companies later bought up for a song when the bubble popped.
This is a "workable strategy" only if you can find a sucker to eat the losses.
Telecom is not more affordable today than it was in 1990. Back in 1990 the private phone line we shared at home for a family of 4 primarily to support connecting to local BBSes and the internet cost $20/month, or roughly $48.65 in 2024 dollars. That $20 was enough to be able to send and receive email through Fidonet and UUCP, download software and connect to the local Freenet for internet access. Today's telecom spend is on the order of $250/month once a cell phone, landline (since there is no cell phone service here) and internet connection are all included. That's pretty much a factor of 5x increase in telecom spend required for a family of 4. Sure, we can do a lot more, but it's not cheaper when directly compared to the historic cost of telecommunications services.
I don't think tech getting into power will make things better. Just look at what is happening in Texas and other parts of the world: grid operators have to pay bitcoin miners to turn off their farms when grid capacity is overwhelmed, which drives up cost for everyone. Depending on where data centers are located, construction of new transmission lines becomes necessary. All this increases the baseline operating cost of the grid. Personally, I don't want more AI generated content or timelines powered by AI driving toxic engagement because it gets more clicks. The "improvements" we're seeing now are beyond the point of diminishing returns. Tech will abuse any externalities that exist worth exploiting, and society will end up paying for it.
Handwaving away all the additional utility seems unfair to me. These pipes are a lot fatter, more accessible than ever before, and there are many more ways to use them. Working from home, eliminating shopping trips, telehealth, video calls, online banking and bill pay, podcasts, maps, music, gaming, the list goes on and on.
If you're "cord cutting" and not paying for cable TV anymore, then you likely still come out ahead even after folding a couple of streaming services into the mix.
If all you have are 1990 expectations, then you should be able to make do with something for about $50/mo, maybe less. Either a cheap phone plan, or entry level internet and VOIP. And it'll still be leagues more useful.
That private phone line you shared could only be used by the one computer in the household, if there even was a computer, which more often than not there wasn't, and when it was online, you couldn't take phone calls, which was more of a problem than now, because it was 1990.
And we don't live in fear of our telephone bills like we used to. We don't charge long distance, by the minute, or per text. Data caps are annoying, but they're not life-changingly expensive, and hey, if you're living it up like it's 1990, you'll never get anywhere close to exceeding them anyway.
The big tech companies are already “into power” - they (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) are constantly investing in power projects close to their data centers and manufacturing hubs.
>Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free.
Not sure where you are but where I am you still have to pay for cell phone data plans and internet to the house.
Dear sirinsalot, we regret to inform you that this post is not in line with our community guidelines and as such we have temporarily suspended your power. Please speak to our AI representative if you wish to appeal this decision.
So it'd be better for these companies to not pay for their own resources? It's better to let Microsoft consume so much power that it browns out the local grid? And what, we're all suppose to just hope that the utility companies fix it for us with taxpayer bailouts and massively increased residential power bills?
I think you were too busy chugging that contrarian kool aid to spend even one moment thinking about what you're arguing for.
Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100.
For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly.
A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include.
Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.
Relative to the beginnings of the internet, your current internet bill is closer to "free" for communication than just about any other time in history. In 1996, AOL introduced their "unlimited" dialup plan. For a mere $19.95 / month, you too could browse the information super highway at a blisteringly fast 56kbps. At today's prices, that would make it $40 / month. But that was their unlimited plan. In 1995 AOL charged you $9.95 for 5 hours and the $2.50 per hour after that each month. Assuming you wanted 24/7 access like we all do these days, AOL would have cost you ~$1,800 per month, or ~$3,700 / month in today's money. Even assuming you don't want 24/7 access, the average internet user today supposedly spends 6 hours a day online[2]. Even at that rate you're still looking at ~$435 / month (or $898 / month today).
And that was just your access costs, you still needed to pay for the phone service. According to the FCC[1] you could expect to tack another $20 / month on to those costs, just for your local phone service. And all of that would have probably been enough to service one user online at a time. If you wanted multiple people in your household to be online at the same time, you at a minimum are going to want multiple phone lines, never mind the additional hourly access charges.
Are these AI companies already profitable or is it speculation that's causing them to get a ton of funding? AI is such a polarizing subject and I find it difficult to sift through all the hype and hate surrounding it.
This mostly depends on what you mean by "these AI companies".
If you're only referring to the big players creating foundation models, like OpenAI and Anthropic, it's mostly speculation of future improvements and revenue, because the amount of money they've raised pretty much requires massive returns. This is similar to how most venture capital works, e.g. Amazon was laughed at for being unprofitable for the first, what, 10 or 15 years of its life.
If you're referring to a broader set of AI companies, then most of the more "normal" AI companies have raised far less money, and are usually eyeing more clear use cases and are sometimes already generating real revenue. For them, I'd say it's not all speculation, a lot of it is productizing and monetizing this new technology that's come along, and is the obvious "low hanging fruit" that actually needs to get done.
> If you're referring to a broader set of AI companies, then most of the more "normal" AI companies have raised far less money, and are usually eyeing more clear use cases and are sometimes already generating real revenue. For them, I'd say it's not all speculation, a lot of it is productizing and monetizing this new technology that's come along, and is the obvious "low hanging fruit" that actually needs to get done.
Most other noticeable(drummed up in news media and various other prominent online media) are mostly wrappers around big players' APIs, more commonly OAI. I have seen some using Mistral(mostly nerds), but if I were to say that if OAI sank, a broader set of AI SME will sink with it, because they are symbiotic.
There are some covert "old fashioned" AI companies I know of, who are still stuck at previous era CV(majority) suddenly gained a lot of interest(+funding), but they are more well positioned to continue revenue generation compared to the more hyped smaller ones.
But what was the cost of producing that revenue? At what point do they expect to break even on their investment?
I can very quickly generate a lot of revenue if my investors will let me buy eggs at $0.50 each and resell them for $0.05, but I don't think I'd get any bites unless I could explain how that enterprise will eventually turn a profit.
Off topic, if 'Three New York Cities' has the dimensions of power, and 'Three Mississippi' has the dimensions of time, we've got a starting point for a new system of units...
Wyoming being a near-square state, a Root Wyoming would be the unit of length, and a California a unit of temperature, calibrated to the Death Valley record.
one would think the human race would prioritize solutions like clean, renewable energy, food production, not USING energy to solve "AI problems" like summarizing my email, and putting Sly and Arnold in YouTube video remixes
Yeah, it's quite sad. It's perplexing how the hype is being maintained at the moment. JP Morgan and Goldman both released reports more or less claiming AI is a deadend until we make some technological or supply chain breakthroughs. This is before we mention that OpenAI (and probably other AI projects/companies) seems to be operating at a significant loss with no foreseeable reprieve.
Yet here we are, pouring money, resources, expertise, and people hours into an endless pit of hopes and possibilities of a possibility.
for real, I wonder what this level (collective human time spent on AI) of effort could accomplish if focused on trying to build self-sufficient city scale indoor farming in the wealthier parts of the Middle East (ie somewhere where energy and water need to be figured out at scale), figure out how to make them more efficient, and then use that tech to build those indoor farms in developing countries.
... I already can sense somebody typing "but AI will help us design those better!!!1!!"
If we just sacrifice, 5 more New York’s worth of power, and the intellectual output of a generation, we will _totes_ get an AI that will finally tell us how to solve global warming!!!!!! (In a way that doesn’t hurt my feelings/money-machine like “use less fossil fuels” and “stop emitting carbon”) /s
And it will go from 9% to 90% over the century. Big tech companies might as well avoid the middleman and evolve into the power generation business, although it's not hard with an open design of a solar farm in the desert.
Not true. You need a worldwide transmission network that supplies electricity to wherever it is needed. Solar power is available 24x7 on the planet. Long-distance DC transmission technologies have evolved.
Giant buildings in the desert with solar cells on top. No need for distribution lines. How many people are actually necessary to staff one once it is up and running? Bury the building with the desert soil for insulation.
I think you massively overestimate the generation capacity of a PV cell. If you cover all the surface area of a datacenter with PV cells, it will generate a small fraction of the power required.
Your idea could perhaps work only in space, a bit closer to the sun, operating at peak power generation 24x7. On the ground it takes a lot more area in panels than is used by a datacenter.
Crypto currency promised to overthrow the bankers, so they are bad and their energy waste is also bad for environment.
AI intends to overthrow expensive people(costs) and make the bankers as well as investors plenty money. Climate change can wait, once AGI is achieved, it'll figure out how to solve all the climate issues and all will be well.
That being said, AI here is no different from crypto, only diff. is, AI has immense backing and lobbying. Even our EU climate friendly overlords are parroting that AI will improve everything and more adaptation of AI is needed in all businesses and investment must be injected into anything that has AI. So, all is well in the end.
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These companies that have many big data centers are now big players. If they are stressing the grid they will need to be part of the solution in expanding the capacity and infrastructure, either by paying more to the electric companies or by including power infrastructure in their vertical integration. Microsoft has the right idea by investing in Three Mile Island, I think other big players will do similar things.
In my thought process, an analogous statement might be, “if you ask for 10 kilowatts from the power company, that’s the power company’s problem. If you ask for 10 megawatts, that’s your problem. If you (an AI company) ask for a historic amount of power and your business fails if you don’t get it, then it’s your responsibility to ensure the grid can supply that much power.
Data centers/supercomputers/similar facilities have agreements to ensure uninterrupted power.
The grid would sooner cut off residential power than risk running foul of SLAs.
Most developing countries are very familiar with this, the technical term ‘load shedding’ having entered common parlance because of the frequency of power cuts faced by consumers.
And that single customer is paying more than likely millions of other customers.
Notably, if the grid has a good PR/marketing department, those customers are a lot more likely (individually) to take a black out ‘for the greater good’ than the data center.
See California’s rolling blackouts, etc. in the past.
While your suggestion is the morally correct thing to do, you’re forgetting the other option makes more money and will always be taken.
Deleted Comment
In renewable energy it is actually common for the funding institutions to be paid a cut of the profits and to have no recourse to repossess assets. They take all the risk because they provide all the funding. The job of the actual developer is to provide a project worth funding.
To expand upon your bank metaphor, let’s say the bank are energy utility companies, and the customer that owes $2bn is Company A. Yes, this is the bank’s problem in a vacuum because it needs to remain solvent for its other customers (provide energy) while still collecting on its owed debt (the power bill from Company A). However, the bank also has an obligation to reduce the total amount of currency that changes hands in the first place (reducing energy use) or finding more efficient ways of exchanging that currency (renewable energy). With that broader scope in mind, Company A charging $2bn in debt isn’t just a problem for the bank, but a problem for that bank’s customers, and any customers of any other banks that do business with the affected bank.
In other words, the problem isn’t merely hyperscalers and generative models gobbling up vast amounts of power or purchasing nuclear power plant capacity, it’s that we sorely needed that capacity to wind down total fossil fuel usage and to focus on efficiency of resource usage until we addressed the climate crisis. That’s where I (at least) have a beef with the current state of datacenters, hyperscalers, and generative models. So long as compute remains insanely cheap and “infinite” in scale, we lack any incentive other than financials to reduce consumption or increase efficiency. And financial incentives only work as long as the penalty is significantly more expensive than the insurance.
If tech companies get into power and break down the regulatory capture of utilities, they can make money off of energy storage and virtual power plants while providing free power for people.
If tech companies got into power, the inevitable result would be that they embrace and extend the regulatory capture of utilities, with the explicit goal of maximizing their profit at the expense of human needs. As well as of course the evisceration of as much pesky environmental regulation as their lobbyists can get their hands on, to the extent that it serves as an impediment to this paramount goal.
Their philosophical stance on these concerns and tradeoffs has already been made palpably clear, in any case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552642
From everything we know so far, these people definitely will not do the right thing without the swift and exacting application of a very heavy stick.
In power generation there is little appetite for innovation from producers since they are either monopolies or government agencies. So instead all innovation has been going to local generation like solar and wind.
As if any tech company would build anything but solar. You don't need to bend the rules here and you don't need too much storage either. You just need cheap land, a fuckton of solar to get your peaks to your base consumption and you already do 60% of energy renewable. Anything above that is battery storage and more land.
It's such a no brainer in cost and from an operations PoV the only thing that is easy enough to go into power.
They're not going to build a second grid, or power plants for everyone else. That's an awful business. These companies are in good businesses. They don't want to get into an awful business.
There's so much wealth to be created given the multiplier these SMNR companies are likely to have. And the tech companies will invest in the SMNR companies they purchase power from. Some of them are already invested.
Hopefully, they'll have enough scale that whatever they need to do makes it cheaper for the grid at large.
Microsoft have already entered into an agreement with Constellation Energy which pays to restart one of the reactors at three mile island. This comes with a 20yr purchase of the power from that plant.
There aren't many usable and idle nuclear power plants sitting around. It's extremely likely, as you point out, that states will soon be competing for jobs by offering land for both data centers as well as new power plants.
The best estimates I've seen but new construction of nuclear plants at 5-7 years. If this could safely be sped up then I assume big tech is already working to make it happen.
Of note, there are already some third parties/regulators working to stop big tech from capturing large shares of existing power generation[1]
[0] https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power
Deleted Comment
I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that, and I can see the communication of demand changes back to generation being useful to those running the plant(s).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443
Microsoft's commitment allows Constellation Energy to restart the 819 MW nuclear fission reactor at Three Mile Island. This reactor operated without problems for approximately 45 years and was switched off in 2019.
The other reactor at Three Mile Island (880 MW) melted harmlessly in 1979 due to operator error. That reactor will never be restarted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Clean baseload power is extremely valuable.
Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source mature enough to be widely adopted. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. Having used fission reactors for 70 years, we know how to build them and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). For example, Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100% of their capacity.
In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline.
Furthermore, even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar and wind. As a last resort, fossil fuel backup plants can be built, but building them is costly and using them is dirty. See Germany's power grid for an embarrassing real-world example.
Solar + wind + batteries is an intrinsically unreliable, unacceptable solution. Please see Yann LeCun's comments, reflecting Meta's view on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
This is a "workable strategy" only if you can find a sucker to eat the losses.
I don't think tech getting into power will make things better. Just look at what is happening in Texas and other parts of the world: grid operators have to pay bitcoin miners to turn off their farms when grid capacity is overwhelmed, which drives up cost for everyone. Depending on where data centers are located, construction of new transmission lines becomes necessary. All this increases the baseline operating cost of the grid. Personally, I don't want more AI generated content or timelines powered by AI driving toxic engagement because it gets more clicks. The "improvements" we're seeing now are beyond the point of diminishing returns. Tech will abuse any externalities that exist worth exploiting, and society will end up paying for it.
If you're "cord cutting" and not paying for cable TV anymore, then you likely still come out ahead even after folding a couple of streaming services into the mix.
If all you have are 1990 expectations, then you should be able to make do with something for about $50/mo, maybe less. Either a cheap phone plan, or entry level internet and VOIP. And it'll still be leagues more useful.
That private phone line you shared could only be used by the one computer in the household, if there even was a computer, which more often than not there wasn't, and when it was online, you couldn't take phone calls, which was more of a problem than now, because it was 1990.
And we don't live in fear of our telephone bills like we used to. We don't charge long distance, by the minute, or per text. Data caps are annoying, but they're not life-changingly expensive, and hey, if you're living it up like it's 1990, you'll never get anywhere close to exceeding them anyway.
Not sure where you are but where I am you still have to pay for cell phone data plans and internet to the house.
Wow. Really chugging the coolade.
I think you were too busy chugging that contrarian kool aid to spend even one moment thinking about what you're arguing for.
Tech companies and their cults are perfectly represented by the South Park episode about Priuses
Dead Comment
Edit: OP's comment is almost nonsensical I feel it might be AI. "Traditionally youtube would cost hundreds of dollars"??
For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly.
A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include.
Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.
And that was just your access costs, you still needed to pay for the phone service. According to the FCC[1] you could expect to tack another $20 / month on to those costs, just for your local phone service. And all of that would have probably been enough to service one user online at a time. If you wanted multiple people in your household to be online at the same time, you at a minimum are going to want multiple phone lines, never mind the additional hourly access charges.
[1]: https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/vpn/screen-time-statis...
If you're only referring to the big players creating foundation models, like OpenAI and Anthropic, it's mostly speculation of future improvements and revenue, because the amount of money they've raised pretty much requires massive returns. This is similar to how most venture capital works, e.g. Amazon was laughed at for being unprofitable for the first, what, 10 or 15 years of its life.
If you're referring to a broader set of AI companies, then most of the more "normal" AI companies have raised far less money, and are usually eyeing more clear use cases and are sometimes already generating real revenue. For them, I'd say it's not all speculation, a lot of it is productizing and monetizing this new technology that's come along, and is the obvious "low hanging fruit" that actually needs to get done.
Most other noticeable(drummed up in news media and various other prominent online media) are mostly wrappers around big players' APIs, more commonly OAI. I have seen some using Mistral(mostly nerds), but if I were to say that if OAI sank, a broader set of AI SME will sink with it, because they are symbiotic.
There are some covert "old fashioned" AI companies I know of, who are still stuck at previous era CV(majority) suddenly gained a lot of interest(+funding), but they are more well positioned to continue revenue generation compared to the more hyped smaller ones.
So they are currently printing 1 dollar bills at a cost of $2.35 each.
I can very quickly generate a lot of revenue if my investors will let me buy eggs at $0.50 each and resell them for $0.05, but I don't think I'd get any bites unless I could explain how that enterprise will eventually turn a profit.
Yet here we are, pouring money, resources, expertise, and people hours into an endless pit of hopes and possibilities of a possibility.
... I already can sense somebody typing "but AI will help us design those better!!!1!!"
If we just sacrifice, 5 more New York’s worth of power, and the intellectual output of a generation, we will _totes_ get an AI that will finally tell us how to solve global warming!!!!!! (In a way that doesn’t hurt my feelings/money-machine like “use less fossil fuels” and “stop emitting carbon”) /s
You need nuclear reactors or other base line power generation energy sources.
Any day, now.
But AI fans will shrug and say “this has always been happening, AI is nothing new”. The usual refrain.
Also, AI is way more useful than blockchain etc etc.
AI intends to overthrow expensive people(costs) and make the bankers as well as investors plenty money. Climate change can wait, once AGI is achieved, it'll figure out how to solve all the climate issues and all will be well.
That being said, AI here is no different from crypto, only diff. is, AI has immense backing and lobbying. Even our EU climate friendly overlords are parroting that AI will improve everything and more adaptation of AI is needed in all businesses and investment must be injected into anything that has AI. So, all is well in the end.