jsnell

Local officials granting tax breaks to data centers are just total morons. There is no polite way to say it. They have these companies over the barrel, any negotiation should be about how much extra money the data center shovels directly to the locals to make them enthusiastic about the DC, not about tax concessions.

But amazingly, they might not be the biggest morons of the story. This data center will make Google billions in profit per year. What beancounter is choosing to jeopardize that for avoiding $3M/year in taxes? How out of touch do you have to be to be to make that call, and why does that person still have a job?

No. If models become better, the natural expectation is for hardware to get more valuable, not less. (The hardware that was previously able to achieve X can now do 2X. Why would that make the hardware worth less?)

Likewise if models become commoditized, it's raising the value of the existing hardware (you'd expect the hardware owner to keep a bigger slice of the surplus when that's the scarce component).

For model improvements to be bad for the value of hardware, what you'd need is for demand for intelligence to be inelastic. But everything we've seen so far suggests that is not the case: the demand for intelligence (whether human or artificial) is highly elastic both in price and in quality.

The growth doesn't need to be from Search. Even with the current level of search growth, Google's total revenue is up 25% year on year, operating income is up 30% year on year.

That is not actually a typical playbook. Normal businesses do not want to be regulated, and will fight it tooth and nail. So regulation happens when bad things happen, the public wants change, and the businesses can't fight it or set favorable terms. (At most they can minimize the badness of the terms). Regulatory capture happens much later, and slowly. It's not where you start at.

FT clearly didn't do their due diligence, since the auxiliary information provided with the $70B leak (about e.g. growth rates and enterprise sales) made it clear that the number could not possibly be correct.

It just wasn't clear exactly what the error was (e.g. was a projection of a $70B ARR by end of year being misinterpreted as $70B ARR now -- that would have been stupid, but less stupid than the "investors added a fudge factor to the numbers" story that they're now going with).

If that were the case, the hyperscalers would be ramping down capex, not increasing it.

The not-in-service numbers on the financials are just the normal lag, and have been stable in proportion to capex for years, to well before the start of the boom.

We do in fact know:

> The chips in the proposed deal were bought or leased by Amazon. They are installed in more than a dozen US data centres across five states, including Nevada and Virginia, the report said.

The "warehouses full of GPUs" thing might be the most absurd of the AI economy conspiracy theories.

Your analogy make zero sense. Atom bomb manufacturers do not market their products.

Big businesses really do not like to talk about their products being harmful or dangerous, and there is ample evidence to that. Danger only sells in artisanal quantities to niche audiences.

Yes, famously tobacco companies wanted to advertise their products as addictive and deadly. That's why they funded and heavily publicized research to that effect.

Climate change is just a scam by the fossil fuel industry to hype up their market cap. Look at the power of co2, and the damage it can do without even trying.

Medicines being pulled during trials or after public availability for side effects are just Big Pharma making their products more desirable via scarcity.

Boeing did really well out of the 737 max. Airlines were just lining up to buy an airplane that could give the passengers an experience they would remember for the rest of their life. That's why they absolutely made clear that it was their product that was dangerous, rather than blaming operator error.

No. They tasked them with answering questions by retrieving data from public sources. This obviously requires internet access. So the incredulity about "how could they fail to block internet access" is just inane. That was the task.

They did not task the agents with hacking into systems. Not monitoring for that was a mistake, but maybe a forgivable one the first time around. The subsequent coverups are inexcusable.

These were evaluations or training runs dealing with the ability to do web searches. The entire reason the bots were targeting this site is that it had some of the data they'd been tasked with finding. Access to the internet is not really optional for that, and providing internet access doesn't demonstrate neglicence.

> This is why it smells like marketing

It doesn't. "Our product commits felonies" is not marketing. If something is marketing, you don't engage in repeated coverups of the true extent. If something is good news, you don't release it on a Friday evening (in this case) or wait for 3rd parties to find and publicize the evidence (the past cases).

The impact from a model not being included in the training set is increased false negatives for text generated by that model, not increased false positives for text written by humans.

The latter are not doomers at all, that's just a misuse of the term.

A year ago I would have described that group as AI skeptics or AI deniers depending on how charitable I felt on any given sany. At this point AI truthers seems more appropriate.