Can confirm: There’s a lot of money in machine room planning, setup, and building-out right now. If you have experience with electrical, cooling (water or forced air), cabling, and rackmount machine installation and sysadmin stuff, you’ll make good money.
Also: When this shit crashes (and it will), used memory and GPUs will flood the market for cheap. Then it’ll be time to buy. Lol
I think a lot of gear will be server/AI specific and won’t run in peoples home computers. GPUs with no graphics driver support, no video output etc. Some memory finding itself into HBM modules instead of DDR5. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have an agreement with the semiconductor cartels to crush it all so it doesn’t land in the consumer market.
Massive opportunity cost. People will say that could have been spent on social programs and I agree but realistically that can’t happen until voters stop being manipulated sheeple and wake the fuck up. Which in the USA is never. Brainwashed and neutered.
Until then that capital could have been invested in other industries, creating sustainable jobs and long term economic growth. But it is tied up in a bubble and a huge amount of wealth will be destroyed, invested in rapidly depreciating equipment and data centres that have no prospect of returning their investment.
If you thought it was hard to source computer parts at reasonable prices, imagine what the capital market must be like for anyone but the AI con artists. So when AI tanks, everything else is in limp mode, so the economy will be doubly fucked.
This is called Dutch Disease and most often happens with natural resources, but also with natural stupidity.
I feel like tulips are the next big thing.
I work in procurement and the last week and a half at work has been hell. Buying anything that contains RAM, Hard drives or GPUs right now is a circus. Pricing changing after orders placed, 6+ month lead times, insanely expensive pricing and any other problem you can imagine. It’s not just a problem for consumers, but businesses that need hardware refreshes, startups that are trying to launch, and replacements for defective units are all just really hard to get right now. I know this will pass eventually, but it’s a tough time to be in procurement for IT hardware.
I work for an OEM and the sales dudes have been getting reamed by our customers because they’ve had to deliver this news to folks like you. Sucks all around.
I bet those sales douches are happy with the bonuses they will get.
I don’t like sales dudes.
We’re not really raising prices above costs, in fact we’re eating a lot of the cost increases ourselves to flatten the overall increase across the board that ends up with our customers. But a lot of them already made commitments to buy that we have to raise the price on through no fault of our own. And more are coming. So I don’t think the sales dudes are seeing any benefit tbh. Though you’re right to not like them.
Dot com mk II
Waah but this time it’s BiLlIoNs!! Yeah scales slide as the world inflates.
just burst already please rahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Imagine how improved things would be if that $700 billion was spent improving the lives of regular people. Or, what if it was just used to pay the debt through taxes? Medicare for all? They clearly had the money to sqander.
Surely it’ll trickle down this time?
Oh, they do trickle down on ya! Not with what want ya though
There enlies a great response to people who insist we cannot resist progress (AI) and it’s totally inevitable. If they believe in that progress so much, they can choose from any previous innovation that didn’t bring the thing they say AI will bring.
Any second now. Maybe just one more tax cut for the rich just to be safe.
/s
Meanwhile they can’t figure out why not enough
consumerswage slaveschildren are bornDon’t worry. They’ll “solve” the problem with abortion bans.
Interviewer: Margaret Atwood, what are your thoughts on the trend in the US?
Atwood: I’m Canadian
People have already “solved” that problem by simply giving up on sex. We are headed into Japan territory.
Exactly. Without immigration, our population would collapse. Our birthrate is 1.64 per woman. Japan’s is 1.2. The replacement rate is 2. It’s just too damn expensive to have kids, put a roof over our heads, and retire. Meanwhile the fed just funnels more money to the rich. No wonder the workers can’t maintain the population: we’re starving and the government is giving all the food to the rich.
And rolling back things like marital rape laws. And perhaps we were a little hasty allowing women to have their own checking accounts (IN 1974). Etc…
Don’t even get them started on the right to vote.
To then discover people are so glued to their phone filled to the brim with anger inducing engagement, they don’t have any energy left over to meet people or even do the deed.
Just crash and burn already… Idiot timeline
Uhhh… I won’t comment on the other stuff but I can confidently say the electrician that comes to your house is not the electrician who is wiring these data centers. Completely different crews.
It’s also weird to single out electricians when it’s the construction companies themselves that are being dragged across the globe to the few places that will auto stamp new data centers. There’s a private compound in the Western US that doesn’t allow reporters and is blowing millions to bring workers in from thousand of miles away. Rumor is local crews weren’t considered because they’d be more likely to report environmental concerns in their own backyard.
Huh, where’s that?
Last data center I was on outside Cheyenne, WY there were about 100 iron workers from Texas doing their thing.
Fernley, details these days are hard to find since the tech companies started moving in.
https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2019/jul/12/45-million-industrial-sale-closes-in-fernley-secon/
Well yeah, it’s right there in the first sentence
Electricians are getting harder to find, and some construction projects are on hold.
They’re talking about commercial electricians. Because of all these data centers being built electricians are being moved around because of the money being thrown at these projects. For example, Dallas has been a hub for tech sector projects for a while; because of all the new data centers being built in Texas there are out of state electricians coming in for these projects from neighboring states like OK. Funny tho, now that Oklahoma is starting its own data center boom, now electricians from OK would just rather stay there which is causing projects in TX to stall.
An Inside Wireman does not do the work of a Residential Wireman. They CAN, they just don’t. Why would this reporter need an Inside Wireman?
He doesn’t mention residential wireman anywhere in the article. He’s quoting someone who notes that skilled labor is moving away from complex construction project, such as multi family, to data centers. Multifamily is in the commercial sector rather than residential.
There are not enough skilled electricians and other specialized trade workers for both data center projects and other complex construction, Basu said, such as apartment buildings, factories and health care facilities. AI data centers tend to be more lucrative for construction firms, which relegates anything else to a lower priority.
The quoted person does mention residential, but attributes the decline in residential building to things like material prices and other factors. Lumber has been high for quite sometime which really impacts residential as they rely on lumber heavily for beams and framing, whereas commercial uses metal for beams and framing.
Basu said that a decline in U.S. manufacturing of homes, offices and factories would probably occur even without the AI data center construction boom, because of factors including climbing costs for building materials, zoning restrictions, higher tariffs and stricter immigration policies. But he notes that AI data center demand is probably worsening chronic capacity shortages in construction.
That’s just flat out incorrect
edit: I’m done with this. It’s obvious that the people arguing with me have no idea what construction work is like.
You didn’t read the article and it shows.
I do commercial and government construction. I see this shit daily. I even work in electrical and low voltage construction, so yeah.
While you are not wrong about these different specialities within the trade, there can still be an effect. Let me illustrate:
Suppose you like bananas but not apples. One day there is an apple disease that kills most of the apple trees leading to a collapse of the apple market. You feel relieved because you don’t eat bananas anyways. But you go to the supermarket and find that not only are the apple shelves empty, the banana shelves are empty too! Why? Well people still gotta eat, and not everyone is as picky as you, they switched to bananas and now the banana market is under supplied too. And it’s not like you can build a banana farm overnight.
Back to electricians, if the salaries of data center electricians increases rapidly, you will find that those electricians who are qualified for both (even if it is just a very small number) might focus on data centres, straining the supply of residential electricians. Just like with banana orchards, it takes time for new electricians to enter the market, and those new hires will further be swayed to the data center specialty first, further straining the residential market.
We can see a real example of this with the price of RAM. RAM manufacturers saw increased demand for data centre RAM so they switched focus to that market and it ended up drying out the consumer side supply, hence the surge in price. And just as with banana plantations and electricians, you can’t start up a RAM fab overnight.
wut? A Residential Wireman doesn’t even go into the space for Inside Wireman. Then there’s the fact that the space where an Inside Wireman works is tiny compared to the rest of the data center.
What are you basing your opinion on?
edit: bunch of butthurt Residential Wiremen in this thread apparently
I would rather see you explain why electricians would never change their field of work.
Residential Wiremen are not qualified to be Inside Wiremen
edit: I’m done with this. It’s obvious that the people arguing with me have no idea what construction work is like.
And residential Wiremen are unable to get the qualification to be inside Wiremen? Are there no inside Wiremen who worked at residential ones before? Are you serious?
The fact that they don’t even know what the job title is, says to me their opinion isn’t worth considering.
Oh, so Residential never switch, got it.
They need more training
edit: I’m done with this. It’s obvious that the people arguing with me have no idea what construction work is like.
The AI boom
They misspelled “bubble.” None of the AI providers have a path towards profitability.
None of the AI providers have customers. They’re all selling to OpenAI.
I assume they’ll do the same as the auto industry and banks and get huge government bailouts once investors start demanding returns. That way all us taxpayers can make sure the scammers at the top don’t have to spend one second worrying about giving up their lavish lifestyles.
I mean we’re (we as in local taxpayers, not me personally in this case) already paying for the infrastructure they use in increased bills. We’re paying for their tax holidays while they’re talking about all the new jobs they’ll bring (lots of short term construction, 25-50 long term employees once the tax holiday runs out, so very little money in the local economy). We (all of us) are paying the price for the mothballed coal plants that are coming back online to support them. We are paying for federal government contracts on them.
It’s corporate welfare all the way down.
Or hype.
Profitability went out of fashion. Control and power is the new trend. Big tech controls 95% (if not more) of all information sources. Even if they don’t own newspapers, they can make them more or less visible at will. Google tried to monetize it with ads everywhere but that is the old way of thinking.
Cambridge analytica showed that by controlling the information, you can select who makes the laws.
Musk bought Twitter without any chance for a reasonable return on investment. Guess why?
The “old tech” (Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok) controls what you know. But AI goes a step further. It controls what you think about things. It can explain why, what you thought was outrageous, is perfectly normal, or vice versa. It’s your own personalised propaganda machine. Once enough people are hooked and get used to using AI, the enshitification phase will begin and the AI will become more and more opinionated. And most people won’t notice… Some will, but they don’t need to influence everyone.
Classic capitalist trap. AI is a service that was never meant to be profitable. AI is bringing tech bros into socialism.
They only want to socialize the costs and negative externalities.
While I agree with you, is there anyway to know how much an average prompt (let’s say a coding question that used to be a quick google search) costs?
I really want to ask people, would you pay X per prompt?
Cause most people “love” AI cause it costs very little
People measure the water usage so why not.
Shoukd I start selling tulip seeds?
Anyone remember which country had an inflation so bad, it issued trillion dollar bills useful only as toilet paper?
One sec, let me ask an AI about that
Hyperinflation in Germany after WW1? But I think there must be more examples.
Wheelbarrows of cash will be needed to buy groceries if that happens
IIRC it was Zimbabwe?
They hadn’t mastered the Argentinian custom of changing currency to remove zeros.
The closest you can get to that is if you vacation in Vietnam. One Euro is about 30,000 Vietnamese đồng. Yeah, it’s really called like that. Buy a Coca Cola with a 100,000 bill, pull a few million out of the ATM.
i wouldn’t mind wiping my ass with cheeto-face
There is a toilet paper that has his face on it, I bought some.
Prayers weren’t working, I’ll try anything.
Don’t worry, it makes your life a little bit harder now, but it is worth it, because if everything goes well, your employer will save a lot of money by firing you. Yes you will lose your source of income, but ChatGPT will help you by providing tips on how to survive as a homeless person!
Totally worth it.
some say it’s a bubble other go full doomer idk what to believe
It’s both. It’s a bubble because of the amount of investment and lack of actual revenue, but it’s also being used to replace humans. We will have to pick up the pieces when the bubble bursts, but in the mean time it’s going to concentrate wealth and lower the standard of living.
But critics worry that the up-front costs to develop AI have become so mammoth that the investment can possibly pay off only if AI reshapes life, work and the economy in a way that uncorks massive new profits for these technology firms.
So this is why I don’t think it would pay off:
Haven’t they already shoved AI in every aspect of our lives? I’ve literally seen tooth brushes with AI.
Putting aside how much normal people hate AI, if you already have integrated it everywhere, how can you grow further?
Seriously, we’ve already hit critical mass and now some people actively avoid it, even if you force them, how would the AI revolution look any different than what we have today?
I’ve said it in other similar articles, it depends on your definition of “Ai”. Marketing is insisting on “powered by Ai” on all sorts of products but that doesn’t mean llm. Some “Ai” may be useful, like the old on-star system on some cars. They had multiple inputs to determine if a crash occurred and alert emergency services if it did… Could be classified as Ai.
Your toothbrush example could be useful, if just finished cleaning cycle and battery level below 20% and not on charger, emit a beep to alert user to charge tooth brush. More advanced, and I doubt these are the case but would be cool and useful. If the could detect blood during a cleaning cycle, alert user to contact a dentist for possible gum disease. Or detection of a new/growing hole in a tooth based on the defection of the bristles and alert user to see a dentist for possible cavity.
Without a solid definition of “Ai” this is all marketing talk. Basically all “Ai” takes multiple inputs and then generates an output based on those inputs. If you say it must generate it based on a llm, then what about the image generating ai? If you say it must have natural language as in an input most of these “Ai” products don’t qualify unless they expect you to say “ok, sonic care end cleaning cycle” with a mouth full of toothpaste and water. Technically an argument could be made that a check engine light on a car is “powered by Ai”.
The only definition which goes against this and I would agree to is a system where given an identical set of inputs the output is not always(or ever) the same. If that’s the case then I am going to start making “Ai” powered lava lamps…
i think the plan is to first shove it everywhere, have everyone use and rely on it and eventually become dependent. Then they start tightening the screws while using it to influence people too.
That requires it to provide something other solutions can’t (or no longer do).
People need taxis, uber drove them out and then increased the price, so people used it and ended up paying a similar amount to old taxis (maybe a little more).
People don’t need AI, if chatGPT stops working, you can just use a search engine again. Sure you might not be used to it and feel dependant on the chatbot, but if it’s free compared to a big price tag, the path of least resistance would be to use the cheap solution.
The only way is that if your brain dead enough and rich enough to pay high prices, but these robber barons are ensuring people don’t have much cash.
I think you’re vastly underestimating how illiterate people are. Especially newer people.
AI does provide solutions for them that can’t be found elsewhere.
Well, i didnt say the people pushing the ai are very smart, or there might be some angle on this that isnt apparent.
Or they just see new tech that on the surface seems incredibly revolutionary, lack critical thinking and self-evaluation skills to really consider if its actually as good as it seems to them.
Or it could also be case of sunk cost fallacy. They have already put unimaginable amounts of money into it, backing down now would mean most if not all of that is lost. That seems most reasonable explanation, but these people dont think like rest of us do so I have no idea.
Also, to them it doesnt matter what people need or want. They manufacture the need and do whatever it takes to get what they want. Many have already started to fall for the ai crap and rely on it for decisions. Eventually those who view it critically will be considered conspiracy theorists and otherwise weird people, at least if current attitude towards ai is taken for granted.
Or it could also be case of sunk cost fallacy. They have already put unimaginable amounts of money into it, backing down now would mean most if not all of that is lost.
Holy shit, I didn’t think of that angle, I think you’re probably right and that is horrifying cause I know they have no problem with letting us plebs go down with the ship and using their golden parachute.
Yet another technological antisolution.
Because the product is dreams and the customers are investors.
I have an idea about how to solve it. How about google only gives ai answers to people who specifically ask for one
I quit using Google a long time ago. It’s answers weren’t good enough before AI.
