alt Hacker NewsWill all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now?
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
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The trillon dollars question is more, will the current GPUs still be relevant in 3 years? 5? 10?
Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?
The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.
For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
We will all be happy with our local inference, but how will our overloards be able to surveil and control us en-masse without them?
It's a big bet to not have a plan for needing power.
I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
Probably yes, and if not, it can most likely be repurposed
Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.
The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox