alt Hacker NewsI keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software (at least if you want to run local or host your own saas)
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud", because the AI buildout makes everything too expensive. Including memory, a nonnegotiable component of any computer or server
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
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That's an interesting take. I had a similar thought about safety and how AI providers propagate that using cloud options is safer because hosting a server is open to attack vectors, and who would manage that best if not the big providers themselves.
The fact that Hugging Face was attacked not by a small amount of compute but such a vast amount of computation. It was only possible because its already so centralized by Open AI.
It feels a bit like cyberpunk where only the big companies in reality will have the resource to pull of such an attack.
Classical monopoly (or duopoly) requires a moat. This is the moat they build. Everyone will just rent centralized intelligence - that's a promise to investors.