Description du poste
This is part linkpost, and an expansion on a previous shortform posted on LW.
I believe a massively undermade point in favour of the belief that AI will be a very big deal is that the AI buildout over the past four years is the largest bet in the history of capitalism. A peacetime industrial effort is underway which has not had a comparison since the nineteenth century. The size of the effort and the scale of the spend signal that key decision makers and capital allocators believe that very powerful AI will be achieved in the next few years.
Many of us are vaguely aware that large sums are being spent, but the scale of the undertaking is astonishing:
• The six largest spenders this year are spending more on capital expenditures this year than the Russian government, governing 11 timezones and 143 million people, fighting a war on which the fate of its regime probably depends, spent last year. • Hyperscaler spending (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle) will be $785-820bn this year, about 2.4% of US GDP. There are only 11 governments on earth who spend more than that. Next year the Hyperscalers are projected to spend about $1.3 trillion dollars.• Google and Amazon are each spending about 0.6% of US GDP. The Manhattan project and Apollo programme each accounted for about 0.4% of US GDP in their peak years of spending. Both of these companies has announced their intention to spend more next year.• The dramatic capital expenditure figures actually dramatically undersell the scale of the spend, because they are commiting to future purchases and leases at an incredible rate. Just looking at the second quarter of this year:In the three months between the start of April and the end of June this year Google’s financial commitments to future spending increased by half a trillion dollars. In the same period Meta signed $233bn of new spending commitments and added a further $68bn in data center leases in July. Microsoft signed more than $130bn of new data centre leas