Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
dghlsakjg 3 minutes ago [-]
The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them).
I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
chromacity 47 minutes ago [-]
But doesn't that overstate it in the other direction? Talking about investments in proportion to GDP back when any estimate of GDP probably wasn't a good measure of total economic output?
We're talking about the period before modern finance, before income taxes, back when most labor was agricultural... Did the average person shoulder the cost of railroads more than the average taxpayer today is shouldering the cost of F-35? (That's another line in Paul's post.)
bombcar 43 minutes ago [-]
That's the problem with going too far using "money" or "GDP" - you can roughly compare the WWII 45% of GDP spent with today - https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-milit... because even by WWII much was "financialized" in such a way that it appears on GDP (though things like victory gardens, barter, etc would explicitly NOT be included without effort - maybe they do this?).
As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?
helterskelter 10 minutes ago [-]
You don't even need to go that far back to run into issues, when I read Pride and Prejudice, I think Mr. Darcy was one of the richest people in England at around £10,000/year, but if you to calculate his wealth in today's terms it wasn't some outrageous sum (Wikipedia is telling me ~£800,000/year). The thing is that the economy was totally different back then -- labor cost practically nothing, but goods like furniture for instance were really expensive and would be handed down for generations.
With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either.
Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.
chaos_emergent 43 minutes ago [-]
I posted just that on the Twitter feed but then I realized that railroad started at the beginning of an industrial revolution where labor was a far larger portion of GDP compared to industrial production. So it kind of makes sense that the first enabling technology consumed far more GDP than current investments do, even on a marginal basis.
This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)
0xbadcafebee 10 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
therobots927 25 minutes ago [-]
The problem is that once built, railroads provided economic value right off the bat.
I would love to hear about the economic value being generated by these LLMs. I think a couple years is enough time for us to start putting some actual numbers to the value provided.
lukeschlather 8 minutes ago [-]
Equating this buildout with LLMs is also a category error. Waymo (self-driving cars) depends on the same infrastructure, and there are a variety of other robotics programs which are actually functioning, you can see them in operation. They all require a lot of GPUs to train and run the models which operate the robotics.
jeffbee 29 minutes ago [-]
The other categorical error is that the American people paid the railroads a monumental subsidy to get the job done. We gave them almost 10% of the territory.
lenerdenator 18 minutes ago [-]
Given the size of some of these data centers, the incentives packages that local governments often give their developers, and the impact on the electric grid that can, in some cases, raise costs for other ratepayers, I'd say the comparison could be similar.
The one Google's putting in KC North is 500 acres [0] and there were $10 billion in taxable revenue bonds put up by the Port Authority to help with the cost.
This for a company that could pay for that in cash right now.
That's the opposite of a subsidy. KC stakes nothing of value and gets a defined revenue for the next 25 years.
stefan_ 35 minutes ago [-]
"Infrastructure build out"? Everything put into these datacenters is worthless well before 10 years have gone by.
We aren't even getting infrastructure out of it, they are just powering it with gas turbines..
jeffbee 31 minutes ago [-]
This isn't true and you can easily prove it to yourself by renting a Sandy Bridge CPU or a TPUv2 from Google today.
kerblang 14 minutes ago [-]
Adjusted for inflation?
edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see
anigbrowl 9 minutes ago [-]
It literally says 'Inflation-adjusted costs' on the right side of the graph, right under the main title, FFS.
11 minutes ago [-]
therein 44 minutes ago [-]
I really dislike the term hyperscaler. Comes off very insincere. They came up with it themselves, didn't they? What's the official definition supposed to be now? Companies that are setting up as many GPU/TPU server clusters as possible for a demand that's yet to exist?
coffeefirst 26 minutes ago [-]
I have concluded the entire public discourse surrounding AI has no relationship to real stuff that you can go, test, and point at.
There’s a loop of everyone is saying stuff because everyone else is saying stuff that turns into a sort of reality inspired fan fiction.
It’s not just that it’s wrong or imprecise, that I expect, it’s that the folklore takes on a life of its own.
cidd 40 minutes ago [-]
Nobody really uses the term in the Valley except probably C-level people talking to Wall street investors.
bombcar 43 minutes ago [-]
It always makes me think of a hyperactive toddler running around in circles, which oddly fits most thought leaders who use the term.
lenerdenator 17 minutes ago [-]
That's not fair to the toddlers; their crap tends to be safely contained in a diaper as opposed to their heads.
28 minutes ago [-]
SpicyLemonZest 13 minutes ago [-]
Gentle reminder that the cost of producing well-formatted graphs is much, much lower than it used to be. We grew up in a world where the mere existence of this graph would prove that someone put a great deal of effort into making it, and now it does not. I have no specific reason to doubt the information, but if you want to have reliable epistemic practices, you can no longer treat random graphs you find on social media as presumptively true.
metalman 1 hours ago [-]
we, the people, are the ultimate mega project, and it's showing
Rendered at 17:56:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142
Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
We're talking about the period before modern finance, before income taxes, back when most labor was agricultural... Did the average person shoulder the cost of railroads more than the average taxpayer today is shouldering the cost of F-35? (That's another line in Paul's post.)
As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?
With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either.
Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.
I would love to hear about the economic value being generated by these LLMs. I think a couple years is enough time for us to start putting some actual numbers to the value provided.
The one Google's putting in KC North is 500 acres [0] and there were $10 billion in taxable revenue bonds put up by the Port Authority to help with the cost.
This for a company that could pay for that in cash right now.
[0] https://fox4kc.com/news/google-confirms-its-behind-new-data-...
We aren't even getting infrastructure out of it, they are just powering it with gas turbines..
edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see
There’s a loop of everyone is saying stuff because everyone else is saying stuff that turns into a sort of reality inspired fan fiction.
It’s not just that it’s wrong or imprecise, that I expect, it’s that the folklore takes on a life of its own.