Cancelling new data centers because deep seek has shown a more efficient path isn’t proof that AI is dead as the author claims.
Fiber buildouts were cancelled back in 2000 because multimode made existing fiber more efficient. The Internet investment bubble popped. That didn’t mean the Internet was dead.
yeah, genai as a technology and field of study may not disappear. genai as an overinflated product marketed as the be all end all that would solve all of humanity’s problems may. the bubble can’t burst soon enough
This is a good point. It’s never sat right with me that LLMs require such overwhelming resources and cannot be optimized. It’s possible that innovation has been too fast to worry about optimization yet, but all this BS about building new power plants and chip foundries for trillions of dollars and whatnot just seems mad.
There’s no need for huge, expensive datacenters when we can run everything on our own devices. SLMs and local AI is the future.
This feels kinda far fetched. It’s like saying “well, we won’t need cars, because we’ll all just have jetpacks that we use to get around.” I totally agree that eventually a useful model will run on a phone. I disagree it’s going to be soon enough to matter to this discussion. To give you some ideas, DeepSeek is a recent model. It’s 671B parameters. Devices like phones are running 7-14B models. So, eventually what you say will be feasible, but we have a ways to go.
The difference is that we’ll just be running small, specialized, on-demand models instead of huge, resource-heavy, all-purpose models. It’s already being done. Just look at how Google and Apple are approaching AI on mobile devices. You don’t need a lot of power for that, just plenty of storage.