Examining the bigger picture around the SpaceX Colossus lease
AI is useful and very rapidly becoming more useful. Initially mainly used for computer coding, it can now perform many knowledge management tasks and will likely continue to improve. I speak from experience: I have been using AI since pretty much the first commercial models became available, so I have watched the capabilities increase.
But AI is not yet easy to use well. It’s easy to spend money and come up with a good-looking diagram; getting the most out of it takes real effort. As capabilities increase further it’s likely to become easier to use.
People will pay to use AI, and inference – the business of actually helping them – is already profitable, in some cases very profitable. So investment will grow.
Improvement in model capability requires more brute compute power for training runs, and that means more megawatts (MW). It’s plausible that continuing the current rate of improvement will require two to three times as many training MW in two years’ time as today. It will also require continued and hard-to-forecast improvements in algorithmic methods.
