adityaathalye
14 hours ago
Why I think this sort of "High-tech Computer Hardware Cottage Industry" stuff is significant (ignoring the fact that it's One Internet Rando versus One Trillion Dollars).
IMO, we --- as in someone somewhere who's seeing it coming --- stand to gain far greater indirect benefits, as and when GPU datacenter over-investments transmute into serving today's severely under-served but world-reforming science/industry application areas…
Think Massive GPU Infrastructure -> Industry application transmutations... "on-campus GPU supercomputers too cheap to meter".
My optimistic LLM-AI scenario is a hope that we get a version of what happened after the boom years of railroads, telecoms, and/or cloud computing (currently in progress)… Which was the decades after massive capital investments, the implosion of which unprecedently fuelled large-scale industrial and economic and socio-political phenomena, by way of infrastructure ownership re-allocations through write-offs, fire sales, and bankruptcy style M&A.
A hope that we get a disintermediation of datacenters. Back to the neighbourhood VPS provider. People shipping out containers to private industry and universities and so forth — stacks of supercomputers in your backyard... A whole new breed of Oxide Computer Company companies.
Interesting critique / counterarguments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419416
Adding to that...
But this dream-like phenomenon is not going to happen in places in poverty of hands-on local neighbourhood "Computer/GPU hardware mechanic" expertise. (A poverty that is tied to zoning laws, tariffs, import duties, and public policy --- Are you pouring gobs of cash into making large datacenters, at the cost of all the other sides of the equation; education, training, small and medium businesses, precision manufacturing capacity, long-range sponsorship of the various sciences, R&D, arts etc. etc. etc.)
The revolutionary proliferation of mobile telephony in India (where I live), for example, was---and continues to ride---largely on the back of a mobile phone cottage industry that proliferated.
Mom-and-pop shops that can do pretty much everything you need to ... repair, update, un-bork your cell phone, your phone plans, prepaid sims etc. Print you your documents and photos, fix your broken screens, replace bloated batteries, do "whatsapp agent" stuff (government paperwork). This has been an unbroken trend from the early days of the Nokia 3310 to the now-a-days of cheap ubiquitous android devices, and even "feature phones" participating in money flows via zero cost-to-consumer UPI payments.
A similarly revolutionary thing did not happen for computers in India, because of decades-long protectionist policies. High import duties ("luxury goods"), and regulatory capture by computer hardware distributors who still maintain a choke-hold on imports and supply. We do have an equivalent cottage industry of computer repair people, but it's nowhere close to the ubiquity that it could have had because it's just so damned hard to sell computer hardware in India.
Stuff like that.
(edit: add clarification)