There's no limit to the algorithms. People dont understand yet. They can learn the whole universe with a big enough compute cluster. We built a generalizable learning machine
I guess gigawatts is how we roughly measure computing capacity at the datacenter scale? Also saw something similar here:
> Costs and pricing are expressed per “token”, but the published data immediately seems to admit that this is a bad choice of unit because it costs a lot more to output a token than input one. It seems to me that the actual marginal quantity being produced and consumed is “processing power”, which is apparently measured in gigawatt hours these days. In any case, I think more than anything this vindicates my original decision not to get too precise. [...]
It's not really a stable measure of compute, but it's a good indication of burn rate as energy cost is something we closely track in economies and it actually dominates a lot of the cost of operating data centers. At least short term. Over time we'll get more tokens per energy unit and less dollars for the hardware needed per energy unit. Tokens currently is too abstract for a lot of people. They have no concept of the relation ship of numbers of tokens per time unit and cost. Long term there's going to be a big shift from op-ex to cap-ex for energy usage as we shift from burning methane and coal to using renewables with storage.
Interesting to see Anthropic investing in compute infrastructure. The bottleneck I keep hitting is not
raw compute but where that compute lives — EU customers increasingly need guarantees their data stays
in-region. More sovereign compute options in Europe would unlock a lot of enterprise AI adoption.
How is compute shortage to satisfy demand manifested? Obviously they never close sign-ups, so only option is to extended queues? But if demand grows like crazy, then queues should get longer, yet my pro claude plan seems snappy with only occasional retries due to 429.
Interesting timing given the quantum computing timeline pressure from this week's cryptography discussions. $30B run-rate and gigawatts of TPU capacity — and meanwhile the most interesting AI work I've seen lately runs on a phone in Termux with no cloud dependency at all. Both things are true simultaneously.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] thread> Costs and pricing are expressed per “token”, but the published data immediately seems to admit that this is a bad choice of unit because it costs a lot more to output a token than input one. It seems to me that the actual marginal quantity being produced and consumed is “processing power”, which is apparently measured in gigawatt hours these days. In any case, I think more than anything this vindicates my original decision not to get too precise. [...]
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/new-new-rules-for-the-new-...
Is it priced that way, though? I assume next-gen TPU's will be more efficient?
Feels like the lede is buried here!
OpenCode: you pay per token.
Claude Code: you pay a flat fee.
And the subscription is not Anthropic's moat either since it's likely heavily subsidized. They're just using it to acquire customers.
The moat is locking you into Anthropic's model particularities (extended thinking, getting you into their "mindset", etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637597