All the compute being built out is very impressive and it's nice to think it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good. But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.
So what does one of these full time data center jobs look like, day to day? If I’m a software engineer I feel like I’d have to move and get a pay decrease to actually work at one of these? I mean until AI finally puts me out of a job. I guess I wouldn’t really be qualified to work one of these jobs?
You're likely unqualified. You'll be competing against a pool of people who are qualified and have worked these jobs.
I used to do SWE. Early in my career I realized that DCO/DCE was not only an entire discipline unto itself, but that the rest of the "team" looked down on it because it required physical labor. Perfect, I don't feel like I've done Real Work unless I do something in the physical world. Hence my DCE jobs. I would not be able to do SWE today.
But I'll tell you this: way more than once I've had a cocky new hire from the HFT I work at wither under simple tasks: Please re-balance the load across all phases of these PDUs. Please groom & remove dead cables from wherever. But you don't have time to figure it out on the fly. You have an hour to have it DONE.
Anyway, I think your intuition serves you well. :)
I wrote below in 2022 on HN [1] when everyone was panicking about AWS growth slowing down.
* >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.*
27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 and 2023. Then the whole 2023 33% growth alone, would equal to the size of the entire AWS in 2018. It is not the first time Amazon said they are limited by how fast they are building out Datacenter and getting hardware resources ready.
That was in 2022. They nearly double their 2018 size alone in a single year.
I don't understand back then. I still can't get my head around it now. With or without AI. With AI the number and scale just grows beyond my imagination. CPU power per socket or per Rack have increased every single year. What used to take 10 racks could now be replaced by 1. I would have expected slowly replacing old Rack to newer ones would have been enough with slower Datacenter growth. That is not to mention software have gotten faster and efficient over the years. JVM, PHP, Ruby, C, Database etc over the past 10 - 15 years.
Instead we keep growing, not only that; AI have shown they seems to have infinite appetite for computing resources. I know this is classic Jevons Paradox but the scale [2]. It is mind boggling numbers.
[2] I remember the last time I had scale issues was I can't compute in my head how Apple will be a trillion dollar company by 2020. That was written on Appleinsider in ~2012. We now have multiple trillions dollar companies. The TAM of some of these market continue to amaze me.
What a refreshing change from a post like this on Reddit. It would be hysterics like they’re emptying lakes and using electricity (gasp!) and if you get really close it’s 60db (!!) loud. I only wish we had a competent administration at this point that would put in clever laws like requiring data centers to build out accompanying solar+battery buildouts to power themselves or something.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadToday it will be used to power AI girlfriends.
There are little to no SWEs in a large AWS datacenter.
I used to do SWE. Early in my career I realized that DCO/DCE was not only an entire discipline unto itself, but that the rest of the "team" looked down on it because it required physical labor. Perfect, I don't feel like I've done Real Work unless I do something in the physical world. Hence my DCE jobs. I would not be able to do SWE today.
But I'll tell you this: way more than once I've had a cocky new hire from the HFT I work at wither under simple tasks: Please re-balance the load across all phases of these PDUs. Please groom & remove dead cables from wherever. But you don't have time to figure it out on the fly. You have an hour to have it DONE.
Anyway, I think your intuition serves you well. :)
* >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.*
27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 and 2023. Then the whole 2023 33% growth alone, would equal to the size of the entire AWS in 2018. It is not the first time Amazon said they are limited by how fast they are building out Datacenter and getting hardware resources ready.
That was in 2022. They nearly double their 2018 size alone in a single year.
I don't understand back then. I still can't get my head around it now. With or without AI. With AI the number and scale just grows beyond my imagination. CPU power per socket or per Rack have increased every single year. What used to take 10 racks could now be replaced by 1. I would have expected slowly replacing old Rack to newer ones would have been enough with slower Datacenter growth. That is not to mention software have gotten faster and efficient over the years. JVM, PHP, Ruby, C, Database etc over the past 10 - 15 years.
Instead we keep growing, not only that; AI have shown they seems to have infinite appetite for computing resources. I know this is classic Jevons Paradox but the scale [2]. It is mind boggling numbers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33384628
[2] I remember the last time I had scale issues was I can't compute in my head how Apple will be a trillion dollar company by 2020. That was written on Appleinsider in ~2012. We now have multiple trillions dollar companies. The TAM of some of these market continue to amaze me.
7 million dollars is peanuts for amazon btw
There are some sly word games happening there.
Although to be fair, it does roll off the tongue better than "Project Jeff Wants Another Yacht".