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An issue with the doom forecasts is most of the hypothetical $8tn hasn't happened yet. Current big tech capex is about $315bn this year, $250bn last against a pre AI level ~$100bn so ~$400bn has been spent so far on AI boom data centers. https://sherwood.news/business/amazon-plans-100-billion-spen...

The future spend is optional - AGI takeoff, you spend loads, not happening not so much.

Say it levels of at $800bn. The world's population is ~8bn so $100 a head so you'd need to be making $10 or $20 per head per year. Quite possibly doable.





65% of people in the world earn less than 3000 euros/year.

Getting 65% of the population to spend 1% of their income on some new digital toy forever does not seem so far fetched.

That seems super far fetched given that 37%[1] of the world's population does not have internet access. You could reasonably restrict further to populations that speak languages that are even passably represented in LLMs.

Even disregarding that, if you're making <3000 euros a year, I really don't think you'd be willing or able to spend that much money to let your computer gaslight you.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/internet


The power distribution goes the other way too. There are outliers that will spend much more per capita.

Lol. If you ballpark numbers like that probably anything is doable!

$10/head x $8bn people is easier said than done - only your major enterprises like Google or Amazon can. But AI even if just LLMs may be there.



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