The notion I now believe more fully is that the money people - managers, executives, investors and shareholders - like to hear about things in units they understand (so money). They don't understand the science, or the maths and in so much as they might acknowledge it exists it's an ambient concern: those things happen anyway (as far as they can tell), and so they don't know how to value them (or don't value them).
Because we saw, what a week ago the leading indicator that the money people were now feeling happy they were in charge which was that weird not-government US$500 billion investment in AI announcement. And we saw the same being breathlessly reported when Elon Musk founded xAI and had "built the largest AI computer cluster!"...as though that statement actually meant anything?
There was a whole heavily implied analogy going on of "more money (via GPUs) === more powerful AIs!" - ignoring any reality of how those systems worked, their scaling rules or the fact that inferrence tended to run on exactly 1 GPU.
Even the internet activist types bought into this, because people complaining about image generators just could not be convinced that the Stable Diffusion models ran locally on extremely limited hardware (the number of arguments where people would discuss this and imply a gate while I'm sitting their with the web GUI in another window on my 4 year old PC).
Because we saw, what a week ago the leading indicator that the money people were now feeling happy they were in charge which was that weird not-government US$500 billion investment in AI announcement. And we saw the same being breathlessly reported when Elon Musk founded xAI and had "built the largest AI computer cluster!"...as though that statement actually meant anything?
There was a whole heavily implied analogy going on of "more money (via GPUs) === more powerful AIs!" - ignoring any reality of how those systems worked, their scaling rules or the fact that inferrence tended to run on exactly 1 GPU.
Even the internet activist types bought into this, because people complaining about image generators just could not be convinced that the Stable Diffusion models ran locally on extremely limited hardware (the number of arguments where people would discuss this and imply a gate while I'm sitting their with the web GUI in another window on my 4 year old PC).