Gavin Baker：2000年97%光纤闲置，如今GPU无闲置
Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of Ameri...
a16z 把 2000 年光纤泡沫和现在的 GPU 荒放在一起对比，97% 闲置 vs 零闲置，数据和观点都很有意思。
Gavin Baker 回忆 2000 年科技泡沫时指出，当时美国已铺设的光纤中有 97% 处于未点亮状态，即所谓 dark fiber。他将之与当下对比：如今训练任务中 GPU 供不应求，没有任何闲置算力，甚至成为技术论文中的瓶颈。Ben Horowitz 则以 LoudCloud 的经历补充，1999 年带宽价格为一兆比特 1500 美元，到 2001 年跌至 50 美元。他认为当前 AI 基础设施面对的是相反局面：token 价格下降但 GPU 价格未降，数据中心建设成本上涨，这对 CoreWeave 构成有利条件。
Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of Ameri...
Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of America's fiber sat dark, and today there are no dark GPUs. "I had, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a tech investor during the year 2000 bubble, which was really a telecom bubble." "The year 2000 bubble was defined by something called 'dark fiber.' Dark fiber was literally fiber that was laid down in the ground, and not lit up... At the peak of the bubble, 97% of the fiber that had been laid in America was dark." "Contrast that with today. There are no dark GPUs. All you have to do is read any technical paper, and one of the biggest problems in a training run is that GPUs are melting." @GavinSBaker Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter a16z @a16z Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they now face the opposite problem: "It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us." "In 1999, bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it. It was very hard to get it. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001, it was $50 a megabit... And if you borrowed money to get it, you're dead." "That kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur." "I think the core dynamic of AI has been working for CoreWeave, though, in that there's a massive shortage, not an overage of supply... Token prices have gone down, but GPU prices have not." "And by the way, data center space is going up in price because even labor to build data centers is hard. The politics are making it hard to build data centers. So the whole supply chain price is going up and demand is not subsiding." "Those are very big tailwinds for CoreWeave, despite the fact that the debt markets, kind of independent of them, are tough." @bhorowitz w/ @chamath on @allinpod Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter 🔗 View Quoted Tweet 💬 15 🔄 6 ❤️ 51 👀 10589 📊 16 ⚡
