Intelligence Futures
Epistemic status: informed speculation using only publicly available information OpenAI is about to spend $500 billion on infrastructure they might not need: if researchers aren't ready with experiments, or if demand for intelligence doesn't grow, every unused GPU-hour vanishes forever. Yet there's no futures curve for compute, no market price...
Jul 6, 202513
For compute futures specifically, AI labs who are building their own data centers are on both sides of the equation: they supply the compute (from their data center), but they also consume the compute (their big training runs). So, implicitly, these labs are already forecasting their compute demand, and they are building data centers in anticipation of that demand. So we have empirical evidence that firms can forecast compute needs.
I do agree with the general sentiment that maybe demand for compute/intelligence feels less predictable than say electricity, but it feels like the uncertainty is mostly right tailed, e.g. I know I will need at least this much compute / intelligence, but there is a chance that I need 10x more than that.