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Where Compute Cost Kills And Why Band Aids Will Not Save Us

Full name
11 Jan 2022
5 min read

The Bill That Decides Who Survives

Training GPT-3 once consumed enough electricity to power 120 U.S. homes for a year. Inference now burns through that much energy every single week.

The story is no longer just about breakthroughs. It is about bills. And across industries those bills are reshaping margins, business models, and entire markets.

Finance: When Compute Eats Its Own Margins

Trading firms run models at millisecond speed on oceans of data. The result is monthly power bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, before they even think about refreshing hardware.

Compute can predict markets, but it is devouring margins.

Healthcare: Innovation Choked by Cloud Bills

Medical imaging and drug discovery rely on enormous training runs. Hospitals and startups often discover their cloud bills outpace their research budgets.

The bottleneck is not data or talent. It is the invoice.

Gaming: The Success That Bankrupts

Games that promise infinite worlds and lifelike characters sound like the future of entertainment. But when millions of players log on at once, every interaction carries a real compute cost.

Some studios learn the hard way. Viral success brings hosting bills that explode faster than revenue. In gaming, success can bankrupt you faster than failure.

Search: The End of Cheap Queries

Search used to cost fractions of a cent per query. Generative systems made it ten to one hundred times more expensive. Microsoft admitted it plainly: from now on the gross margin of search is going to drop forever.

Search just became smarter and instantly less profitable.

The Band Aid Problem

The industry keeps reaching for band aids. Quantize the model. Distill it smaller. Rent GPUs on the spot market. Shuffle workloads between clouds.

Each slows the bleeding. None touch the underlying wound. These tricks make balance sheets look tidier for a quarter, but the economics keep breaking underneath.

We are putting band aids on a hemorrhage of compute cost.

The Real Solution

The race is no longer about the biggest model, but about the cheapest intelligence per watt and per dollar.

The future is not won by stockpiling hardware, but by making intelligence affordable everywhere, in every industry, at every scale.

Compute costs are rising faster than returns. Band aids will not save us.

The winners of the next era will not be the companies that simply add more capacity. They will be the ones who make intelligence affordable, sustainable, and available at scale.

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