Talking With Paul Kedrosky - Paul Krugman
full of useful and juicy nuggets, e.g. on GPU failures due to thermal stress: "So let’s aggregate up. Imagine you had a 10,000 or even a 20,000 GPU data center. You should expect on the statistics a chip to fail about every 3 or 4 hours. So long before I get to the point where I’m rapidly turning these over because there’s a new generation of chips, I’m turning over a vast chunk of my chips just because they’re failing under thermal stress."; "TSMC now is something like 15% of Taiwan’s GDP" (!!); "the U.S. has been very good at speculative bubbles. This is one of our main core competencies here. They tend to be about real estate, or... technology, or... loose credit, and sometimes they even have a government role with respect to some kind of perverse incentive that was created. This is the first bubble to have all four.... The sum of all bubbles"; "[Like shale wells], it’s an extractive resource economy in surprising ways. So not just in terms of the... declining return from the GPUs themselves, but also the declining return... of these giant training sets that allowed us to scale up the so-called scaling laws for large language models...." also it's adorable that Paul Krugman thought that GPU stands for "general processing unit"