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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Technology
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Yeah and the point is that model improvements so far have meant making huge increases in size, which offsets the datacenters scale out.
The whole point is that this is futile because we will always be playing catch-up to model sizes, to our ultimate downfall. The tech needs to be smarter not larger. That’s why the whole cloud AI business is shit and not going to work. as anyone with a brain has been saying from the beginning.
Jesus Christ man, people’s homes are being sized with eminent domain for this shit. It ain’t worth it.
This is only true if everyone is always using the top line model, which most people don't. Both because most people just use the default, which is a low or mid tier model, and because it's expensive. The top line models are becoming increasingly niche.
I agree, that's why more focus is being put on the harness and agent orchestration these days. You can achieve better results by having a large model orchestrate a bunch of smaller model agents to do simpler tasks then trying to have the large model one shot it. This doesn't mean the whole cloud AI business is bullshit, they're still going to need to build out a lot of capacity for these smaller models and still going to need large models to handle the planning and orchestration, it just means the call count for these larger models are going to be lower.
So it's probably not going to be 1 million calls to a small model turns into 1 million calls to a larger model and the capacity never catches up, it's going to be 1 million calls to a small model and 1,000 to a large one which is more feasible to build out.
I don't agree with how the data centers are being rolled out, they can and should be built out with renewable energy and consent from the community which isn't happening. I disagree that data centers shouldn't be built at all or that it will be an unachievable Sisyphusian task to build them out.
The performance per parameter has been improving steadily though. Gemma 4 is ~4o level at a fraction of the parameters.