Fiber is a decades long investment into hardware- one that I would argue we hardly needed. Google fiber started with the question, what would people do with super high speed? The answer was stream higher quality videos and that's about it. In fact, by the time fiber became widespread, many had moved off of PCs to do the majority of their Internet use via cell phones.
With that said, the fiber will be good for many years. None of the LLM models or hardware will be useful in more than a few years, with everything being replaced to newer and better on a continual basis. They're stepping stones, not infrastructure.
We reemplaced one tech that was used by literally the whole world, pair copper wires, with something orders of magnitude better and future proof. My pc literally cant handle the bandwidth of my fiber connection.
In that, it's closest to the semiconductor situation.
Few companies and very few countries have the bleeding edge frontier capabilities. A few more have "good enough to be useful in some niches" capabilities. The rest of the world has to get and use what they make - or do without, which isn't a real option.
zdragnar|5 months ago
With that said, the fiber will be good for many years. None of the LLM models or hardware will be useful in more than a few years, with everything being replaced to newer and better on a continual basis. They're stepping stones, not infrastructure.
yeasku|5 months ago
We did not need it? Did you ever used DSL?
What is AI replacing? People?
lomase|5 months ago
Even the smallest and poorest countries in the world invested in their fiber networks.
Only China and the US have money to create models.
ACCount37|5 months ago
Few companies and very few countries have the bleeding edge frontier capabilities. A few more have "good enough to be useful in some niches" capabilities. The rest of the world has to get and use what they make - or do without, which isn't a real option.