infrastructure
Building the large physical things -- reservoirs, roads, pipelines -- and why some countries have stopped being able to.
FilterEveryone, all time111 from 63 people
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Their wordsBut whatever the correct numbers are, the basic point remains the same: AI is now one of the two biggest infrastructure booms in American history, by a large margin.
- 6 days earlier
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO
Our readingA new kind of economy is being born where agents purchase infrastructure products and services.
Their wordsIt's incredible to watch a new kind of economy be born. Agents purchasing infrastructure products and services.
- 1 day earlier
- DT
Derek Thompson quoted
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra…
Their wordsAs a share of the economy, this is the most expensive infrastructure project since the 19th century railroads.
↗The 26 Most Important Facts About AI and the Economyderekthompson.org
- 2 days earlier
- KJ
Katelyn Jetelina quoted
Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March…
Their wordsAll of this underscores something so important: Biosecurity and public health are essential infrastructure investments, not “nice to haves.”
- NL
Nathan Lambert quoted
Machine-learning researcher on open language models
Their wordsThe leading proponents of this new wave of open-weight fear mongering have effectively been making a falsifiable prediction — that the current open-weight models are going to cause substantial, not seen before AI harms by crippling our cyber infrastructure. Based on all the evidence I have, which I’ve unpacked above, they’re set up to be wrong.
- SA
Scott Alexander quoted
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten
Their wordsBut of course humans will grant AI access to infrastructure and factories. I assume many factory managers are already using GPT or Claude on their computers to do basic tasks (like write up the shift schedule, or make inventory spreadsheets, or compose emails to the boss). Once AI can do harder work, like automate the factory itself, they’ll do that too.
- 10 days earlier
- AR
Armin Ronacher quoted
Creator of Flask and Jinja
Their wordsAustria was late 30 years with mass car ownership, 15 years with modern water infrastructure, 7 years for railways, 16 years for electric trams, 12 years late for diesel railways and 40 years with electric city lights. Just to set the expectations vis-a-vis AI here :)
- 8 days earlier
- BD
Brad DeLong quoted
Economics professor at the University of California
Their wordsChokepoint risk does more than spike the spot price for a season. It re-prices geography permanently: it redirects the next decade of pipeline and terminal investment and hands a windfall to whoever sits on the alternative route.
↗CROSSPOST: SPENCER ACKERMAN: Fanute The Houthi Coupbraddelong.substack.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 days earlier
- BD
Brad DeLong quoted
Their wordsThe usual default math assumes debtors want to pay. But founder-controlled firms with a "you lent us too much" attitude introduce a strategic-default option that standard systems of ratings do not fully capture.
↗DataCenter Risk Is the Real Thing: CHART OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 2 days earlier
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer
Their wordsAgentic infra became its own discipline inside many tech companies (often existing infra teams "morphing" into AI infra teams)
- 1 day earlier
- TL
Tobias Lütke quoted
Co-founder and CEO of Shopify
Their wordsThe best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
- 3 days earlier
- NL
Nathan Lambert quoted
Their wordsI put the probability of complete extinction as being so low it isn't worth discussing, but the probabilities of AI caused disasters - e.g. cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or bio-risks - as being worth debating.
↗One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfireinterconnects.ai 1st of 3 in this piece
- 3 days earlier
- BM
Bill McKibben quoted
Writer and climate campaigner
Their wordsBuilding clean energy is much more likely, and much more effective, if we're also shutting down dirty energy.
↗Facts on the groundbillmckibben.substack.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 days earlier
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World
Their wordsSupplying drinking and household water through desalination is really quite cheap, and uses far less energy than I’d have guessed.
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Their wordsReservoirs are not automatically cheaper than desalination plants.
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Their wordsThe problem is that reserving desalination for emergency situations does not seem to work well.
- 1 day earlier
- TS
Tara Seshan quoted
Product lead for ChatGPT Work at OpenAI
Their wordsbut a lot of it is also just really tactical like data access like cloud infrastructure and reliability pieces that feel um yeah, they feel much more prosaic than some of the the broader intelligence questions, but matter in some ways just as much for end effectiveness.
↗AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead)youtube.com 7th of 17 in this recording
- 2 days earlier
- MW
Matt Webb quoted
British designer and technologist
Their wordsSoftware has changed forever. We need more APIs (like WeatherKit) and underlying reliable databases with high-level operators (like whatever powers Photos or Reminders) and identity/permissions/etc, and that's what an OS will have to include in the future.
↗New app: Yesterday, an iPhone app for yesterday’s weatherinterconnected.org 1st of 3 in this piece
- 2 days earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals
Their wordsLinux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.
↗DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501youtube.com 32nd of 41 in this recording
- 8 days earlier
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Their wordsIf the UK is to survive water-starved summers in the future, it will need to build more reservoirs and plug holes in our existing pipelines at the same time.
↗The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Our readingBritain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs
Their wordsI think Britain has a real problem with building almost anything, from train lines to houses, and reservoirs to energy infrastructure.
↗The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Their wordsThere is also a clear rationale for why privatisation would lead to a drought in reservoir-building.
↗The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com
- 4 days earlier
- DS
Daniel Stenberg quoted
Swedish open source developer
Their wordsThis is basically impossibly to accomplish using most cloud infrastructure since those are almost always shared with countless other users.
- 3 days earlier
- DT
Derek Thompson quoted
Their wordsThis is the biggest and fastest-growing infrastructure project of our lifetimes.
↗The Great American AI Rebellionderekthompson.org 1st of 2 in this piece
- 4 days earlier
- AL
Alon Levy quoted
Mathematician turned transport researcher
Their wordselectrification in Germany is usually bundled with other projects that end up costing that in total
↗Electrification Costs and Confounderspedestrianobservations.com 1st of 2 in this piece
- AL
Alon Levy quoted
Their wordsone should never apportion the cost of the RER or Stammstrecke tunnels to the cost of surface electrification
↗Electrification Costs and Confounderspedestrianobservations.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- MH
Max Hodak quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Science
Their wordsAnd so speed determines success and failure and speed is determined by infrastructure. This is driven by really boring sounding things like how well do your purchasing and recruiting and spending processes work. This is as important as how well do you understand understand the object level technical content of the thing that you're building.
↗Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com 10th of 22 in this recording
- MH
Max Hodak quoted
Their wordsIt's like it's it's uncommon that these deep tech companies that fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because once you end up with this organization of hundreds of people and thousand hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical infrastructure, you haven't built the systems to manage that.
↗Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com 11th of 22 in this recording
- 4 days earlier
- JC
Jack Clark quoted
Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic
Their wordsThe future internet is going to be more like a complex ecology full of attacker and defender AI agents than anything else; research like this shows how certain AI agents might end up carving out their own ecological niches, living off of infrastructure and self-replicating autonomously, beyond human control.
↗Import AI 467: Self-sustaining AI viruses; pacing AI progress; confusion about AI and creativityjack-clark.net 1st of 3 in this piece
- 3 days earlier
- AW
Adam Wiggins quoted
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku
Their wordsTechnologies from our community - CRDTs, sync engines, universal version control, and good old-fashioned open protocols and file formats - can give a nation more independence and control over its own critical software infrastructure.
↗Politics and emotion at Local-First Confadamwiggins.com 1st of 2 in this piece