quote: Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of America's fiber sat dark, and today there are no dark GPUs. "I had, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a tech investor during the year 2000 bubble, which was really a telecom bubble." "The year 2000 bubble was defined by something called 'dark fiber.' Dark fiber was literally fiber that was laid down in the ground, and not lit up... At the peak of the bubble, 97% of the fiber that had been laid in America was dark." "Contrast that with today. There are no dark GPUs. All you have to do is read any technical paper, and one of the biggest problems in a training run is that GPUs are melting." @GavinSBaker | Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they now face the opposite problem: "It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us." "In 1999, bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it. It was very hard to get it. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001, it was $50 a megabit... And if you borrowed money to get it, you're dead." "That kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur." "I think the core dynamic of AI has been working for CoreWeave, though, in that there's a massive shortage, not an overage of supply... Token prices have gone down, but GPU prices have not." "And by the way, data center space is going up in price because even labor to build data centers is hard. The politics are making it hard to build data centers. So the whole supply chain price is going up and demand is not subsiding." "Those are very big tailwinds for CoreWeave, despite the fact that the debt markets, kind of independent of them, are tough." @bhorowitz w/ @chamath on @allinpod