<story><title>Building Meta&apos;s GenAI infrastructure</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineering/building-metas-genai-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dougdonohoe</author><text>Having lived through the dot-com era, I find the AI-era slightly dispiriting because of the sheer capital cost of training models.  At the start of the dot-com era, anyone could spin up an e-commerce site with relatively little infrastructure costs.  Now, it seems, only the hyper-scale companies can build these AI models.  Meta, Google, Microsoft, Open-AI, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>herval</author><text>I’m not sure we went through the same dot-com era, but in my experience, it was extremely expensive to spin up anything. You’d have to run your own servers, buy your own T1 lines, develop with rudimentary cgi… it was a very expensive mess - just like AI today&lt;p&gt;Which gives me hope that - like the web - hardware will catch up and stuff will become more and more accessible with time</text></comment>
<story><title>Building Meta&apos;s GenAI infrastructure</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineering/building-metas-genai-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dougdonohoe</author><text>Having lived through the dot-com era, I find the AI-era slightly dispiriting because of the sheer capital cost of training models.  At the start of the dot-com era, anyone could spin up an e-commerce site with relatively little infrastructure costs.  Now, it seems, only the hyper-scale companies can build these AI models.  Meta, Google, Microsoft, Open-AI, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andy99</author><text>So far it&amp;#x27;s been pretty &amp;quot;democratic&amp;quot; - I feel in no way disadvantaged because I can&amp;#x27;t train a foundation model myself. Actually the ecosystem is a lot better than 25 years ago - there are open source (or source available) versions of basically everything you&amp;#x27;d want to participate in modern AI&amp;#x2F;ML.</text></comment>