Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
Some wild things happening with those, and infrasound. Colossus is shown 4 mins in
But hey, number must go up, right?
This is a joke. Read it in a mocking tone.
Or is there something fundamental in the way these models get deployed (encryption or something or than legal contracts?) at this scale that prohibits the owners of the infra from gaining this level of insight / access?
The contract can stipulate a penalty at a high enough amount to discourage this behavior.
2) Output from models & intra-datacenter communications can be encrypted if customers truly cared.
3) There is no reason do this, because there are far better ways to exfiltrate data from Anthropic models. Chinese companies are already doing this at an industrial scale where they are reselling Claude tokens for 10-20% of the cost while retaining the data to train their own models. https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
If we look at Deepseek V4-pro, created by Deepseek who Anthropic formally accused of harvesting Claude tokens at scale, it performs the same as Claude did 6 months prior.
And I'm sure it's a bonus point for Musk that it goes to OpenAI's most relevant competitor
And frankly as bad as Altman is from a: if AI is really going to disrupt humanity do I want this guy in charge? Elon is 10x worse. So why would the best and the brightest ever work for him?
You can kick off more model training runs and experiments than your competitors.
You can kick off a $1-2t IPO claiming you are going to capture a large portion of the largest TAM the world has ever seen.
Also possible he sees infra as the future of xAI if he really believes in the value of space compute.
Hard to see this any of this as anything other than a bearish sign for Grok though.
I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, but I genuinely believe a big percentage of AI investment revolves around that (or similar) scenarios.
But booking outrageous rental fees as fake AI revenue ahead of the SpaceX IPO apparently takes precedence.
This is all real revenue, real spend, real usage.
Hetzner just aren't at this scale. Not even close. If they wanted to get into this business - first, they're late. Second, it's at a scale of ~10x of their total lifetime datacenter buildout. Third, they'd need to change their business to being one that is debt fronted.
xAI have proven out that being able to deploy compute is a very viable business (and difficult to pull off)
At some point AI cynicism clashes with reality, it must be exhausting maintaining it.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-ipo-anthropic-compute-fin...
Nowhere does the hypothetical state that Hetzner, an example for hardware rental, has the funding or the capabilities to execute the sarcastic example.
But ok, now hardware rentals have a P/E of 100 or more.
And yes, if hetzner built a massive AI hyper scale datacenter and rented it out for billions, with the expectation that they would keep building more, they would also see massive PE ratios because it’s expected that their revenue would be going up.