You are already paying for several national lab HPC centers. These are used for government/university research - no idea if commercial interests can rent time on them. The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on.

The biggest run classified nuclear stockpile loads, at least in the US. They cost about half a billion apiece. And are 30 (carefully cooled and cabled) megawatts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan_(supercomputer)

No chance they're going to take risks to share that hardware with anyone given what it does.

The scaled down version of El Capitan is used for non-classified workloads, some of which are proprietary, like drug simulation. It is called Tuolumne. Not long ago, it was nevertheless still a top ten supercomputer.

Like OP, I also don't see why a government supercomputer does it better than hyperscalers, coreweave, neoclouds, et al, who have put in a ton of capital as even compared to government. For loads where institutional continuity is extremely important, like weather -- and maybe one day, a public LLM model or three -- maybe. But we're not there yet, and there's so much competition in LLM infrastructure that it's quite likely some of these entrants will be bag holders, not a world of juicy margins at all...rather, playing chicken with negative gross margins.

>The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on.

these things constitute public goods that benefit the individual regardless of participation.

Many more people materially benefit from e.g. good weather forecasts than form video slop generation.

if datacenters are built by the government, then i think it's fair to assume there will be some level of democratic control of what those datacenters will be used for.

What's the democratic control of existing resources? I would make the opposite assumption, it would be captured by the wealthiest interests.

This is literally the current system... adding more democratic controls is a good thing, the alternative is that only rich control these systems and would you look at it only the rich control these systems.

Uncanny really.

Certainly! Your congress representatives would be voting on how to allocate its computing power. (Do you remember who did you vote for last time?)

Sure. Same for healthcare and education right? If you don't have a child or need medical attention, why should you pay for them?

That's like every government initiative. Same as healthcare? School? I mean if you don't have children why do you pay taxes... and roads if you don't drive? I mean the examples are so many... why do you bring this argument that if it doesn't benefit you directly right now today, it shouldn't be done?

There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all).

What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good?

There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.

Libraries with books are likely considered public goods right?

Why not an LLM datacenter if it also offers information? You could say it's the public library of the future maybe.

Not all libraries are publicly owned or accessible. Most are run by local municipalities because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

Data centers clearly can exist without being owned by the public.

So can bookstores.

a distinction: the data centers have become the means of production, unlike clothing from a store

How is that distinct from any of my other examples which listed factories? Very few factories in the US are publicly owned; citing data centers as places of production merely furthers the argument that they should remain private.

Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.

We gave incentives to broadband, why not generative AI?

Last-mile services like roads, electricity, water, and telecommunications are natural monopolies. Normal market forces fail somewhat and you want some government involvement to keep it running smoothly.

This is not at all true of generative AI.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted because you're right. The entire point of taxation is to spread the cost among everyone, and since everyone doesn't utilise every government service every tax payer ends up paying for stuff they don't use. That like, the whole point...