this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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By your own definition, then AI is now the internet. Prompts and outputs are the cars and trucks, while the data centers and models are the highway. 70% of the internet is running on data centers and models. What makes more of something, 30% or 70%?
Not even. The internet is the highway. The datacenters running the internet are the department of transportation. Average internet users are the compact hybrids, EVs, and cyclists who use the road. Prompts and outputs are the couriers driving various kinds of vehicles. AI datacenters are the giant trucks with smokestacks that smokescreen all the old grannies behind them.
The prompts and outputs traveling over the internet consume a negligible amount of energy. The bulk of it is consumed by training giant LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters. A lesser portion is consumed by the inferencing those models do to produce outputs, which is done at the AI datacenters, and not what travels over the internet via internet datacenters.
You’ve misunderstood. AI datacenters are not the highway. Prompts and Outputs are the cars and trucks, the AI data centers are the factories making the cars. The highway is datacenters and transmission media that do not house AI and do not require the immense cooling or power that the AI datacenters use. The highway and the things on the highway are two entirely decoupled things.
human transportation in the abstract is the internet
data is people
data packets / rates (related tech) are the various vehicle types
there was a time of no highways, what need do horse drawn carriages have for paved asphalt?
highways are a direct though not immediate consequence of American car and civic planning policy
if instead we had focused on mixed use walkable cities with connected mass transit instead of urban sprawl highways would be much reduced if not gone, just look at existing examples in eu etc
so yes American cars and every nuance that implies in our current American reality are fucking highways
Incorrect. Let me help you out here:
Human transportation in the abstract is computer networking in the abstract.
The highway is the internet, the current physical implementation of the computer networking transportation system we call The Internet.
You can go into minute detail on what the cars and trucks are, horse drawn carriages, people etc, but ultimately, the internet is the highway. It is separate from and fundamentally not responsible for what you choose to put on it.
my whole fucking point is that roads in the US didn't start with highways
highways in the US came about because of American car culture and fossil fuel policy
so American cars are American highways as far as how intertwined they are, this idea is so old it is literally a plot point in fucking Roger Rabbit
the internet today isn't the internet 5 years ago, you the end personal user is no longer the focus of the infrastructure in the same way no one gives a shit about the horse drawn buggy
the internet we have now is designed for bots, you can thank google and meta and the like
it has accelerated to ludicrous speeds this year if you are paying attention and dead internet theory already had shit pegged as high as in the 60s before the ai boom