I can see two potential explanations:

1. Hubris on the part of the tech giants. We already know they’re hubristic, it’s possible that they thought they could actually make it intelligent. (This seems even more likely when you understand the “spiritual” beliefs of the people building the datacenters. The “T” in TESCREAL tells us a lot about how these dumbasses think).

2. Surveillance apparatus of the state. Would the state want to do this? Yes, 100%. Can the state afford to use and maintain this? Absolutely not.

So, I’m personally leaning towards Option 1 with a small side of option 2

The silicon valley mentality involves selling a product before it's useful and sometimes even before it exists. They believe that it will become profitable they just don't know how yet. But if it turns out not to be that profitable then they will try to pass the buck on to the public one way or another.

I think it's simpler, and perhaps even more perverse.

Lemmy often talks about AI as if it's a monolith, but these companies are in competition. No one wants left behind in not having enough compute to keep training and advancing their own models. Also, if they're not building, investors are going to get antsy, thinking that company isn't a serious competitor.

They all know damned well this is a bubble, but they're banking on being the winner that crawls out the blast crater. They're deliberately fucking our economy on the gamble that they alone prevail.

Hacking sort of depends on there being a bug in the targeted infrastructure, a so called exploit, which you can, well, exploit. If you don't have one, all you can do is brute force attacks, which are impractical, no matter how much you're willing to invest. You may want a high end llm looking for vulnerabilities, but the enemy probably doesn't have enough stuff to justify using more than a handful of those. And you'd want those computers running in underground bunkers, not in exposed data centers on the surface.

The whole data center build out only serves to excite investors. It's a waste of resources in every other regard. A symptom of late-stage capitalism.