Jup.

And the Panama and Suez Canals are STILL incredibly important to global shipping, greatly shortening trade routes where rail or road simply isn’t an alternative

Western Canada might not exist if it hadn’t been for canals.

After the war of 1812, Canada / Britain (there wasn’t really a separate Canada at that point) decided there needed to be a way to get military supplies and equipment to Fort York (Toronto) and west of there without using the St. Lawrence river. The river had a number of issues, but the biggest one was that the US controlled the southern shore. So, as a result, it built a canal from Ottawa to Kingston. Montreal to Ottawa was possible with existing rivers, and it was safe to get to Montreal from England without going too close to US territory.

So, the Rideau Canal was built. It connected Bytown (now Ottawa) to Kingston. For about 30 years it was the main way of moving people and supplies to the upper shore of Lake Ontario. After that it was replaced by railroads. But, without all the people who had moved west thanks to the canal and now could buy and sell things, there might not have been the justification to build those railroads.

So, yeah, it got outpaced by technology. But, it was a good idea, and was very useful for a few decades.

Also, many of those canals are now tourist attractions and pleasant natural spaces for residents. Virtually everywhere I’ve travelled where there is a canal, it is now used by people for pleasure boating, or houseboats. Almost always there’s also a nice walking path or bike path next to the canal. Rivers are lovely, but rivers tend to have sloped banks which means there isn’t a natural path that’s right next to the water. With canals, there’s often a man-made edge to the waterway, so you can walk / bike right next to it.

Free Version: Full of Ads

Premium Version: First adertised as Ad Free, then within a few years Full of Ads

Extreme Version: Ad Free for now, but features segregated into additional subscriptions.

Eh, it’s close enough?

If they really wanted to, they could charge for “GPU time” directly. Usage gets a bit complicated with batching and context caching, but its definitely a metric that could be precisely derived.

Don’t get me wrong though. That whole business model is doomed.

The plan is for them to make agentic AI and charge a yearly salary per agent. They are obviously not close to that goal, or you would hear more about it.

There is applications and ways to make money. But competition isn’t hard to come by and profit will be under expectations.

So my expectations is “skill-based programming” will become too expensive as a long-term solution and people who went that route will quickly become uncompetitive.

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Pretty much all cloud compute is charged by usage (CPU time, storage, ingress, egress, class X api calls, etc), and is notoriously unpredictable. Businesses deal with it because, despite the unpredictability, it is cheaper than any other model could viably be offered at.

Consumer facing products will likely adopt different models; but “AI” is not a product, and most AI products will be bought by businesses.

Depends on whether the AI boom is like the canal boom (fizzled), or the railroad boom (still going, arguably underinvested).

It’s so narrow and shallow.

They are saying AI is a boom, we are building infrastructure for something that we will look back on as a quaint unfulfilled pipedream.