AI is starting to feel a bit like the Mind Flayer

I keep thinking about AI infrastructure like the Mind Flayer in Stranger Things. Not because I think AI is some kind of evil hive mind, calm down, but because of the shape of the thing.

You see ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, some image generator, a chatbot bolted onto an app you already use. That's the visible tendril. Small, contained, sitting right in front of you.

Behind that tendril is something enormous: data centres, racks of GPUs, energy contracts, cooling systems, networking, training runs that take weeks, supply chains for chips that stretch across multiple countries. The product you actually touch is a tiny fraction of what has to exist to make it work.

Every new AI feature feels like another little tendril connecting back into the same underlying system, and the system keeps getting bigger to support more of them.

The question I find more interesting than 'what can AI do' is 'what do we have to build, power, and maintain to make this available everywhere, all the time, to everyone.' That's a much less flashy question and I think it matters more.

Anyway. Tiny visible endpoint, enormous invisible mass underneath. Somewhere, Will Byers is trying to explain this to his mum.