Utilization Is the Economics
The fixed cost of an AI factory is set on purchase day. Only the useful work it performs can move. That makes goodput, the share of computation that actually advances a result, the number that decides returns, and it is almost never published. Meta's Llama 3 paper is the useful exception: 466 interruptions in a 54-day window, and still more than 90 percent effective training time, because automation and checkpointing made failure cheap. Faraday's read is that an operator's recovery mechanics tell you more about its economics than its chip count does. Ask how often the cluster stops, how fast it restarts and what the pauses do to the power bill.
Knowledge check
What is the difference between allocation, utilization and goodput, and which one matters most to an owner?
Show the answer
Allocation is the share of accelerators assigned to a job; utilization is the share of their capacity doing arithmetic; goodput is the share of that arithmetic that advances a result and is not lost to failures and redone. Owners care most about goodput, because it is the useful output set against a fixed cost.