"JPMorgan calculated last fall that the tech industry must collect an extra $650 billion in revenue every year — three times the annual revenue of AI chip giant Nvidia — to earn a reasonable investment return. That marker is probably even higher now because AI spending has increased."
That pretty much tells you how this will end, right there.
It tells you that 500 million people will be paying $60-$80/mo for AI. Something they find as indispensable as a cell phone or internet bill.
The numbers actually work really well, (un)fortunately.
Nvidia invests $100bn in OpenAI, who buy $100bn of Nvidia chips, who invest the $100bn revenue in OpenAI, who buy $100bn in Nvidia chips, and round it goes. That's an easy $600bn increase in tech industry revenue right there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37395566
Mass layoffs and the wellness camp industry will easily account for $600+ billion a year in contracts, for at least a few years.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/rfk-wellness-farms-us-disabi...
Someone in management read and misunderstood "The Velocity of Money" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money)?
Or understood way too well. I promise it isn't Altman that will be left destroyed or jobless if this crashes.
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Smells like "Banco Master" (Brazil) scandal.
investment is not revenue tho... this is equivalent to nvidia buying its own chips...
It is equivalent under scrutiny, but casually looking the books and seeing Nvida making a sale to Nvida sticks out like a sore thumb a lot more than Nvida making a sale to OpenAI. The latter is much more likely to pass as revenue.
Either Nvidia eventually runs out of chips for OpenAI to buy or OpenAI runs out of equity Nvidia can buy.
Total US GDP is ~31 trillion, so that's only like 5%. I think it's conceivable that AI could result in ~5% of GDP in additional revenue. Not saying it's guaranteed, but it's hardly an implausible figure. And of course it's even less considering global GDP.
Yup. If you follow the links to the original JP Morgan quote, it's not crazy:
> Big picture, to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of annual revenue into perpetuity, which is an astonishingly large number. But for context, that equates to 58bp of global GDP, or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...
> or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...
As a current iPhone user, I'm not signing up for that especially if it is on top of the monthly cell service fee.
I do realize though that you were trying to provide useful context.
But think about it this way: something simple like Slack charges $9/month/person and companies already pay that on many behalf. How hard would it be to imagine all those same companies (and lots more) would pay $30/month/employee for something something AI? Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.
> Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.
I agree, and would add that it’s contributing to inflation in hard assets.
Basically:
* it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today
* if you have a billion to spend, and you agree, you will be inclined to put your wealth into hard assets, because AI depends on them
In a really abstract way, the world is not responsible for feeding a new class of workers: robots.
And robots consume electricity, water, space, and generate heat.
Which is why those sectors are feeling the affects of supply and demand.
> * it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today
If AI makes workers more productive, labor will have higher value than it has today. Which specific workers are winning in that scenario may vary tremendously, of course, but I don't think anyone is seriously claiming AI will make everyone less productive.
The value of labor i.e. wages depend on labor demand (the marginal product of labor) and bargaining power, not output per worker. If AI is a substitute for many tasks, the marginal value of an additional worker, and what a company is willing to pay for their work can fall even if each remaining worker is more productive.
The world IS responsible for handling the people. Thats the whole fucking reason we made society to take care of children. Nothing is inevitable. It serves the interests of the few.
"The world" isn't responsible for anything. The world simply exists, and owes you nothing.
What your describing is a low trust society. If you disregard the social contract like that, then people wont owe the "the world" anythign either. Collaboration and civics goes out the window. If you want to look at what kind of a shithole that libertarian nonsense leads to, then try taking a stroll in SF at night
humans collectively are responsible for the end results of innovations and achievements , otherwise who are you doing all this for. Wars are a extreme form of disagreements amongst a large body of opposing opinions or perspective IMHO. Earth (world!) simply exists, with or without you. You as Byorganism/Byproduct of this planet you have an obligation to this planet in good deeds. Have you not watched Star-Wars?
Most people in the economy do not use Slack. That tool may be most beneficial to those people who stand to lose jobs to AI displacement. Maybe after everyone is pink-slipped for an LLM or AI chatbot tool the total cost to the employer is reduced enough that they are willing to spend part of the money they saved eliminating warm bodies on AI tools and willing to pay a higher per employee price.
I think with a smaller employee pool though it is unlikely that it all evens out without the AI providers holding the users hostage for quarterly profits' sake.
That AI will have to be significantly preferable to the baseline of open models running on cheap third-party inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit of a challenge for the big proprietary firms.
> the baseline of open models running on cheap third-party inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit of a challenge for the big proprietary firms.
It’s not a challenge at all.
To win, all you need is to starve your competitors of RAM.
RAM is the lifeblood of AI, without RAM, AI doesn’t work.
Assuming high bandwidth flash works out, RAM requirements should be drastically reduced as you'd keep the weights in much higher capacity flash.
> Sample HBF modules are expected in the second half of 2026, with the first AI inference hardware integrating the tech anticipated in early 2027.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sandisk-and-sk-hy...
A lot of iPhone users will be given a subscription via their job. If they still have a job at that point.
This is true though I think even if the employer provides all this on a per employee basis, the number of eligible employees, after everyone who stands to lose a job because of a shift to AI tools, will be low enough that each employee will need to add a lot of value for this to be worth it to an employer so the stated number is probably way too low. Ordinary people may just migrate from Apple products to something that is more affordable or, in the extreme case, walk away from the whole surveillance economy. Those people would not buy into any of this.
Why are they not getting the iPhones paid by employers now?
It could be priced into your appstore purchases like apple 30% cut is and you wouldn't notice.
Why you even said you wouldn’t subscribe? It’s not relevant in the slightest.
Personally I would be astonished if LLMs percolating through the global economy doesn’t give a 50bp bump from here on out.
Even if scaling hit a wall, commoditizing what we have now would do it. We have so much scaffolding and organizational overhang with the current models, it’s crazy.
Agreed. Applying the intelligence we already have more broadly will have a huge impact. That's been true for a while now, and it keeps getting more true as models keep getting better.
It's conceivable to us working in white collar knowledge jobs where our input and output is language. Will it also make 5% more homes built by a carpenter?
It might provide cover to lay off more than 5% of us (the LLM can create a work-like text product that, as far as upper management can tell, is indistinguishable from the real thing!), then we will have to go find jobs swinging hammers to build houses. Well, somebody’s got to do it.
That seems pretty reasonable, yes. That is like asking if putting a low-cost Ops Research specialist in every company could make a 5% difference in operations - yes it could. Making resource-efficient decisions is not something that comes naturally to humans and having a system that consistently makes high quality game-theoretic recommendations would be huge.
Bunch of tiny companies would love to hire a mathematician to optimise what they are doing to get a 5-10% improvement. Unfortunately a 5-10% improvement in a small business can't justify the cost of hiring another person, and good mathematicians with business sense and empathy are a rare commodity.
If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know anything about residential construction. The problems that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues, corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.
The first 2 are very LLM amenable, the last 3 are very mathematical-solution amenable (optimising around issues like that is basically what Ops Research does). I don't see what your argument is here.
The list of people claiming that maths won't work who then get bulldozed by mathematicians is long.
How will the LLM bypass the corrupt government official?
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Lots of jobs like daycare, teachers, cleaning, the material costs are near zero and your ability to increase productivity using technology is very low.
You can reduce quality of cleaning. But it's very hard to clean faster and better at the same time.
These industries are not going to be optimized by an AI. The only optimization is lower overhead or lower salaries.
Sure, we could have robots in daycare, but I don't think lack of AI is why my wife would have concerns :)
Of course there's jobs that don't have a productivity boost from AI. The question is whether across the entire economy there will be a 5% GDP boost.
Teachers, cleaners, and daycare workers may see 0% gains, but don't be surprised if that is made up for by 10% gains the productivity of tech, law, marketing, advertising, manufacturing, government, etc. (okay maybe not government).
Have you ever seen US GDP go up 5% yearly for several years?
That’s the bet! last time we had that growth was for a few years during the dotcom, followed by a lost decade of growth in tech stocks
Doesn't have to go up. It's also fine if they replace other parts of the economy.
In the expenditures for the economy making up GDP, not a lot of it screams “AI-able.” Page 9 here breaks down GDP on expenditure basis.
https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/gdp3q25-upda...
Given how much of the spending is hard goods and simply not AI-able (rent, most of housing new construction, most of other goods, most health care, much of other services), the replacement theory would require a massive displacement.
exactly.
The quote is about a one-time increase in growth of 5 percentage points. Not multiple years or forever.
Or obviously it can be spread out, e.g. ~1% additional increase over 5 years.
It cannot be sustained with just one-time growth. Capital always has to grow, or it will decrease. If this bubble actually manages to deliver interest, this will lead to the bubble growing even larger, driving even more interest.
China did it. It’s not inconceivable.
China’s GDP per capita fell for the first 40 years of CCP rule, making it way easier to have constant growth after that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_(191...
Developed countries have slow growth because they need to invent the improvements not just copy what works from other countries.
The chart you listed is for the years before the CCP won the civil war in 1949. But agreed that many of the problems overcome were also problems that were created after the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist-controlled_China_(19...
Starting at 1949 is overly generous IMO, but yes the purges that followed didn’t help.
Japan controlled much more of China than the communists did before 1945. And having half your country occupied is bad for GDP. You made a mistake and believed some propaganda here.
In 1979, median income in China was $100 USD a year.
In 1979, median income in the US was $16,530 USD a year.
Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
Did China really do it though? We can clearly see that China has achieved huge economic growth since Deng Xiaoping took control. But the specific numbers can't be attempted to be believed. Communist Party officials at every level heavily manipulate the official economic data to meet their annual goals and no independent auditing is allowed.
Yeah but China actively works in the best interest of their entire population.
Huh? No they don’t.
In what way? Bring some substance instead of a vague rebuttal
They're for those within the population that are willing to submit themselves to the whim of the state and whose prosperity in some way directly benefits the oligarchs that run the state.
Certainly, as just a few examples, they are not for the well-being of the Uyghar population or pro-democracy activists or journalists investigating human rights violation or supporters of Tibetan independence.
Oh and Covid, don’t forget Covid.
The population's best interest is to never get COVID
So for that GDP gotta show growth of over 5% extra to other growth sources (so total yearly growth will be pretty high). I doubt this will materialise
You're saying that the entire increase in US GDP goes into the pockets of like 5 companies.
Or we’re seeing a world where corporations dwarf countries.
Apple will be around in a hundred years.
Will the USA?
Tech companies never last. Apple will miss a disruptive innovation or make a key strategic error causing them to lose their dominant spot. Look at the top tech companies 50 years ago: how are they doing today?
There is exactly 0.00% chance Apple will be around in 50 years let alone 100.
Is like the transition from monarchies to nation states.
By the 19th century, the rise of nation-states accelerated due to the spread of nationalism, the decline of feudal structures, and the unification of countries like Germany (1871) and Italy (1861). Centralized governments, uniform laws, national education systems, and a sense of collective identity became defining features. The French Revolution (1789) played a pivotal role by promoting citizenship, legal equality, and national sovereignty over dynastic rule
Maybe in 2300 they'll say something similar about nationalism
I love HN, you can't get stuff like this anywhere else, the DKE from posters here - you can't get it anywhere else!
The future is not looking bright at all....
I only have a meme to describe what we are facing https://imgur.com/a/xYbhzTj
> The future is not looking bright at all....
The tech industry going through a boom and settling back down at a higher place than before isn't the end of the world. They all start merging together soon.
I am more afraid if AI will actually deliver what CEOs are touting. People that are now working will be unemployable and will have to pivot to something else, overcrowding these other sectors and driving wages down.
If that comes to pass you will work the same or more for less money than now.
Basically jump back to a true plutocracy since only a few people will syphon the wealth generated by AI and that wealth will give them substantial temporal power.
This is basically just a standard cliche doomer prediction about any new development.
I mean, I just dont see any evidence of that happening. TBF I'm a SWE so I can only speak to that segment, but its literally worse than useless for working with anything software related thats non-trivial...
There has never been an industry that does that consistently (that wasn't government subsidised at least).
We got lucky with the dotcom bubble.
There's no guarantee of anything, and it's totally possible for the industry to collapse and stay that way.
They got the current administration to ban state level regulation for them. Not to mention various defense contracts. They are government subsidized.
I was expecting to see Mark Baum on the phone saying "hey, we're in a bubble".
> I only have a meme to describe what we are facing https://imgur.com/a/xYbhzTj
I don't recognize that cartoon and there's no audio. I'm going to need help with that one.
Make sure you click the unmute button, imgur mutes by default it seems.
Smiling Friends
As someone in the UK for whom that link is blocked, I wonder if that meme is doubly apt.
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> "must collect an extra $650 billion in revenue every year" paired with the idea that automating knowledge work can cause a short-term disruption in the economy doesn't seem logical to me.
I find it funny that Microsoft is scaling compute like crazy and their own products like Copilot are being dwarfed by the very models they wish to serve on that compute.
If 1 or 2 of the 5 big spenders starts having big losses, things will be interesting. Their market caps will be a fraction of the current overinflated values.
Meanwhile Apple is only spending 1 billion a year to use Google's models.
It's crazy to me how many flags are being thrown in this investment spree. Repeating the same mistakes as before (2000). Big companies will be hit hard when they can't show for what they spent shareholders money on. The run will be large and impactful.
If you analyze what's happening right now in the tech industry, you can't help but to think of something deeper than what's being talked about in plain sight. There is a clear panic amongst the large tech firms. the root cause of the panic is still unclear, simply saying these companies want to be the first in this new revolution isn't enough to draw conclusion. Amongst the top tech firms there still sits the original founders whom as we all know changed the way we live life today. Saying they are misunderstanding what's happening right now and they're are foolish, is to simple of an understatement. They of all people in the world would know it's a bad idea to go all in, in this manner. The underlying competing nature of this whether it has to do with China or other competing markets are not being talked about, and not just that " what exactly is the strategy here?"
> They of all people in the world would know it's a bad idea to go all in, in this manner.
Or this kind of financial crash is exactly what they want. If they can drive the markets to failure, only the largest companies can hold on - and acquire more of the failing companies in the process.
Day-by-day it seeming this way. They seem to want to flush out the remaining competitors. dedicators are old news, umbrella corporation(tm) is the new form of totalitarian/authoritarianism.
> Repeating the same mistakes as before (2000).
The issue is that every company in a position to do so is trying to stake a claim in a new market. Not every company will win. No-one has a surefire way of identifying "mistakes" ahead of time.
What alternative do you think would work better, short of central planning?
I run the numbers on hyperscaler AI capex and the math is not going to work out.
With these assumptions:
– Big 4 keep spending at current pace for 3 more years
– Returns only start showing after aprox 2 years
– Heavy competition with around 20% operating margin on AI and Cloud
– Use of 9% cost of capital
This is the current reality:
AWS aprox $142B/yr
Azure aprox $132B/yr
Google Cloud around $71B/yr
Combined its about $330B to $340B annual cloud revenue today
And lets says Global public cloud market of $700B total today.
To justify the current capex trajectory under those assumptions, by year 3 the big hyperscalers would need roughly $800B to $900B in new annual revenue just to earn a normal return on the capital being deployed.
That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))
In other words...Cloud would need to roughly do 4× in a very short window, and the incremental revenue alone would exceed the entire current global cloud market.
So for the investment wave to make financial sense, at least one of these must be true:
1 Cloud/AI spending globally explodes far beyond all prior forecasts
2 AI massively increases revenue/profit in ads, software, commerce and not just cloud
3 A winner takes all outcome where only 1 or 2 players earn real returns
4 Or a large share of this capex never earns an economic return and is defensive
People keep modeling this like normal cloud growth. But what we have is insanity
> That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))
You’re ignoring the fact that gaming is going to the cloud.
That industry is bigger than Hollywood.
Desktop computers will invariably follow.
The RAM shortage will drive the transition.
For instance, my wife uses her personal laptop about four days a year.
People like that won’t be buying personal desktops or laptops, five years from now. The RAM shortage will drive a transition into thin clients.
I already see it with our kids. They use an iPhone, unless they need to type. Then they use an iPad with a BT keyboard.
Cloud gaming is crap and any actual gamer will tell you that. The niche of gamers casual enough to not care about playing over network latency but serious enough to pay real money for cloud gaming is microscopic.
It's not 2023 anymore. Have you tried cloud gaming in 2026? I can barely tell it's connected to the cloud.
Yes, it's amazing because it's streaming directly from a computer in the room behind me. :)
What amount of the gaming industry do you think will go to AI providers and not game developers?
You think we'll replace gaming and desktop computers into the cloud in the timeline of the poster above (2-4 years?)
Just not realistic.
Even if gaming goes to the cloud, how are they going to run the massive existing library of video games on the dedicated AI inference hardware that everyone is buying right now? Seems like that pivot would require even more spending.
And how are they going to get sub-5ms round trip latency into the average consumer’s home to avoid people continuing to see cloud gaming as a janky gimmick that feels bad to use?
Azure revenue is growing at 39% year over year. If Microsoft can sustain this growth, in four years Azure will be ~3.73x its current size. This is of course very difficult, but you really don’t need a deus ex machina to hit 4x growth under your assumptions.
The issue in the late-90s was all the investment created a lot of real revenue for telecoms and other companies. Even though there were a lot of shenanigans with revenue, a lot of real money was spent on fiber and tech generally.
But the real money was investment that didn’t see a return for the investor. The investments needed to have higher final consumption (such as through better productivity or through displacing other costs) to pay back the investment.
I read "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation" last year, and the current AI bubble is like getting a front row seat to the next edition being written.
The really stupid bubbles end up getting themselves metastasized into the public retirement system, I'm just waiting for that to start any day now.
> The really stupid bubbles end up getting themselves metastasized into the public retirement system, I'm just waiting for that to start any day now.
Not sure what you mean exactly but every single 401k is tied into this.
The question is not "is it a bubble". Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment. The question is "will this bubble lay the foundation for growth and destroy some value when it pops, or will it only destroy value"
https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/is-it-a-bubble
Pretty good article until the bizarre post-script where they fall back on the tired "people derive meaning from their work" for why UBI is bad.
Meaning or not, UBI doesn't work because the math doesn't work.
> bizarre
It isn't bizarre at all. Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
I remember summer vacations from school. It was great for a while, but soon I was looking forward to getting back to school.
> Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
I have no problem finding fulfilling and meaningful projects outside of my work! There are many people like me :)
> There are many people like me
I'm sure there are. Doesn't mean most people are like that. Consider retirees. Some find meaningful activities, many just rot away out of not having a purpose.
What percentage of people currently living off of welfare are doing meaningful work?
I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been doing so many projects, and exploring so many places, working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.
Best wishes to you! I'm retired myself, but I work full time (on D). Yale is hosting a symposium on D in April, and I'll be a speaker at it.
>Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
Some people might, others wouldn't. Not everyone is a pot-smoking teenager.
People like ice cream, too. But not everyone.
Your anecdote is not compliant with reality. Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.
There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.
I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.
I suspect it was because the UBI wasn't enough to live on.
Hard working billionaires famous for succesdully working devolved into abuse island, real saltiness over anyone saying sexual harrasment is wrong and basically conspiracy to end democracy.
UBI guy playing games in moms basement comes accross as harmless in comparison.
governments will collapse before we are at a moment where UBI is needed. Billionaires and companies hardly pay any tax and if white collar jobs die down, there is no guarantee that government will even have money to wipe their butt.
What can we use fields of GPUs for next?
AI, obviously! A bubble doesn't mean demand vanishes overnight. There is - at current price points - much more demand than supply. That means the market can tolerate price hikes whilst keeping the accelerators busy. It seems likely that we're still just at the start of AI demand as most companies are still finding their feet with it, lots of devs still aren't using it at all, lots of business workflows that could be automated with it aren't and so on. So there is scope for raising prices a lot as the high value use cases float to the top, maybe even auctioning tokens.
Let's say tomorrow OpenAI and Anthropic have a huge down round, or whatever event people think would mark the end of the bubble. That doesn't mean suddenly nobody is using AI. It means they have to rapidly reduce burn e.g. not doing new model versions, laying off staff and reducing the comp of those that remain, hiking prices a lot, getting more serious about ads and other monetized features. They will still be selling plenty of inferencing.
In practice the action is mostly taking place out of public markets. We won't necessarily know what's happening at the most exposed companies until it's in the rear view mirror. Bubbles are a public markets phenomenon. See how "ride sharing"/taxi apps played out. Market dumping for long periods to buy market share, followed by a relatively easy transition to annual profitability without ever going public. Some investors probably got wiped along the way but we don't know who exactly or by how much.
Most likely outcome: AI bubble will deflate steadily rather than suddenly burst. Resources are diverted from training to inferencing, new features slow down, new models are weaker and more expensive than new models and the old models are turned off anyway. That sort of thing. People will call it enshittification but it'll really just be the end of aggressive dumping.
There may not be that much demand at a price that yields profit. Demand at current heavily subsidized “the first dose is always free” prices is not a great indicator unless they find some way to make themselves indispensable for a lot of tasks for a lot of people. So far, they haven’t.
I find myseld using dumber free models more as they reply instantly and keep me learning.
Some local models run well already too and do the job. Not sure if i would pay any money when a discarded mac can run these just fine already.
This may turn out like trying to make people game over streaming.
Yes if/when prices rise there'll be demand destruction but I think demand will keep rising for the foreseeable future anyway even incorporating that. Lower value use cases like vibe coding hobby apps might fall by the wayside because they become uneconomic but the tokens will be soaked up by bigger enterprises that have found ways to properly integrate it at scale into their businesses. I don't mean Copilot style Office plugins but more business-specific stuff that yields competitive advantage.
You’re just repeating their predictions. Investors are starting to get nervous that there’s no real proof these things could justify burning a Mt. Everest sized pile of $100 bills to achieve.
"much more demand than supply"? Demand from who?
The demand from middle managers trying to replace their dev teams with Claude Code, mainly.
Please respect other users of hacker news and don’t generate your replies with LLM
FWIW, GP doesn't look like clanker speak to me. It's a bit too smooth and on-point for that.
I never use LLMs to write for me (except code).
Whatever happened to crypto/blockchain ASICs
Nothing happened to them, they're still around; just consolidated into industrial operations.
The "twist" is they rot as e-waste every 18 months when newer models arrive, generating roughly 30,000 metric tonnes of eWaste annually[0] with no recycling programmes from manufacturers (like Bitmain)... which is comparable to the entire country of the Netherlands.
Turns out the decentralised currency for the people is also an environmental disaster built on planned obsolescence. Who knew.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
Anyone who regularly tries to rent GPUs on VPS providers knows that they often sell out. This isn't a market with lots of capacity nobody needs. In the dot.com bubble there was lots of dark fiber nobody was using. In this bubble, almost every high-end GPU is being used fully by someone.
Heating!
Can they run Crysis?
Ironically, no
We can use the GPUs for research (64-bit scientific compute), 3d graphics, a few other things. We programmers will reconfigure them to something useful.
At least, the GPUs that are currently plugged in. A lot of this bullshit bubble crap is because most of those GPUs (and RAM) is sitting unplugged in a warehouse, because we don't even have enough power to turn all of them on.
So if your question is how to use a GPU... I got plenty of useful non-AI related ideas. But only if we can plug them in.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
> I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
That's my fear.
The problem is these GPUs are specifically made for datacenters, So it's not like your average consumer is going to grab one to put into their gaming PCs.
I also worry about what the pop ends up doing to consumer electronics. We'll have a bunch of manufacturers that have a bunch of capacity that they can no longer use to create products which people want to buy and a huge backstop of second hand goods that these liquidated AI companies will want to unload. That will put chip manufactures in a place where they'll need to get their money primarily from consumers if they want to stay in business. That's not the business model that they've operated on up until this point.
We are looking at a situation where we have a bunch of oil derricks ready to pump, but shut off because it's too expensive to run the equipment making it not worth the energy.
That's fine. Server is where we programmers are best at repurposing things. Just a bunch of always on boxes doing random crap in the background.
Servers can (and do!!) use 10+ year old hardware. Consumers are kind of the weird the ones who are so impatient they need the latest and greatest.
> 3d graphics
Seems like the G in GPU is very obsolete now:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...
> As it turns out Nvidia's H100, a card that costs over $30,000 performs worse than integrated GPUs in such benchmarks as 3DMark and Red Dead Redemption 2
I predict there's going to be a niche opening up for companies to recycle the expensive parts of all these compute hardware that AI companies are currently buying and will probably be obsolete/depreciated/replaced in the next 2-5 years. The easiest example is RAM chips. There will be people desoldering those ICs and putting them on DDR5 sticks to resell to the general consumer market.
It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with to get conventional scientific computing workloads to work on 16 bit or smaller data types. I think there’s some hope but it will require work.
The government is going to use them.
The flock cameras are going to be fed into them.
The bitcoin network will be crashed.
A technological arms race just occurred in front of your eyes for the past 5 years and you think they're going to let the stockpile fall into civilian hands?
In 2 years the next generation chips will be released and th se chips will be obsolete.
That's truly e-waste. Now in practice, we programmers find uses of 10+ year old hardware as cheap webhosta, compiler/build boxes, Bamboo, unit tests, fuzzers and whatever. So as long as we can turn them on we programmers can and will find a use.
But because we are power constrained, when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released (and when those chips use 30% or less power), no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.
I assume even really out of date cards and racks will readily find some use, when the present-day alternative costs ~$100k for a single card. Just have to run them on a low-enough basis that power use is not a significant portion of the overall cost of ownership.
cloud gaming?
It’s too bad they’re all concentrated in buildings, having been hovered up by the billionaire class.
I would love to live in the world where everyone joins a pool for inference or training, and as such gets the open source weights and models for free.
We could call it: FOSS
> Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment
Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."
It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.
> Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."
This is not the definition of a bubble, and is specifically contrary to what i said.
A good bubble, like the automobile industry in the example I linked, paves the way for a whole new economic modalit - but value was still destroyed when that bubble popped and the market corrected.
You may think its better to not have bubbles and limit the maximum economic rate of change (and you may be right), but the current system is not obviously wrong and has benefits.
The trouble is, you can only tell what was "detached from reality" after the fact. Real-world bubbles must be credible by definition, or else they would deflate smoothly rather than growing out of control and then popping suddenly when the original expectations are dashed by reality.
> It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.
... and which forces do you think are the core concept of "the American experiment"?