One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2)
Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
In TX? In Russian blogosphere it is a standard staple that Trump is rushing Ukrainian peace deal to be able to move on to the set of mega-projects with Russia - oil/gas in Arctic and data centers in Russian North-West where electricity and cooling is plentiful and cheap.
actually it is more of the opposition's narrative, probably a way to explain such a pro-Russian position of Trump.
I think any such data center project is doomed to ultimately fail, and any serious investment will be for me a sign of the bubble peak exuberance and irrationality.
""It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said."
Right, THEY can't, but cloud providers potentially can. And there are probably other uses for everything not GPU/TPU for the Google's of the world. They are out way less than IBM which cannot monetize the space or build data centers efficiently like AWS and Google.
The key difference between AI and the initial growth of the web is that the more use cases to which people applied the web, the more people wanted of it. AI is the opposite - people love LLM-based chatbots. But it is being pushed into many other use cases where it just doesn't work as well. Or works well, but people don't want AI-generated deliverables. Or leaders are trying to push non-deterministic products into deterministic processes. Or tech folks are jumping through massive hoops to get the results they want because without doing so, it just doesn't work.
Basically, if a product manager kept pushing features the way AI is being pushed -- without PMF, without profit -- that PM would be fired.
This probably all sounds anti-AI, but it is not. I believe AI has a place in our industry. But it needs to be applied correctly, where it does well. Those use cases will not be universal, so I repeat my initial prediction. It will endure and contract.
In the last month I personally used (as in, it was useful) AI for this:
- LLM-powered transcription and translation made it so I could have a long conversation with my airport driver in Vietnam.
- Helped me turn 5-10x ideas into working code and usable tools as I used to.
- Nano Banana restored dozens of cherished family photos for a Christmas gift for my parents.
- Help me correctly fix a ton of nuanced aria/accessibility issues in a production app.
- Taught/explained a million things to me: difference between an aneurysm/stroke, why the rise of DX12/Vulkan gaming engines killed off nVidia SLI, political/economic/social parallels between 1920s and 2020s, etc...
Maybe everyone isn't using it yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Way too many people find real use every day in a lot of AI products. Just because MS Office Copilot sucks (and it does), doesn't mean it is all useless.
I think you're exaggerating a little, but aren't entirely wrong. The Internet has completely changed daily life for most of humanity. AI can mean a lot of things, but a lot of it is blown way out of proportion. I find LLMs useful to help me rephrase a sentence or explain some kind of topic, but it pales in comparison to email and web browsers, YouTube, and things like blogs.
Don’t even get me started on this. I recently been shopping on eBay for some DDR4 memory. You may think - who’d need this dated stuff besides me? Yet 16Gb 3200Mhz is at least 60$. Which is effectively the price you paid for DDR5 6000. Crazy, right?
For a while with bitcoin, it seemed GPU investing was almost a thing.
I just checked, the kit I bought in February was $270, today it is showing up for $1070. Woof. Now I have to decide if I should keep it on the off chance I do get around to that machine or dump it while the getting is good. Then again, who wants to buy RAM of unknown provenance unless they themselves are looking to scam the seller.
The GPUs, sure. The mainboards and CPUs can be used in clusters for general-purpose computing, which is still more prevalent in most scientific research as far as I am aware. My alma mater has a several-thousand-core cluster that any student can request time on as long as they have reason to do so, and it's all CPU compute. Getting non-CS majors to write GPU code is unlikely in that scenario.
I provide infrastructure for such a cluster that is also available to anyone at the university free of charge. Every year we swap out the oldest 20% of the cluster as we run a five year depreciation schedule. In the last three years, we’ve mostly been swapping in GPU resources at a ration of about 3:1. That’s in response to both usage reports and community surveys.
It wasn't an 'it' it was a 'some'. Some of these companies that are investing massively in data centers will fail.
Right now essentially none have 'failed' in the sense of 'bankrupt with no recovery' (Chapter 7). They haven't run out of runway yet, and the equity markets are still so eager, even a bad proposition that includes the word 'AI!' is likely to be able to cut some sort of deal for more funds.
But that won't last. Some companies will fail. Probably sufficient failures that the companies that are successful won't be able to meaningfully counteract the bursts of sudden supply of AI related gear.
That's all the comment you are replying to is implying.
Given the amounts being raised and spent, one imagines that the ROI will be appalling unless the pesky humans learn to live on cents a day, or the world economy grows by double digits every year for a few decades.
If the entire world economy starts to depend on those companies, they would pay off with "startup level" ROI. And by "startup level" I mean the amounts bullish people say startups funds can pay (10 to 100), not a bootstrapped unicorn.
Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype