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Comment by forgetfulness | Hacker News Reader

If gen AI companies and gen AI initiatives within major players start shutting down, there might be a glut of graphics card flooding the market, though the supply might fuel another crypto bubble, so NVIDIA may not be in trouble after all thanks to market irrationality.

And I blame squarely business majors for their blind faith in assets whose price goes up with no explanation, they are the ones who always push the hardest for adoption of these fads with no understanding of what the actual value behind them is.

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The blame may not lie in businesses having blind faith in the potential value of LLMs, it may be an issue with incentives. It seems like every major tech player leaned fully into LLMs and valuations ballooned because of the hype. There would need to be concerns over an even worse crash if/when LLMs don't match the hype, otherwise they're incentivized to take the cash up front and handle a smaller hit later.

Worse, those tech companies have been the only thing propping up the stock market, and arguably the economy as a whole. Collectively they may very well fall into the too big to fail category, whether because the feds can't allow them to lose all that value or because investors can't afford to properly value the companies when the hype dies.

I think the blame is pretty clearly on the big tech founders who have so much money that their mentality is "a billion dollar doesnt matter, all that matters is that my company isnt left behind." The founders incentives arent aligned with wall streets, so they have their companies waste all this money on GPUs for the <10% chance that they'll be able to create a product since failing doesnt cost them anything.

I'm actually not sold that big tech founders' problem is their views on money or being led behind. The underlying concern for both is a fear of to lose power and control.

I do agree that part of the massive investment in GPUs and LLMs at the biggest tech companies is fear of missing out. I also think a decent part of it is a lack of concern over real downsides. What will really happen when all the tech companies have to write off all those investments? They either get what is deserved, something like the dotcom bubble, or they all see a short lived decline in stocks that disappears quickly when they find a new hype train to jump on.

I hope the glut will spur a bunch of research that is currently not possible outside large labs.

Glut still costs $$$$ to run, electricity isn't cheap at that scale.

It's a different order of magnitude, though. Buying an H200 GPU costs upward of $30,000. The electricity cost to run it at full power for a year would only cost me $675 (700 watt TDP, 11 cents per kilowatt hour at my house.)

Everyone having their own private multimodal assistant on the cheap will be pretty futuristic if we can make it happen

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