Going to be ugly when the AI bubble busts
If the AI bubble bursts, people will use the available GPUs for something else.
Yes, of course, but that just means that this bubble would be basically identical to previous capital intensive bubbles. For example, there was a railroad bubble in the 1800s, and a massive telecom bubble in the late 90s. These bubbles popped, resulting in massive corporate bankruptcies and failed companies. But the infrastructure they built (miles and miles of railroad and dark fiber, which has since been lit up) laid the foundation for huge economic development shortly thereafter.
If the US had maintained and kept the rail it built, it wouldn’t have the poor infrastructure it has right now.
Nvidia is not the train company on that scenario.
AI/LLMs are radically expanding my abilities, and as I adapt to this new power, I'm using it more frequently in everyday life.
Sure, Nvidia stock may be overpriced, but AI is empowering. I can't imagine not continuing to expand its use. As its abilities expand, I'll use it even more. I will have much further use even as a few bugs are fixed and integrations become more frictionless.
Whereas what it could be reinforcing instead is that some people are better at "using AI" than others.
When I was young, I always saw how my parents never really "got" new technology that I was using all the time, like the internet. Many young people think about it and are sure it won't happen to them. I'm sure many on this technophile site think so.
And then a new technology like AI comes along, some people find ways to be incredibly productive with it, but a very widespread sentiment is that they're... lying? Mistaken? Not very good at their job so it helps them more? The number of excuses people have for "keep this new technology that I don't know how to use away for me" is pretty crazy.
(And I say this as someone who is probably not on the "cutting edge" of AI usage, compared to others I see.)
Maybe it is not for you. Maybe it is for people asking AI questions about you. (or chemistry or gold prospecting or legal documents or ...)
the eric schmidt talk made it seem like better hardware led to better results and there was a race.
When businesses stop accepting dollars and your employer starts compensating you in crypto will it stop being a “scam” or will the goalposts move again?
The scam is comparing some ATMs to what is happening in AI. Trillions of dollars are going into AI and actually useful things like self driving cars are coming out.
(I don’t expect it to see it in my lifetime.)
Most cryptocurrencies are just straight up scams. Some people are getting some usage of Bitcoin as a store of value and for cross border transactions. This is increasing slowly. Stablecoins also have some usage for store of value and cross border transaction. They are also used for trading and arbitrage, which you can argue about whether that brings value to the world. The rest of the crypto market is struggling to find an enduring use cage. I'm saying this as someone who is marveling about Ethereum and Solana, but I don't value trading immaterial NFTs. Ethereum and the like are struggling to do anything that reaches into the real world. None of the cryptocurrencies outside the top 10 have found any real world use case that people care about.
So AI != crypto
The dot com bubble popped, but it's not like the Internet technologies that were launched then (and companies like Amazon and Google) weren't hugely impactful on all of society since then.
I think the AI bubble will pop, and while I think there is a lot of nonsense hype about AI I still think AI's societal impact will only grow.
Nvidia made 18 billion in profit last quarter, and expects to make 20 next quarter. That isn't speculation.
How much money is OpenAI or Anthropic making? Because that's what people are thinking is speculative value.
My position has always been that Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude are all pretty great at a cost of Free, and grow increasingly questionable past that. My work is already limiting how many ChatGPT users we can afford with their price increases, and I'm pretty sure OpenAI is still not profitable. If ChatGPT is $50/month as a breakeven cost for them, how many people/companies will buy it then? Most jobs I've been at won't pay for JetBrains licenses that cost way less per head.
I feel like the best comparison is something like Uber or AirBnB where it's easy to be excited about it when all the services are crazy discounted by free VC money, but when they have to start turning a profit, they're back to actually competing with other tools.
But the big deal isn't OAI being a profitable company. The big deal is that GPT6 will be 100x more useful in doing productive work.
Tulips did not have cash flow like this. It was only people selling to speculators who hoped to sell again to another speculator.
Citation extremely needed. There's a lot of people and companies downstream of OpenAI speculating on that 100x that are gonna be in a lot of trouble if it's even just 10x, let along 5x.
Again, not saying that none of this has any value, just that the value may well never live up to the cost. Uber's not a worthless company or service, but they're far from the values or profits they were pitching 10 years ago.
1. Drive a new Tesla with the latest Supervised FSD and measure how often you have to intervene to stop a crash.
2. Go back and look at your own expectations around AI two years ago. Did thing progress the way you expected or did they progress further?
2. I have no expectations for 'AI' because the term is a nonsense label. I have followed and been excited by machine learning for a good number of years, and my expectations of progress were pretty much on par. The progress with LLMs has taken me a little by surprise, but I am also cognisant that their progress is being massively over-hyped presently, not least by ppl who call them 'AI' and then, even more foolishly, go on to talk about 'AGI' (a nonsense upon a nonsense).
I'm intentionally including FSD and LLMs under the same category of technologies that will have a huge impact. The point of this thread is that the demand for inference is going to skyrocket because AI is going to get a lot more useful.
We both appear to agree that Machine Learning is a very powerful technology that will have huge impacts. Machine Learning requires (and will continue to require) a lot of compute and thus large costs but will also, almost certainly, produce great profits in some domains (FSD being one).
It's a lot less clear to me that LLMs will 1) continue to require lots of compute beyond the short term (languages can get close to being 'solved') or 2) that LLMs will generate substantial profits because a) the model can escape capture from a monopoly player far more easily and b) while useful for translation, pulling summarised data from a corpus, recognition of voice commands, etc, none of these applications actually make for the kind of profound impacts that ML is capable of, because none of them transcend human ability like ML has the power to do.
2. If anything, GPT4 has turned out to be less of an advancement over 3.5 than either OpenAI was claiming and what I'd expected. 2 years ago, people were all but promising AGI by now. Even the folks I know working in the GenAI space are telling me they're using Copilot/ChatGPT less now than a year or so ago. My work has actively cut back on spending in the area and investors have been asking our board questions to make sure we're not overinvesting in it.
I want to be clear, I'm not a doomer at all about this. I use these tools a fair bit and find value in them. But the value that GPT3 and 3.5 brought to me versus what GPT 4 has brought certainly isn't 100x. GPT4 isn't even 100x better than me using Google Search most of the time.
Oh. It's been tried: https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-ultra-expensive-h100-hopper-...
Seems the pros of an h100 over a 4090 are: much higher vram, much faster vram, technologies like nvlink available, and a focus on lower precision performance more useful for ML (as opposed to 4090s focus on fp32).
Same'll happen here.