Hacker News Reader

> In a gold rush, the folks that sell pickaxes make a reliable living.

Not necessarily. Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan

Sam of the current gold rush is selling pickaxes at a loss, telling the investors they'll make it up in volume.

View on HN

According to the linked Wikipedia article, he did not go broke from the gold rush. He went broke because he invested the pickaxe windfall in land, and when his wife divorced him, the judge ruled he had to pay her 50%, but since he was 100% in land he had to sell it. (The article is not clear why he couldn't deed her 50% of it, or only sell 50%. Maybe it happened during a bad market, he had a deadline, etc.)

So maybe if the AI pickaxe sellers get divorced it could lead to poor financial results, but I'm not sure his story is applicable otherwise.

Nvidia is selling GPUs at a loss? TSMC is going broke?

I'm pretty sure they are the pickaxe manufactures in this case.

This is where Google thrives, it makes it's own TPUs that run the models.

Clouds are the actual pickaxe manufacturers. Google has a cloud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com