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"
> 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.
Some people might, others wouldn't. Not everyone is a pot-smoking teenager.
Why aren’t you smoking pot in your basement?
People can find other things to do than work for a wage. I don’t get what your original objection is about when you yourself work even though you don’t have to.
Some local volunteer organizations seem to only have people 60+ years of age.
I think UBI advocates may have a point once you're 2-3 generations into some sort of UBI system. But bootstrapping that system is not possible, most people will revert to do nothing of value to society, no projects, nothing.
Where I grew up the people who didn’t work almost universally turned into consumers of everything and creators of basically nothing. The exceptions were retirees who had a lifetime if work experience prior to their idle years. For those folks it was gardening and other similar hobbies that provided meaning but not much output for society as a whole.
I think if you offered the entire population the ability to do no work other than what they felt like doing, exceedingly few people would be motivated to do the needful. A few more would be motivated to do things like create art and otherwise contribute back to other people but I am thinking along the lines of the 80/20 rule here.
I think our future if we ever figured out automation and UBI looks a lot like Wall-E vs some sort of utopia. In fact I believe that sort of setup is as close to a utopian society as I can imagine being realistic.
I did apartment maintenance for a place where about half the recipients had paid for rent, utilities, and bare necessities provided by the government. It was easy to play the odds and know which apartment was which the moment you stepped foot into one. It’s not a perfect correlation to what UBI would look like for many reasons, but it’s closer than the average upper middle class suburbanite imagines people will act like if given the opportunity.
I have no problem finding fulfilling and meaningful projects outside of my work! 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?
Do you have that number? Do you have any numbers to back up your claims or are you just talking about what works for you?
This doesn't mean they are poor. As their income goes up, so does their spending.
Also according to google, "Approximately 60% to 80% of professional athletes face severe financial distress or go broke within a few years of retirement, particularly in the NFL and NBA. Data suggests 78% of NFL players experience financial hardship within two years of retirement, while about 60% of NBA players are broke within five years."
and:
"though often debated, statistic suggests that up to 70% of lottery winners go broke or face financial distress within three to five years, more conservative estimates indicate about one-third (roughly 33%) declare bankruptcy."
Personally, I think that high schools should have a required course in finance and accounting.
Most of them, since the vast majority of "welfare" programs exclusively assist people who are in work.
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'm not aware of any realistic UBI tests. Could you point me to any?
The ones I'm aware of were either or both:
1. Time limited, so participants were aware that they needed to still have a job or at least be employable after the experiment has concluded.
2. Were funded externally, so participants only reaped the benefits of UBI but didn't incur the drawbacks (i.e. didn't have to fund the program by much higher income taxes) which could have discourage them from working.
It was basically a supplementary source of income - money for nothing for a limited time period, not an actual UBI program.
UBI guy playing games in moms basement comes accross as harmless in comparison.
People devolve like that when they have no purpose or opportunities. Which I’m sure would happen with the real goal of UBI: barely subsistence support in order to grow a larger pool of reserve labor while the rich (who are not degenerate at all[1]) live large.
Purpose, though, comes from within.
Skill issue
People would work for two reasons. One is to make extra money and afford a lifestyle beyond what UBI provides. The second is to… do things that are meaningful. If people derive meaning from work then that’s why they’ll work.
Some people will just sit around on UBI. Those are the same people who sit around today on welfare or dead end bullshit jobs that don’t really produce much value.
I’m not totally sold on UBI but there’s a lot of shallow bad arguments against it that are pretty easy to dismiss.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In what sense? Not competitive for chat bot providers to use? Is that a metric that matters?
> when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released
What if they don't get released? You don't have a broad and competitive set of players providing products in this realm. How hard would it be to stop this?
> no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.
You have lived your life with ready access to cutting edge resources. You ever wonder how long that trend could _possibly_ last?
We are power constrained. The GPUs of this generation can't even be plugged in yet because of these power constraints.
When power is a problem, getting lower power GPUs in is a priority. The 1.8nm and 1.5nm next generation is already in production, and will likely launch before these massive GPU stockpiles are used.
And then what? Why plug in last generations crap when the next generation is shipping?
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Todays GPUs have to actually launch and be deployed while they are useful. Otherwise they could fully be obsolete and lose significant value.
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 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
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.
It's also possible non-tech industries just have a collective imagination failure and can't find use cases for AI, but I doubt it.
I’m not worried about the technology flourishing. I’m worried about my fucking retirement, know what I mean? The question isn’t whether there is demand, it’s how much demand there is, because they’re betting on having all the demand. I don’t have a ton of money. People getting this wrong in a way my financial advisor can’t outmaneuver is an existential threat to my ability to not live in crumbling public housing in a few decades.
We’re talking about this needing to meaningfully move towards making whole digit percentages of the US GDP, soon. Not only are these initiatives largely unprofitable, they’re increasing their expenses based on hopes and vibes. I think a whole lot of people are so focused on short-term gains and being king of the hill that sustainability is a distant afterthought — just like it was in the .com era. I have zero faith in the current cohort of tech leaders to get this right.
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.
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...
Only proof of work systems, such as Bitcoin. Proof of stake such as Ethereum is a lot less energy intensive
Is it any worse now than say, the NYSE ?
This reference says energy usage was 0.0026 TWh (2.6 GWh, or 2600 MWh) in a year
https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption
If the power was used over the whole year (and not just one hour)
(2600 MWh / year) / (24 * 365 h/year) = 0.29 MWh = 296 kWh. Thats like hair dryer levels of power consumption (if the hair dryver was left on all the time)
Even if we continue down this route, its something like 15% of global stock transactions going through NYSE, per transaction its extremely efficient when compared to Ethereum; but thats not the argument anyway- its that the hardware used for mining is barely useful outside of that use-case, and the shelf-life is very low to boot.
If there was a use-case, we’d have found it by now, since 30,000 Tonnes a year of it ends up in landfills, surely someone would dig it out or buy it if it had utility.
No they're not. You don't get to decide what other people desire.
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.
... and which forces do you think are the core concept of "the American experiment"?
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.