What other options? SuperMicro has an 18 month backlog. Same with Dell, HPE, and all the other compute manufacturers and everything in-between.
It's impossible to buildout because best case you would operationalize in 24 months, at which point you would be around 4 years behind SOTA because it takes years to train, and that money would be better spent trying to negotiate a more competitive inference terms.
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The crux of the issue with the Dot-Com boom and bust was that most enterprise were not purchasing the products of most startups. The Dot-com boom/bust was largely a B2C play.
The current generation of AI products are entirely targeted at business applications, where I can justify reallocating spend on SaaS and maybe some headcount to a specific AI product which has a much more predictable cost model.
There is a B2C boom brewing now thanks to OpenClaw, but all that action is in China and India, not the US or Europe.
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Edit: can't reply
> The emergence of something akin to DeepSeek 14 months ago that proves you don’t need all this power to get the desired results
Already has. India's Sarvam has GPT-4 or Deepseek comparable performance. There's a second model of similar scope in the works in India.
I know of 2 other projects in the UAE and KSA with a similar scope, 1 project in South Korea, and 1-2 in Japan.
The thing is, sovereign AI is the name of the game - no country wants to be dependent on Anthropic or OpenAI for government critical applications.
But this isn't an issue from a valuation perspective because it's these sovereign model projects that are also subsidizing domestic hyperscaler buildouts across APAC, as historically most compute was centered in SG+MY.
> That’s an interesting observation
It's because there are less luddites and more openness to experiment. If you spent your entire life using digital payments, running a digital storefront, and doing paperwork via an app you are much more open to playing around with digital and agentic workflows.
I've noticed most western HNers are significantly older (in their 40s-50s) and are much more resistant to new tech as a result, especially as most didn't grow up with digital products for much of their life.
> why are you here then?
Force of habit like taking a smoking. There are also the occasion tidbits of good info, but this is growing less common.
> I’d question if they are adverse or simply measured and able to see through hype because it’s not their first rodeo
There's a difference between hype ("AI will take all our jerbs") and reality ("Agentic workflows are becoming incorporated in most operational workflows but with a human in the loop, and that requires expanded capacity. In a lot of cases, agentic workflows will suck, but so did human developed workflows for cost centers").
People whose thinking is closer to the latter will be more successful professionally speaking. It's the same way HN used to reflexively crap on cloud and K8s, but it has now become the industry norm.