Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by sysguest | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

sysguest

well if bubble pops, everyone will die EXCEPT google

UNLESS openAI/etc actually succeeds in making AGI that never hallucinates and goes over the current LLM limitations

as for google... well they own the web

(+google has plenty of other revenue sources, so it can just pay out its AI survival)

if you're a website owner, would you welcome chatgpt/etc's data-collection bots?

but... as for google's bots... you need your website to be on the Google search results...

View on HN

I expect Nvidia to survive the crash on its own, and everyone else except Softbank to be bailed out with US taxpayer money.

Nvidia has hordes of raucous gamers on the prowl waiting to tear their chips out of their hands the moment hyperscaler demand falters; plus, China has made sure there will always be plenty of open models to run for hobbyists and neoclouds, even if training compute were to drop off a cliff. They'll be just fine.

I want to see the number of gamers that tear the chips from the dead hands of hyperscalers to make up for the implosion of that market. If I had to guess, half of humanity does not have interest in dedicated gaming chips. Memory, that's another story.

The gpus will be too expensive and a lot of them are not even close to useable for gaming. Any consumer gpus maybe but I suspect that nvidia will be able to pivot more quickly producing consumer gpus again.

The market for video game hardware is absolutely puny in comparison to the datacenter GPU boom.

I saw it put quite well in a comment on reddit:

> In 2020, the gaming segment was 47% of revenue at around 8 billion. Today it's doubled to 16 billion, or 7% of revenue. That's right, data center went from 6 billion 2020 to around 198 billion today.

Even if gaming revenue doubles again when the AI bubble pops, their total revenue will still drop by something like 80%. I'm neither smart nor dumb enough to be confident about whether that's something Nvidia can survive.

yeah you can't expect gamers to pay enormous "investment bank money" just to play games...

plus, even old gpus run games fine

I think Nvidia surviving is pretty certain. They are not particularly leveraged to my understanding and their commitments are for their own products. Debt is at 12,34 billion so not that much even at their gaming revenue comparison.

Now their market cap is most likely destroyed for forever... Still I little doubts about them continuing to exist.

True, but Nvidia has 10x'd their market cap since the AI boom. They'll be fine, but their current financials can't be sustained by gamers alone.

Nvidia already seems to be pivoting to "Local inferencing" with stuff like RTX Spark laptops.

The problem is that local inference machines won't allow anywhere close to their current margins or gross sales figures. At the same time, the huge overbuild of GPUs is going to crash server sales and prices for around a half-decade as companies try to avoid hardware upgrades or buy cheap, used equipment to save costs.

I think Nvidia will survive, but they'll be back to something like a 1T (or lower) valuation.

> but... as for google's bots... you need your website to be on the Google search results...

Why? Depends totally on what kind of website you are running.

Totally agree. For a lot of tradefolks maps seem to be the actually more important location. Still Google obviously but it's less slopified in comparison to search. For now at least.

well there are just 2 sources for website profits:

1. money from advertisements (from views, visits): you need to be on google search results at the bear minimum.

2. money from non-advertisements, mostly-offline (eg. you sell preminum stuff/service): you CAN hand out pamphlets to your service website IF your ROI per visit is so good to be true...

but even in the 2nd case, it really helps to be on the google's search result

I'd be a little surprised if any of the hyperscalers (except for Oracle) die, though they may be quite badly burned.

> well if bubble pops, everyone will die EXCEPT google

Also, possible Apple since they haven't gone into deep debt to finance 'AI buildout'.

They’re also primed to capture the on-device AI market in 3-5 years time when a “good enough” model can run locally.

Do they even have any direct exposure to the whole AI bubble?

If not, I'd say they don't even count in the "everyone"-

Their exposure could be net positive. If other companies fail they will still be around to pick up their customers.

Apple is also just partnering with Google.

https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com