Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

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There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.

I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.

I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.

> There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.

I believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.

> I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.

I built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.

The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), [...]

AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).

AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)

Your upgrade cadence will just exacerbate the crunch because real demand becomes spiky.

The next leap in performance will come with next leap in price tiers.

You don't need to upgrade to the very latest tech either.

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

"Sometime in the next few years" is not anywhere near narrow enough of a window to start putting shorts on stock prices.

OP sounds way too confident about the general direction so Im calling him out to take some action on his "insight"

Buying out of money puts with expiration a few years out on AI adjacent stocks should do the trick

Totally inane post. Why does he need to justify his opinion by gambling on the stock market? Having a belief about the way things are going doesn't mean he knows when the tower of corruption and graft is going to collapse

I believe if you're are not willing to back up your opinion with skin in the game then its low value opinion.

People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against

"I may have been early, but I am not wrong!"

"It's the same thing, Michael! It's the same thing!"

As the saying goes...the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

People who talk shit about stocks are talking shit about stocks at a particular time.

"Oh no, when you apply scrutiny to my bullshit I get punished! That means the game is wrong!"

OP is blatantly overconfident on his "prediction", so I called him out. Looks like I struck a nerve with some people.

No, you just don't understand what shorting is.

Feel free to explain it to me

I'm still not sure how shorting is even legal or what useful purpose it serves in the stock market.

Wasn't the whole idea that people can invest arbitrary amounts to companies by buying their stock, making investing more efficient?

How the hell did we get from that to people using it for outright gambling with shorting ??

Somewhat hard to short non public company, don't you think?

Willing to enter a private trade with you if you're actually willing to put up the money

And who determines the price if there is no publicly traded market?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swap_%28finance%29

We can come up with a formula what "tanking financially in a few years" actually means

Let me know if you're interested in moving forward

I wouldn't even short Bitcoin, and that's been on the way out since the AI rise.

Shorting bitcoin would be a huge mistake IMO. Willing to be on the opposite of that trade as well!

So you bought at 125k? That would have been a pretty good short

I'm not OP, but; shorting requires careful timing. Because the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, I don't short.

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