People seem to have forgotten the bust in railroads and Internet (etc), even though those technologies were transformative:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
One thing I'm wonder about: previous busts left useful infrastructure behind (rail, fibre) that could still be used. If/When the AI/LLM companies go bust, what will be left over afterwards and how useful will it be?
Don't focus on the hardware. The models themselves are tremendously valuable. These tools would've been considered alien technology just 15 years ago.
Many many idle GPUs.
I would bet that if all those GPUs go idle, they stay housed and cooled in the data center they were originally installed in, for better or for worse.
Yes, but what use will they have? Rail lines and dark fibre could be used post-bust (and don't depreciate all that quickly).
And that's at day 0. Because LLMs are not going away, thank to open weight models, and the race for capabilities has left so, so many low-hanging fruits unpicked, we'd have a decade or more of useful R&D to do even if LLM capabilities suddenly plateaued tomorrow and never improved.
I mean, look at Jev making round in the industry now - this is just a single example of a low-hanging fruit that took many years for someone to bother to pick up and market a bit. There's many, many more of these just laying around.