Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US.
Long term, I think the real winners are going to be in robotics. Still an unsolved field, but Waymo proves that even a nearly 20 year slog to the finish line is viable. And robotics infrastructure may be more robust to obsolescence than the underlying compute. I find it odd so many companies are making humanoid robots though... Over engineering that reeks of bubble economics and possible fraud.
If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, in all degrees of motion a human has etc.
If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.
Bipedal robots are more expensive to develop, build and maintain, more limited in their payloads, and because of the additional complexity, less reliable.
The most viable use case of AI is bullshiting humans, which is still a multi-billion market. Infrastructure hooray!
Knowing the kind of markup on wheelchairs that means a YouTuber wheel chair look like a bargain (see Jerry rig everything wheelchair), I can't imagine how much the US healthcare "industry" would charge for a "medical grade" exoskeleton.
Exoskeletons can't match that.
I have seen how robots currently behave when they lose their footing though, and I'd be bloody terrified to be strapped into one.
Maybe wheelchair users and robot manufacturers can share a force for getting wheeled locomotion into more spaces, but I think homes will always be a challenge as stairs are a requirement for denser living, and elevators are expensive.
I doubt robots will actually end up in every household, but a niche luxury product and utility for businesses makes some sense. Even if you think about it from that perspective, robot makers would still want them to be a universal robot not dozens of unique use case bots.
I had a friend who got a Sun cluster for basically free when the 2000 dot com bubble burst. And when we were doing recreational math contests a couple of years later it was slower than our laptops.
So it is very likely that a load of today's GPU compute is very competitive next year or the year after?
The AI bubble bursting will kill investment in the next gen hardware in the west.
But china will come to market with its first gen that it is currently building to replace its dependency on the west and will leapfrog the west etc. China isn't really completely dependent on competing in our AI bubble, its using AI for its own things and will plough on even when the west bubble bursts. Seems obvious?
Still, there has been so much talk about the AI bubble bursting last week and this is the the best writeup.
We are not getting the same insane gains from node shrinks anymore.
Imagine the bubble pops tomorrow. You would have an excess of compute using current gen tech, and the insane investments required to get to the next node shrink using our current path might no longer be economically justifiable while such an excess of compute exists.
It might be that you need to have a much bigger gap than what we are currently seeing in order to actually get enough of a boost to make it worthwhile.
Not saying that is what would happen, I'm just saying it's not impossible either.
All the investment in AI should help bring infrastructure up to a higher level, power distribution and cooling for example are at a much higher level than would have otherwise been.
Who knows what use that might have if it suddenly becomes incredibly cheap.
(this is my silver lining thinking)
Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last:
1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside).
2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data centers - doesn't take decades to build for sure, but it's something worthwhile to already have.
3. Advances in the actual chips, i.e. more powerful processing units.
4. Advances in chip fabrication.
5. Chip fabrication facilities and organisations (similar to #1 and #2).
So sure, GPUs are highly temporary. But a lot of the things being developed and built around them much less so.
I do think one possible bubble burst scenario is that we'll have cheap compute available for decades but not a lot of great ideas of what to do with it. That is not unlike the 2000s I suppose.
The GPU hardware rots and becomes obsolete in a matter of years, but the national infrastructure required to support the physical sites isn't going away. Things such as...
- improved power distribution networks
- logistics arrangements to build and support the DC sites
- lots and lots of new fibre interconnects to support the massive bandwidth needs
- hopefully: better power delivery planning laws
- plumbing infrastructure, because all that hardware requires cooling
Some of the DC sites will be decommissioned from their initial use, but given the physical security requirements, might morph into handy higher-security industrial facilities with only small repurposing. Such reuse cases would especially benefit from improved logistics (see above).
I like the term "democratize investing" here. "We're granting the masses the privilege of dumping their lifesavings into this overhyped project, so we can make a clean exit".
> Yes, retail can buy Nvidia, but they can’t access pre-IPO rounds where the real speculation happens. This concentration among professional investors won’t prevent a bubble, but it might prevent the kind of widespread financial devastation that followed previous crashes.
What year is this from? The author might want to do a recent news search.
When you are selling a 5 dollars for 1 dollar doubling revenue is easy. It just creates more losses, same with OpenAI
E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property.
Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.
But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything.
Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.
At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. generic planter pots (some of them just renders, never even printed!) is the result.
This certainly hides the benefit but I very much think it’s there.
On other side you get to complex topologies and very specialised parts. Again pretty hard to scale and limited demand.
In the end it is manufacturing and manufacturing is huge. But also generally does not have great margins. It has lot of competition. So 3D printing would end up there with others say makers of CNC machines, various presses and so on. Multi-billion dollar industry, but not tech.
But if we look at the types of predictions made in the early days (print a house in a day for under $5k, print any food you want at home, obviating factories you can make anything at home...), almost none of that has come through.
And that doesn't mean it's a bad technology. Most technologies don't revolutionize the average person's life, but can still change corners of civilization.
But compare that to the internet, which has literally changed how we do basically everything in our daily lives.
I think the point is that most technologies are like 3D printing while the current narrative is that AI will be more like the internet.
Housing is back …
Dotcom came back…
Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it.
So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years.
AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it.
Sure, but do the math. It doesn’t work out yet. This stuff burns money and energy. Either revenue has to go up A LOT or costs do have to come down A LOT (or quality has to suffer by using smaller models).
Electricity will become very cheap during the day at least with solar continuing its declining trajectory.
Ironic how you can contradict yourself without realizing. The fact that something "came back", meant it WAS a bubble that popped.
The former can be overvalued (see housing pre-2008), but we'll never come to the conclusion that it's useless or only needed in niche use cases. In that case, the item itself isn't really the bubble. The bubble is in what enables the irrational prices (e.g. subprime mortgages).
The latter can definitely be a bubble where the technology just isn't useful for a given use case (or at all).
The clearest example is in AI generated visual content. If you dig through what people are doing, its clear that only a very small % of users are actually getting truly high-quality, ready-for-production content, while the rest are just prompting in pure slop. There is a skill level to this that hasn’t really permeated the mainstream
Once that happens, we might see some of that 95% waste figure change to, maybe, 50% waste
This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.
There is absolutely nothing else left to invest in when it comes to software development, this is it.
It’s so painfully obvious but so many AI doomers use it as evidence.
He doesn’t want a talent war with Meta and Apple. And Meta has responded by signaling a truce in the talent war by saying they’re freezing AI hiring.
"AI is an existential risk for humanity, that's why we have to dump all resources we have into building it".
"It's critically important that AI as an industry is regulated, but also we'll pull out of the EU if they try to regulate us"
The flow of money to spur innovation is exactly like "Cambrian Explosion". We should do this more often, with biotech and future fields to come.
OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;)
I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.
[0] "millions of ordinary investors watched their retirement accounts and college funds evaporate. The same middle-class Americans who had been told they were foolish not to participate in the ‘new economy’ now faced financial ruin. Teachers’ pension funds were halved. Family savings meant for homes and education vanished"
And pray we don't enter a "lost decade" (which is closer to 30 years, now) like Japan.
I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives it at the other side of the transaction. It is still in circulation, it can still be used to outbid people for real things, just by different people.
Also, pets.com still exists, it just forwards to petsmart.com.
The 2014 doc was a pretty wild read for me when it came out - it changed my perspective quite a bit.
[1]:https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58796370-can-t-we-just-p...
On the other hand, the monetary value of the stock market (and other assets) going up and down does create or destroy "money". From a financial point of view, it's not a zero sum game.
Of course, assuming that this would be the only thing where economic gains come from is already such a laughably bearish vision. It's just that that's all you need for the bubble-thesis to fall flat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
I knew about since like 2010 or before, anti-tech Luddite will act like it's never a thing, shatup.
I'm don't think this is unique, most bubbles historically as far back as the South Sea bubble have had a lot of people aware of the irrationality, but investing in an attempt to profit from it.
I'd even go so far as to say, this is exactly what makes bubbles so volatile as opposed to normal "market corrections". If the dotcom boom had been all people who really believed they were sensibly evaluating the internet's financial potential, I don't think we'd have seen them jump ship quite so quickly.
I won't predict the future, but another point about historic bubbles: they almost all go on much further than people think they will before collapse.
linotype•5h ago
teapot7•1h ago