removed AI
I’m getting distinct “fire sale” vibes from all of this.
Oh my god we’re having a FIRE sale
Spiralling
The AI bubble is starting to pop. All of these companies have made hardware and data center investments far beyond what is needed or can be sustained. The debt is piling up and they are scrambling to justify the immense build out. Musk allowing porn and CSAM on Grock for paid users , Chat GPT pushing commercials, Microslop putting copilot in everything and forcing adoption. Oracles server utilization remains low, Etc. etc.
They now need to show immense growth and adoption in order to keep getting loans or justify burning cash to their shareholders.
Chat GPT and Oracle will be the first to fall, then xAI etc. Google and Microslop have other revenue sources that can weather the storm. But they won’t continue their massive investments.
I’m pretty sure the massive buildout is for training new models not for compute power for end users. Their justification is they need more compute to get the superhuman level intelligence AIs that they have been claiming. So if that pans out their probably gonna be fine, but seems unlikely that’ll pan out how they want it to
It’s the grift that keeps on grifting. How long can it keep going
Broadly speaking, yes, and it’ll keep going until they run out of money. However, I think there is a very small chance that one of the companies is able to make a breakthrough probably with a different kind of architecture than our current LLMs that does get us to models that make genuine discoveries and breakthroughs.
Very unlikely though.
At which point the government will step in because they will have become too big to fail
Partially correct. They’ll step in because they signed contracts and have moved AI under the umbrella of National Security. Brockman donated $25m back in September. Trump signed Project Genesis in November. So all these hardware companies feel pretty good because it’ll be backed by taxpayers.
XD
The boobs really sell it.
Those are some big ear muffs
Absolutely massive
They’re huuuge… trunks of land!
Haha this is hilarious
Do your part to make ai unviable by salting their ai algos. Feed them false info & make junk ai requests.
The sooner this bubble pops, the better.
Remember: the tools they give you for free today will make the chains they use on you tomorrow.
I’m not sure feeding more misinformation to our systems and society is that good of an idea. I don’t think it’d be an effective influencing strategy either.
In the short-term, it isn’t. Long-term, I think it’s much better
It will force AI companies to find ways to combat bad data and intentional poisoning efforts. I’d much rather anti-AI activists be the ones abusing AI than for it to be a Russian, Chinese, or American APT
The second effect is that it would make more people aware of how often AI is wrong. Way too many people blindly accept AI results
Also, you can always poison AI to fit your own world view. Teach it that the Epstein files should be thoroughly investigated, with perpetrators prosecuted, or something
Haven’t seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?
The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It’s an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I’m missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?
Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it’s running. Text slop requires negligible storage.
Unfortunately the most refined usage, and money dumped sector of Ai by far is image recognition
Its where all the money from Amazon and others has been dumped (Flock Surveillance, Amazon Ring, FedEx Trucks, Wal~Mart and your choice of store)
Surveillance, ALPR, Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. It takes a massive amount of data
Go see how much space you need if you want to secure data from 10,000 cameras at 480p/720p/1080p for a few weeks, let alone a year or two
This is the plan. They want us to rent virtual machines from them. No buy, only rent. You will own nothing, think of the shareholders and be happy, no….proud, you are here for their benefit.
That argument always befuddled me. There will be a saturation point of AI data centers when there’s enough equipment already installed and ready to use by these over bloated behemoth corporations. Once that’s over or when the market hopefully pops, the demand for memory should have a steep decline. With their cash cow tapped out, WD and all the other memory manufacturers would then have to go back to consumers they previously fucked over to sell their new production stock. I doubt it’ll be at the prices we saw a year ago but once enough memory hits the consumer market for a while, prices should start to dip back down.
Regardless of whether the bubble bursts, the massive amount of compute in these data centers won’t go away. It will be up for rent when this AI training falls out of fashion.
Why would a chip maker try to predict the market when they can make contracts for years worth of production?
If the manufacturers never go back to producing the useful consumer hardware, we would be forced to rent this data center compute.
Smells like cloud gaming.
A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this removed? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
removed’s gonna get stupid, fast.
Businesses want AI because it solves what they perceive as a problem: how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour.
Remember: AI is meant for wealth to access labour without cost, not for labour to access wealth. It’s a golden gate meant to permanently separate the wealthy from what used to be the working class.
So basically the consumer market is screwed until the AI bubble bursts and manufacturers (GPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc.) can rebalance their production lines back to the pre-AI division of enterprise vs consumer product.
As workers, we are majorly screwed no matter what happens. Either AI/Robotics takes off, and creates a permanent 50% unemployment class, which MAGA will solve by exchanging basic subsistence needs like shelter and water in work camps, where we will be leased out to corporations as slaves, under the 13th Amendment. Also a good place for any dissenters, journalists, attorneys and judges who won’t go along, etc.
Or maybe the bubble will pop, and we’ll have a repeat of 2008, except 100 times worse.
No matter what happens, the citizens are going to take it in shorts.
Or maybe the bubble will pop, and we’ll have a repeat of 2008, except 100 times worse.
The AI spending and stock is much more localized. It’s not grown over more years and integrated into many financial systems. So the results may be much less severe.
Circumstances will be different, and the problems may manifest differently, but it will still be very bad for workers. When those companies are forced to realize that they threw away a decade of profits on nothing, they will make up for it by closing locations, and firing lots of people. Those businesses that don’t fold up entirely, that is.
Rather US centric view there. What’ll happen to the majority of the world’s population?
I can’t speak to what the rest of the world might do. Some countries may choose to prohibit fully automated operations.
I just know that in America, any chance to mitigate the damage caused by widespread adoption of automation like fast food operations, will be completely dismissed under a MAGA administration.
Dems should introduce a “Robot Tax” which at least makes up for the lost tax that the now unemployed employee would have been paying. Otherwise we have unemployment rise sharply, as tax collections shrink sharply.
I was just speaking to a MAGA business acquaintance, and HE brought up the idea of the Robot Tax, calling it stupid. When I pointed out the tax situation, he just said “Taxes should be illegal, they’re immoral.” As if MAGA hadn’t given up on morals long ago. He doesn’t have a problem with the morality of completely ending an entire industry’s employment base, just to increase profits for a billion dollar company.
