Futures and unrealized capital gains are more addictive than nicotine
This is peak bubble type shit.
Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures—in pork that doesn’t exist yet—led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does.
Terry Pratchett, Thud!
That’s so freaking funny. Pratchett was just so good.
If I recall correctly that’s the same warehouse that later supercools a golem, making him very smart for a bit.
Pratchett was just so good.
Man left this plane of existence before the techbros enshittified it.
Sargent Detritus the troll… he ends up making a cooling system in his helmet in later books
Ah right that makes sense, thanks! Something was nagging at me earlier, about the Golems being hollow and following the paper in their head, so it didn’t make perfect sense. I forgot the trolls were made of rock!
Imagine how cheap it will be once over supply inevitably occurs.
I am salivating over A100/H100 rigs getting dumped en masse. I’ll take one, thanks.
I hope they don’t just toss them in the garbage, like jerks. Last time this happened with crypto, I think Nvidia bought many back to throw away.
Did GPUs become cheap after the previous hype/bubble simmered down? No, they made even bigger bubble requiring even more resources. They will make it even bigger until it requires toilet paper to sustain, then people will riot.
Did GPUs become cheap after the previous hype/bubble simmered down? No
I my current GPU in my gaming PC I got on a big discount, around when folks couldn’t really do bitcoin mining on consumer hardware anymore, so… yes?
In my time I’ve certainly seen RAM prices rise and fall depending on supply constraints, same with HDD and SSD. Fair point on GPU’s, I just can’t see this data center demand remaining as so much of it seems speculative.
The frustration is valid, but it’s less ‘AI is dumb’ and more ‘markets chasing hype create weird shortages.
what would lenin do?
We should ask Lenin ai
I’m going to be that guy and point out that LLM’s are not really “AI”, that’s just the corporate buzzword but “AI” is a loosely defined thing.
I think we should all get better at calling them LLM’s publicly to take some of the magic woo-woo away.
Right, but in the same spirit, we’re not just talking about LLMs. If we’re being accurate, the common interface we’re used to with ChatGPT or Gemini, they are a system of different models including LLMs and other models for images, or sound.
If we’re talking AI in movies and music, besides LLMs for writing, we’re mainly concerned with diffusion models
If we’re talking AI for wearables… That’s usually more on the sensor/classification side of ML, so it’s not even generative.
The term “AI” today is almost like the term “computer” decades ago.
As in, “this new vehicle is more efficient than ever thanks to a new aerodynamic shape created not on the drawing board, but on the computer.”
Ha! Yes so true.
I think we should call it with the more appropriate acronym: Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI)
Then they can fight over who has the biggest SALAMI
I agreed years ago, but it’s too late now.
“Big Data”, “Neural Net”, etc etc, they keep changing the buzzword for this crap for the past decade.
AI just resonates with the public because everyone has seen Terminator movies. Your dipshit CEO of Buttplugs Inc has no clue what an LLM, or neural net is. But he knows what AI is and he delusionally believes it’s going make Buttplug inc. more profitable in the future.
It’s effective marketing.
They call it a machine learning algorithm i call it lossy text compression.
When you give it a prompt it uncompresses a small portion of the petabytes of zipped information based on the relevance of the keywords you choose. The “generation” comes from approximations of keywords and the underlying prompt. It isn’t “generating” information as much as big tech wants you to believe, its taking information from multiple sources and combining it into one contiguously flowing statement. For people who didn’t understand what I said, generative AI operates similarly by taking 2 paint colors and making a new kind of color from it. It isn’t critical thinking, it’s more of experimenting with no basis, reason, or hypothesis.
To conclude, the underlying mechanism is a lossy compression algorithm: there is no way to reduce the size from petabytes of information to a sheer 40gb downloadable size besides through lossy compression. The “generative AI” component is analogisly equivalent to making a new color of paint by combining two or more other colored paints. It’s entire existence is through experimentation with no preamtive basis that adding two or more colors would give you a new color. It will never figure that it even after having done the experiment.
Yeah, for all the undeserved hype about AI that we and I’m sure plenty of C-suites know about, there is still the issue of fiduciary duty to their bosses (shareholders).
If you’re a tech CEO that knows it’s all crap, but the market conditions are such that going all-in on AI is going to triple your share price for no good reason, you’ll probably be in a “get that money or we’ll find somebody who will” situation.
But that’s also why executives get so much of their compensation in the form of stock. There’s no need for shareholders to get off their asses to demand short term gains they can cash in on when the decision makers are one of them and playing the game game.
i saw my first hover board in back to the future, the pink one. now it’s that overpriced exploding segway.
at least the name segway was almost creative
Remember when the segway was a mysterious to-be-revealed “it” that we were going to design our cities around in the future?
I 'member.
if hover boards were legit real you’d have so many injuries the company would be sued into insolvency.
already starting to see this with ebikes… massive increases in head trauma numbers since they became popular. mostly from old people buying a $5000 e bike and then riding it w/o a helmet at 15-20mph.
if hover boards were legit real you’d have so many injuries the company would be sued into insolvency.
I’m so sad we’re not seeing this with AI. The injuries we get, the insolvency not so much. Fuck.
that didn’t stop RAZOR scooters
yes, I’ll call them AI when they are sentient D:
I was spoiled by Iain Banks’s Culture <3
Iain M. Banks, don’t ya know!?!?
I’m still saving a culture book or two to enjoy, but the entire setting has been amazing.
Eh, afaik he only added the letter to differentiate his scifi books from his non-scifi books :P
Yes, exactly!
Yeah, it’s M for the Culture stuff
This is how every ramp-up in a market works. It is called hedging. The promised sales volume at that higher price then let companies invest in higher supply.
The problem here is that none of only four companies which manufacture RAM don‘t want to compete for this demand, but instead share the price increase among each either in profit margins. (This is of course, because they don‘t believe in the AI hype, but nonetheless RAM manufacturing is an oligopoly, which is a problem in of itself.)
Ramping up supply costs money, and the AI bubble is on the verge of popping. They’d need to know that this demand would be sticking around before investing in higher fab capacity.
…using gigawatts of power that aren’t available on the grid
And megaliters of fresh water.
Immortan Joe sees an opportunity.
The water-thing is mostly bullshit, see https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
see that’s crap because they need muni clean water; it’s gotta come from SOMEWHERE, and your muni water system wasn’t setup to feed a city AND a bunch of datacenters. so it’s gonna have to expand - and who’s gonna pay for that? NOT THE AI. The people will pay for it, every fucking time.
Agriculture uses so much more water. Just so we can grow corn so it can be turned into ethanol. “AI” uses so much more energy though. and it’ll only get worse, the more “advanced” the llms become, the more energy they’re going to require.
And creating energy is also using large amounts of water.
it typically uses non-potable water though, and that water is then typically evaporated as steam which then in precipitated back down, or it’s directly routed back into the stream it came from, which is the case in hydroelectric systems
The water that’s returned is significantly warmer though, which can have some pretty large effects on the local environment.
that is true
Energy use is a more real concern, yes.
there are entire cities facing water crisis already. water is going to be a huge concern going forward.
https://wetravelwebond.com/13-u-s-cities-on-the-brink-of-a-water-crisis/
don’t believe the ‘it’s only a tiny bit of water’ bullshit
Most of the water used by “AI” is in energy generation though, so you’re both right.
to me it’s simply not an either:or it’s an yes:and
the utility customers of these municipalities aren’t being told about the construction of AI data centers, because so many come with NDA strings.
we don’t have infinite potable water. it’s going to come from municipal supplies. they’re going to stick the cost to these communities, and probably stress cities that are already water-fucked even more:
https://wetravelwebond.com/13-u-s-cities-on-the-brink-of-a-water-crisis/
I suggest you read the article I posted, or if you don’t feel like reading, maybe listening to what’s being said in the YouTube video.
There are some very real concerns with everything happening around AI. Water is quite simply not one of them. Focus your energy on criticisms based in reality.
I’d already seen Green’s video. I agree it’s a small thing compared to the power, but in a world obviously running out of easily accessible potable water, it’s only going to exacerbate problems for the communities that are already being hit by the relentless power costs due to AI as well.
This isn’t a one or the other thing. They’ll need water for cooling. It’s not recycled. it’s got to be clean, potable water.
we do not live in an infinite muni-water supply.
Yeah, thanks, this random substack and YouTube video definitely are credible and trustworthy sources.
As opposed to your vibes?
Well, if this does come to pass then we’ll be getting a ton of cheap memory next year.
Except the memory they’re planning to manufacture is not the memory you can just slot into your pc.
Is this a gross exaggeration, or is the entire SaaS-to-hardware supply chain under such deep speculation right now?
It’s exaggerated, yes. It’s not gross.
It’s basically an arms race for a future AI war that probably won’t happen.
Sort of like how armies were bankrupting themselves building battleships before WW1… which turned out to not be a sea war at all.
The fear ‘losing out’ on AI is making companies, and people, totally irrational. All the big players are paranoid that one of the other ones is going to ‘get head’ of AI market and become a monopoly, just like it was in the past with Google and search, or Apple and the iphone, etc. So crazy stupid expenditures and these massive data center plans now are considered a necessity.
But you are correct the AI demand… simple isn’t there and probably won’t materialize and the bubble will collapse.
Sort of like how armies were bankrupting themselves building battleships before WW1
An interesting little tidbit: in 1912, 52% of Germany’s entire military budget went to the navy. The same navy that spent WWI shelling small coastal villages (killing tens of people) and fleeing from the British navy.
all the big players are paranoid that one of the other ones is going to “get head”
Imagine being worried that someone else is getting a BJ.
I do sort of constantly worry about it. What if someone out there isn’t with me and they’re getting a bj? What if it’s not good enough? Have I failed if someone is out there getting a subpar bj, and can I correct the situation somehow?
low exaggeration, imo.
This is mostly an excuse for extortion right now, making people FOMO for ram instead of Luigi’ing the industry execs. If the AI FOMO demand actually materializes, the next generation cards will actually be far more expensive per flop/gb than older ones. NVIDIA wouldn’t be begging to sell chips to China instead of Americans/colonies, if there was demand.
It’s all too crazy, but those who FOMO will lose out. AI/LLMs will continue improving, but waiting for oversupply is the right play.
Remember folks, since the end of COVID another greedy cork sucker is crowned next billionaire every 30 hours.
The number of billionaires in the USA has nearly and will shortly eclipse double the number there were before 2020. How did they do that, you fucking know. By pretending they would die and their children would get AIDS if they didn’t raise the price of every single product on the planet exorbitantly and without need to increase already skyrocketing year to year profitability. These greedy bastards not only did this, they want to kill all of us who they fleeced before we wake up to the facts.
TOO LATE
They never learn, can’t self regulate and won’t give a flying fuck until presented with a French solution
This actually explains a few things for me.
I never considered that RAM and GPUs could be traded as futures, but obviously they can…
This also reminds me of the trader at a trading company in London who had to take delivery of 28000 tonnes of coal due to forgetting to sell a future he owned.
He only found out as the receptionist asked him to come down and sign for it and he saw barges of coal coming down the river:
If we have to play this bubble game, can we at least force them to build some renewable energy sources with their unlimited funds so when the bubble pops, we have some extra renewable energy available to the grid?
Pretty sure Trump banned woke energy
Wind and sun are for SISSIES, even if it’s CHEAPER! Nuclear plants are not antifa-woke, but my pal A.Jones says it makes everyone GAY. Drill baby, drill!
Bastard obviously wants to colonize Venezuela.
pretty sure they dont have the funds to build a power plant that is renewable, or a nuclear plant. thats why the cost of water/electricity is passed onto customers of electric and water companies.
