But the line must go up!
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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The article does mention that when the AI bubble is going down, the big players will use the defunct AI infrastructure and add it to their cloud business to get more of the market that way and, in the end, make the line go up.
That's not what the article says.
They're arguing that AI hype is being used as a way of driving customers towards cloud infrastructure over on-prem. Once a company makes that choice, it's very hard to get them to go back.
They're not saying that AI infrastructure specifically can be repurposed, just that in general these companies will get some extra cloud business out of the situation.
AI infrastructure is highly specialized, and much like ASICs for the blockchain nonsense, will be somewhere between "very hard" and "impossible" to repurpose.
Assuming a large decline in demand for AI compute, what would be the use cases for renting out older AI compute hardware on the cloud? Where would the demand come from? Prices would also go down with a decrease in demand.
Relaunching Stadia?
Haha. I believe the AMD Instinct / Nvidia Datacentre GPUs aren't that great for gaming.
Big tech is out of ideas and needs AI to work in order to drive growth.
To have a bubble you need companies with no clear path to monetization, being over-valued to an extreme degree. This leaves me wondering : what company specifically ? Are they talking about nVidia ? OpenAI ? MidJourney ? Or the slew of LLM-powered SaaS products that have started appearing ? How exactly are we defining "over-valuation" here ? Are we talking about the tech industry as a whole ?
We often invite the comparison to the DotCom bubble but that's apples to oranges. You had companies making social networks for dogs or similar bullshit, valued in the billions and getting a ticker at the stock market before making a single dime. Or companies with outlandish promises such as delivering to any home in the US, in <1 hour, for a low price, and building warehouses by the hundreds before having a storefront. What would be the 2024 equivalent ? If a bubble is about to deflate then there should be dozens of comparable examples.
Exactly. There's a very clear path to monetisation for the bigger tech companies (ofc, not the random startup that screams "AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee").
Lemmy is just incredibly biased against AI, as it could replace a shit ton of jobs and lead to a crazy amount of wealth inequality. However, people need to remember that the problem isn't the tech- it's the system that the tech is being innovated in.
Denying AI is just going to make this issue a lot worse. We need to work to make AI be beneficial for all of us instead of the capitalists. But somehow leftist talk surrounding AI has just been about hating on it/ denying it, instead of preparing for a world in which it would be critical infrastructure very soon.
What job could possibly replace...? If you can replace a job with LLMs it means either that the job is not needed on the first place (bullshit job) or that you can replace it with a dice (e.g., decision-making processes), since LLMs-output will depend essentially just on what is in the training material -which we don't know (I.e., the answer is essentially random).
I don't think it's just Lemmy, i had similar conversations on Reddit. People don't realize that the companies they claim are over-valued actually have very strong business fundamentals. That's why in articles like OP's they will never mention any names or figures. I guess it's very convincing for outsiders but it doesn't stand any amount of scrutiny.
If you take OpenAI for example, they went from 0 to 3.6B$ annual revenue in just two fucking years. How is that not worth a boatload of money ? Even Uber didn't have that kind of growth and they burned a LOT more cash than OpenAI is burning right now.
As for the “AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee” projects... well they have a very hard time raising money right now and when they do, it's at pretty modest valuations. The market is not as dumb as it is portrayed.
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