[kryogen1c]

The question is not "is it a bubble". Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment. The question is "will this bubble lay the foundation for growth and destroy some value when it pops, or will it only destroy value"

https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/is-it-a-bubble

[rubenflamshep]

Pretty good article until the bizarre post-script where they fall back on the tired "people derive meaning from their work" for why UBI is bad.

[WalterBright]

Meaning or not, UBI doesn't work because the math doesn't work.

> bizarre

It isn't bizarre at all. Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.

I remember summer vacations from school. It was great for a while, but soon I was looking forward to getting back to school.

[olyjohn]

I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been doing so many projects, and exploring so many places, working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.

[phil21]

From my lived experience you are an outlier. Potentially an extreme one at that.

Where I grew up the people who didn’t work almost universally turned into consumers of everything and creators of basically nothing. The exceptions were retirees who had a lifetime if work experience prior to their idle years. For those folks it was gardening and other similar hobbies that provided meaning but not much output for society as a whole.

I think if you offered the entire population the ability to do no work other than what they felt like doing, exceedingly few people would be motivated to do the needful. A few more would be motivated to do things like create art and otherwise contribute back to other people but I am thinking along the lines of the 80/20 rule here.

I think our future if we ever figured out automation and UBI looks a lot like Wall-E vs some sort of utopia. In fact I believe that sort of setup is as close to a utopian society as I can imagine being realistic.

I did apartment maintenance for a place where about half the recipients had paid for rent, utilities, and bare necessities provided by the government. It was easy to play the odds and know which apartment was which the moment you stepped foot into one. It’s not a perfect correlation to what UBI would look like for many reasons, but it’s closer than the average upper middle class suburbanite imagines people will act like if given the opportunity.

[mlrtime]

What projects? You are starting from a completely different baseline than the average hypothetical UBI recipient.

I think UBI advocates may have a point once you're 2-3 generations into some sort of UBI system. But bootstrapping that system is not possible, most people will revert to do nothing of value to society, no projects, nothing.

[tayo42]

I generally agree, but I think for some of the most interesting problems in computer science you need resources that only companies can provide and thats basically work.

[fraserphysics]

After free UNIX and Linux became available on affordable home computers, I found it was no longer necessary to be at a company to do interesting projects. That was before 1995.

[WalterBright]

Best wishes to you! I'm retired myself, but I work full time (on D). Yale is hosting a symposium on D in April, and I'll be a speaker at it.

[keybored]

> Best wishes to you! I'm retired myself, but I work full time (on D).

Why aren’t you smoking pot in your basement?

[WalterBright]

I don't like being high.

[rubenflamshep]

> Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.

I have no problem finding fulfilling and meaningful projects outside of my work! There are many people like me :)

[WalterBright]

> There are many people like me

I'm sure there are. Doesn't mean most people are like that. Consider retirees. Some find meaningful activities, many just rot away out of not having a purpose.

What percentage of people currently living off of welfare are doing meaningful work?

[danparsonson]

> What percentage of people currently living off of welfare are doing meaningful work?

Do you have that number? Do you have any numbers to back up your claims or are you just talking about what works for you?

[WalterBright]

According to google: "Some reports indicate that 26.8% to 28.6% of households on welfare have earned income, which sometimes reflects a focus on households with no work-eligible adults (elderly, disabled)."

[mlrtime]

This is human nature, most of humans will revert to a baseline of doing the bare minimum to survive. The rest cannot support that system.

[eli_gottlieb]

> What percentage of people currently living off of welfare are doing meaningful work?

Most of them, since the vast majority of "welfare" programs exclusively assist people who are in work.

[keybored]

Always such glowing recommendations of human kind from techies.

People devolve like that when they have no purpose or opportunities. Which I’m sure would happen with the real goal of UBI: barely subsistence support in order to grow a larger pool of reserve labor while the rich (who are not degenerate at all[1]) live large.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929869

[WalterBright]

America offers a free education for all. People are free to move to anyplace in the country. Historically, people migrated to where the opportunities were. Americans are free to start a business any time.

Purpose, though, comes from within.

[devmor]

Your anecdote is not compliant with reality. Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.

I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.

I'm not aware of any realistic UBI tests. Could you point me to any?

The ones I'm aware of were either or both:

1. Time limited, so participants were aware that they needed to still have a job or at least be employable after the experiment has concluded.

2. Were funded externally, so participants only reaped the benefits of UBI but didn't incur the drawbacks (i.e. didn't have to fund the program by much higher income taxes) which could have discourage them from working.

It was basically a supplementary source of income - money for nothing for a limited time period, not an actual UBI program.

[mlrtime]

A test of UBI is not UBI. It's not possible to show how UBI works in a isolated test.

[devmor]

If this is true, why are we supposed to accept anecdotes of how it would fail?

[WalterBright]

I suspect it was because the UBI wasn't enough to live on.

[devmor]

So you believe that the entire driving factor of the consumer goods market would mysteriously disappear if people had enough money to not worry about missing rent?

[direwolf20]

Rent is defined as unearned income attracted by a dominant market position. If we wanted people to afford rent it'd be more efficient to set rent to zero by fiat.

[Marazan]

> Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.

Skill issue

[krapp]

>Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.

Some people might, others wouldn't. Not everyone is a pot-smoking teenager.

[WalterBright]

People like ice cream, too. But not everyone.

[mlrtime]

Yup, there are adults and alcohol too.

[direwolf20]

It's universal basic income, not universal extensive income. If someone is a minimal drain on society, so what? We have lots of stuff.

[watwut]

Hard working billionaires famous for succesdully working devolved into abuse island, real saltiness over anyone saying sexual harrasment is wrong and basically conspiracy to end democracy.

UBI guy playing games in moms basement comes accross as harmless in comparison.

[api]

UBI doesn’t mean people don’t work. It means work is partially decoupled from basic needs.

People would work for two reasons. One is to make extra money and afford a lifestyle beyond what UBI provides. The second is to… do things that are meaningful. If people derive meaning from work then that’s why they’ll work.

Some people will just sit around on UBI. Those are the same people who sit around today on welfare or dead end bullshit jobs that don’t really produce much value.

I’m not totally sold on UBI but there’s a lot of shallow bad arguments against it that are pretty easy to dismiss.

[falloutx]

governments will collapse before we are at a moment where UBI is needed. Billionaires and companies hardly pay any tax and if white collar jobs die down, there is no guarantee that government will even have money to wipe their butt.

[toomuchtodo]

What can we use fields of GPUs for next?

[thefounder]

Whatever happened to crypto/blockchain ASICs

[dijit]

Nothing happened to them, they're still around; just consolidated into industrial operations.

The "twist" is they rot as e-waste every 18 months when newer models arrive, generating roughly 30,000 metric tonnes of eWaste annually[0] with no recycling programmes from manufacturers (like Bitmain)... which is comparable to the entire country of the Netherlands.

Turns out the decentralised currency for the people is also an environmental disaster built on planned obsolescence. Who knew.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

[SJC_Hacker]

> urns out the decentralised currency for the people is also an environmental disaster built on planned obsolescence. Who knew.

Only proof of work systems, such as Bitcoin. Proof of stake such as Ethereum is a lot less energy intensive

[dijit]

ethereum has a similar ewaste problem

[SJC_Hacker]

> ethereum has a similar ewaste problem

Is it any worse now than say, the NYSE ?

This reference says energy usage was 0.0026 TWh (2.6 GWh, or 2600 MWh) in a year

https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption

If the power was used over the whole year (and not just one hour)

(2600 MWh / year) / (24 * 365 h/year) = 0.29 MWh = 296 kWh. Thats like hair dryer levels of power consumption (if the hair dryver was left on all the time)

[mike_hearn]

AI, obviously! A bubble doesn't mean demand vanishes overnight. There is - at current price points - much more demand than supply. That means the market can tolerate price hikes whilst keeping the accelerators busy. It seems likely that we're still just at the start of AI demand as most companies are still finding their feet with it, lots of devs still aren't using it at all, lots of business workflows that could be automated with it aren't and so on. So there is scope for raising prices a lot as the high value use cases float to the top, maybe even auctioning tokens.

Let's say tomorrow OpenAI and Anthropic have a huge down round, or whatever event people think would mark the end of the bubble. That doesn't mean suddenly nobody is using AI. It means they have to rapidly reduce burn e.g. not doing new model versions, laying off staff and reducing the comp of those that remain, hiking prices a lot, getting more serious about ads and other monetized features. They will still be selling plenty of inferencing.

In practice the action is mostly taking place out of public markets. We won't necessarily know what's happening at the most exposed companies until it's in the rear view mirror. Bubbles are a public markets phenomenon. See how "ride sharing"/taxi apps played out. Market dumping for long periods to buy market share, followed by a relatively easy transition to annual profitability without ever going public. Some investors probably got wiped along the way but we don't know who exactly or by how much.

Most likely outcome: AI bubble will deflate steadily rather than suddenly burst. Resources are diverted from training to inferencing, new features slow down, new models are weaker and more expensive than new models and the old models are turned off anyway. That sort of thing. People will call it enshittification but it'll really just be the end of aggressive dumping.

[DrewADesign]

There may not be that much demand at a price that yields profit. Demand at current heavily subsidized “the first dose is always free” prices is not a great indicator unless they find some way to make themselves indispensable for a lot of tasks for a lot of people. So far, they haven’t.

[mike_hearn]

Yes if/when prices rise there'll be demand destruction but I think demand will keep rising for the foreseeable future anyway even incorporating that. Lower value use cases like vibe coding hobby apps might fall by the wayside because they become uneconomic but the tokens will be soaked up by bigger enterprises that have found ways to properly integrate it at scale into their businesses. I don't mean Copilot style Office plugins but more business-specific stuff that yields competitive advantage.

[DrewADesign]

You’re just repeating their predictions. Investors are starting to get nervous that there’s no real proof these things could justify burning a Mt. Everest sized pile of $100 bills to achieve.

[mike_hearn]

Yes it's only a prediction based on what I'm seeing. And I'm not disagreeing with the investors that there's overinvestment right now. Prices need to rise, spending on R&D needs to fall for this stuff to make economic sense. I'm only arguing that there's plenty of demand, and assuming price rises happen smoothly over not too short of a period, any demand destruction at the lower levels will be quickly counter-balanced by demand creation at higher value-add levels.

It's also possible non-tech industries just have a collective imagination failure and can't find use cases for AI, but I doubt it.

[Krei-se]

I find myseld using dumber free models more as they reply instantly and keep me learning.

Some local models run well already too and do the job. Not sure if i would pay any money when a discarded mac can run these just fine already.

This may turn out like trying to make people game over streaming.

[dickersnoodle]

"much more demand than supply"? Demand from who?

[joe_fishfish]

The demand from middle managers trying to replace their dev teams with Claude Code, mainly.

[blks]

Please respect other users of hacker news and don’t generate your replies with LLM

[zozbot234]

FWIW, GP doesn't look like clanker speak to me. It's a bit too smooth and on-point for that.

[mike_hearn]

I never use LLMs to write for me (except code).

[blks]

Sorry for the false acquisition. Your reply, and your other replies all felt suspicious to me.

[mike_hearn]

Why? I didn't even use a proper em-dash, just a minus sign.

[narrator]

Anyone who regularly tries to rent GPUs on VPS providers knows that they often sell out. This isn't a market with lots of capacity nobody needs. In the dot.com bubble there was lots of dark fiber nobody was using. In this bubble, almost every high-end GPU is being used fully by someone.

[dragontamer]

We can use the GPUs for research (64-bit scientific compute), 3d graphics, a few other things. We programmers will reconfigure them to something useful.

At least, the GPUs that are currently plugged in. A lot of this bullshit bubble crap is because most of those GPUs (and RAM) is sitting unplugged in a warehouse, because we don't even have enough power to turn all of them on.

So if your question is how to use a GPU... I got plenty of useful non-AI related ideas. But only if we can plug them in.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.

[cogman10]

> I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.

That's my fear.

The problem is these GPUs are specifically made for datacenters, So it's not like your average consumer is going to grab one to put into their gaming PCs.

I also worry about what the pop ends up doing to consumer electronics. We'll have a bunch of manufacturers that have a bunch of capacity that they can no longer use to create products which people want to buy and a huge backstop of second hand goods that these liquidated AI companies will want to unload. That will put chip manufactures in a place where they'll need to get their money primarily from consumers if they want to stay in business. That's not the business model that they've operated on up until this point.

We are looking at a situation where we have a bunch of oil derricks ready to pump, but shut off because it's too expensive to run the equipment making it not worth the energy.

[dragontamer]

That's fine. Server is where we programmers are best at repurposing things. Just a bunch of always on boxes doing random crap in the background.

Servers can (and do!!) use 10+ year old hardware. Consumers are kind of the weird the ones who are so impatient they need the latest and greatest.

[throwaway0123_5]

> 3d graphics

Seems like the G in GPU is very obsolete now:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...

> As it turns out Nvidia's H100, a card that costs over $30,000 performs worse than integrated GPUs in such benchmarks as 3DMark and Red Dead Redemption 2

[jdiez17]

I predict there's going to be a niche opening up for companies to recycle the expensive parts of all these compute hardware that AI companies are currently buying and will probably be obsolete/depreciated/replaced in the next 2-5 years. The easiest example is RAM chips. There will be people desoldering those ICs and putting them on DDR5 sticks to resell to the general consumer market.

[themafia]

The government is going to use them.

The flock cameras are going to be fed into them.

The bitcoin network will be crashed.

A technological arms race just occurred in front of your eyes for the past 5 years and you think they're going to let the stockpile fall into civilian hands?

[dragontamer]

In 2 years the next generation chips will be released and th se chips will be obsolete.

That's truly e-waste. Now in practice, we programmers find uses of 10+ year old hardware as cheap webhosta, compiler/build boxes, Bamboo, unit tests, fuzzers and whatever. So as long as we can turn them on we programmers can and will find a use.

But because we are power constrained, when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released (and when those chips use 30% or less power), no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.

[themafia]

> will be obsolete.

In what sense? Not competitive for chat bot providers to use? Is that a metric that matters?

> when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released

What if they don't get released? You don't have a broad and competitive set of players providing products in this realm. How hard would it be to stop this?

> no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.

You have lived your life with ready access to cutting edge resources. You ever wonder how long that trend could _possibly_ last?

[dragontamer]

As in: the 1.5nm or 1.8nm GPUs will use less power and therefore can actually be plugged in.

We are power constrained. The GPUs of this generation can't even be plugged in yet because of these power constraints.

When power is a problem, getting lower power GPUs in is a priority. The 1.8nm and 1.5nm next generation is already in production, and will likely launch before these massive GPU stockpiles are used.

And then what? Why plug in last generations crap when the next generation is shipping?

--------

Todays GPUs have to actually launch and be deployed while they are useful. Otherwise they could fully be obsolete and lose significant value.

[zozbot234]

I assume even really out of date cards and racks will readily find some use, when the present-day alternative costs ~$100k for a single card. Just have to run them on a low-enough basis that power use is not a significant portion of the overall cost of ownership.

[bee_rider]

It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with to get conventional scientific computing workloads to work on 16 bit or smaller data types. I think there’s some hope but it will require work.

[saati]

These AI optimized GPUs are criminally bad at 64bit, so no you won't use them for that.

[ornornor]

Heating!

[zozbot234]

Can they run Crysis?

[nighthawk454]

Ironically, no

[irishcoffee]

It’s too bad they’re all concentrated in buildings, having been hovered up by the billionaire class.

I would love to live in the world where everyone joins a pool for inference or training, and as such gets the open source weights and models for free.

We could call it: FOSS

[greenchair]

cloud gaming?

[eli_gottlieb]

> Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment.

No they're not. You don't get to decide what other people desire.

[themafia]

> Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment

Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."

It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.

[kryogen1c]

> Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."

This is not the definition of a bubble, and is specifically contrary to what i said.

A good bubble, like the automobile industry in the example I linked, paves the way for a whole new economic modalit - but value was still destroyed when that bubble popped and the market corrected.

You may think its better to not have bubbles and limit the maximum economic rate of change (and you may be right), but the current system is not obviously wrong and has benefits.

[zozbot234]

The trouble is, you can only tell what was "detached from reality" after the fact. Real-world bubbles must be credible by definition, or else they would deflate smoothly rather than growing out of control and then popping suddenly when the original expectations are dashed by reality.

[jdiez17]

> It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.

... and which forces do you think are the core concept of "the American experiment"?