[missedthecue]

"So you have on one end the token revenue trending down, on the other end the training cost going up for the next frontier models, and you need to pay back your 10y debt."

Not necessarily, the bond holders could simply take a massive hair cut and lose shitloads of money. On the topic of bubbles and exuberance, Jeff Bezos made the salient point that there was a massive over-invested biotech boom in the 1990s and tons of sophisticated investors ended up losing lots of money. But humanity still kept the medical advancements made by the boom. Stocks going down didn't un-research drugs, and it won't un-research new GPUs or un-build datacenters.

[solatic]

> Stocks going down didn't un-research drugs

Drugs cost pennies to manufacture after they are researched and make their way through the approval pipeline. There are many generic drug manufacturers who can work off the existing formulas.

The more apt comparison is that LLMs won't be un-trained. Opus 4.8 now exists. Even if Anthropic somehow went bankrupt, that particular asset could, at the very least, be sold for proverbial pennies on the dollar to a "generic" inference provider.

[saalweachter]

Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other public paperwork provides enough information for an unrelated company -- either having acquired the patent rights, or after the patent period ends -- to reconstruct the processes with less investment then the original research.

If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

[alfiedotwtf]

> If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

Only if that skeleton crew had deep deep pockets. If Anthropic closed their doors tomorrow because the market collectively saw that AI was not profitable and so open sourced everything, there wouldn't be any money to train Opus 5.0... it would then have to fall on governments to put money into the hat (which I can't see happening unless it was Europe)

[eecc]

Or locked away in litigation for decades… See what became of the Amiga

[20k]

Datacentres aren't the same as infrastructure or research though. All the hardware in them has a finite, useful lifespan. In 10 years time it'll be totally useless

Hardware fails, and also scales out in terms of efficacy to run it as more power efficient, modern hardware turns up. It requires constant investment to keep it useful, and cost efficient

When AI pops, we'll temporarily have some extra compute capacity that will be horrendously uneconomical to run due to the high grid load and low consumer demand, before they get shutdown. There's simply no real use for them at this scale

[biztos]

In order to not un-build the data centers, they at least have to make more than it costs to operate them, and also not have some attractive liquidation value (the land, maybe).

I could imagine something like “inference is done at home or in China, that’s the price to beat” and it’s not worth keeping all those GPUs cool out in Nevada.

[missedthecue]

But the parent comment was that one of the bigger costs in these data centers was the interest expense on the borrowed money. A restructuring removes or heavily reduces that amount.

The fiber laid during the dotcom bubble never paid back the investors or lenders, but it's still profitably connecting customers all these years later.

[nothercastle]

It’s true once built the data center can operate right up to a financed data center value of zero. The investors will loose money but the costs of AI will go down as they do

[lazide]

Yup, that is the real economic benefit of bankruptcy - a reset.

[HWR_14]

Isn't something like 90% of the fiber laid during the dot com bubble still dark?

[dgellow]

Those data centers are specifically for AI workloads. Let’s say everything crashes and we now have all the data centers, what do you do with them? GPU are pretty specialized hardware, without AI a data center full of outdated graphics cards isn’t really too valuable.

It’s really not obvious the infrastructure we are building for AI stuff is something that will benefit humanity over time.

Without talking about the fact that bubbles are extremely destructive. Bezos is obviously someone who came out ok from the dotcom bubble but we are talking about something that destroys a lot of value globally. That has real, direct consequences, not just investors losing some money. The US economy is currently only growing because of the AI bet

[helloplanets]

AI data centers are being already used at max capacity, aren't they? I have a hard time imagining people would suddenly use AI less than they do as of today, let alone collectively drop it altogether. So the worst case scenario is that they'd need to be auctioned off way under what they'd be worth now, but still for someone to use them for AI.

Inference is much cheaper than training a new model, so running them just for inference is a completely different thing than having to price in the fact that at the moment all of these companies need to compromise between compute for inference and compute for training new models. If no new models were to be trained, and all the compute was inference only, that would change everything when it comes to the overall compute cost of AI.

Dotcom infra buildup is a bad comparison, in that it wasn't even close to being all utilized. The infra was completely overproportional to the day to day usage.

[cduzz]

AI data centers that exist and are operational are running at maximum capacity. That's why you see things like the tiny little data center run by xai showing up as a valuable resource to xai (on the sale side) and anthropic (buy side). It is "only" 300 megawatts and there's a 1.25 billion rent on it per month.

If all these other data centers were anywhere near coming on line, that 300mw data center would be a rounding error not a line item as it is right now.

So someone's signed contracts for way more and way larger data centers, someone's purchased billions in hardware for these not yet operational data centers. I'm wondering how depreciation's going to work on all these assets...

Anyhow, I'm not really sure what "max capacity" is here, nor am I really aware when they're going to be delivering the operational assets that are currently levered to their eyeballs and consuming 1/3rd of the memory made on the planet.

As far as inference vs training, have new gotten radically better than old models or only marginally (at the cost of 10x or more the training costs)?

Very exciting stuff.

[overgard]

I imagine the trend for AI usage will go up over the very long term (5-10yrs etc.), but short term how much usage is being propped up by employer's forcing their employees to use it? Or by user's being curious about the novelty but ultimately abandoning it if it doesn't do what they want? It'll be interesting to see what changes as tokenmaxxing disappears.

[abirch]

I would day that the dotcom was directionally correct but the timing was wrong. For instance you had pets.com in 1999 but in 2020 you had chewy.com. It's like you had broadcast.com in 2000 but by 2020 you had YouTube that was making more in ad revenue than the next 4 largest competitors.

With investing timing matters a lot.

[PunchyHamster]

> Those data centers are specifically for AI workloads. Let’s say everything crashes and we now have all the data centers, what do you do with them?

You just run the models and sell the tokens. The demand will still be there even if there will be less money in chasing new frontier model

> GPU are pretty specialized hardware, without AI a data center full of outdated graphics cards isn’t really too valuable.

AI accelerators used in DC are not really "graphic cards" any more, you ain't running gaming on it

[lcnielsen]

> AI accelerators used in DC are not really "graphic cards" any more, you ain't running gaming on it

I think the lighter 40 series cards like L40 still have OK graphics features. But otherwise yeah, after the Ampere generation graphics features went down the drain. The A100 and A40 cards can do graphics well but it already makes no sense in terms of power-to-performance ratio.

[overgard]

You still have to pay for power and water. Those are not insignificant costs.

[inemesitaffia]

You sell the GPU's to remote gaming companies.

Replace servers with regular compute.

[GuB-42]

AI GPUs have terrible graphical capabilities, if at all. They can run shaders, but they are lacking in texture units, rasterization, etc... huge bottleneck here.

These AI "GPUs" are worse for gaming than even the crappiest actual GPUs (with a G as in Graphics). Also, the display drivers won't support them, not officially at least.

[marcta]

The G in AI GPU stands for "grift"

[overgard]

I imagine that the big incentive for remote gaming would be massive price increases in gaming hardware driven by the AI industry...

If the AI industry collapses, it would seem like the price of DDR etc. would dramatically decrease and lower demand for remote gaming

[__alexs]

Nvidia would have to ship game ready drivers for H100s but it could work.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

They don't have display-out. You'd have to send back the screen data over pcie to the motherboard for display.

[__alexs]

Not exactly a problem for cloud gaming.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

Has there ever been a market for cloud gaming apart from middle class people with macbooks who casually want to play one particular game but not enough to pay for a whole PC or console?

[PunchyHamster]

Not gonna run game on fucking tensor cores alone

[xyzsparetimexyz]

Just do software rasterization and ray tracing and play Cyberpunk 2077 on medium at 720p/30fps, what's the problem?

[Frieren]

> Jeff Bezos made the salient point...

Big AI investor tells us that investing in AI is good. Oh, the surprise!

Does that invalidate this point? Yes. Because it makes no sense. The big money is not going to R&D but to build infrastructure that will be outdated in 5 years.

[missedthecue]

No, that's not the right read. He said bubbles and exuberance still produce lasting value for humanity, even when investors lose money.

Big money is going to build infrastructure which is fundamentally required for R&D. They aren't separate, they are the same thing. It sounds like you're complaining that Pfizer isn't investing in drug research, they are buying mass spectrometers and micron fidelity microscopes. Same thing!

[Frieren]

> bubbles and exuberance still produce lasting value for humanity

Citation needed:

Bubbles destroy value, assign resources to wasteful endeavors. Just look at the financial bubble of 2008. So many people lost their jobs, so much money was moved from the average worker pocket to banks, people lost their homes, etc.

A focus on construction will have provided millions with homes, a focus on finance and money stole them of it.

The .com bubble wasted billions in bogus projects and scams. The web didn't became to improve until after the money run out and competition between companies took over.

> Big money is going to build infrastructure which is fundamentally required for R&D.

That is never true. Big money extracts value from society. It is the small investors, pension funds, etc. that move the economy. It is everyday's working class spending. It is educated people pursuing their passion that creates value.

Big money are parasites that steal from society. That pee-in-a-bottle Bezos is trying to convince people of the opposite is unsurprising.