Fundamentally, there is no ceiling on the utility of "compute". There will always be some use for it, the current crop of AIs is just the first practical scalab

Fundamentally, there is no ceiling on the utility of "compute". There will always be some use for it, the current crop of AIs is just the first practical scalable one for this flavour of large-scale GPU clusters. If chatbots turn out to be pointless for anything other than translation, copy-editing, and developer assistance, then we can still use the GPUs for robotics. I.e.: Farmers could have robots in the fields with cameras and arms for picking fruit, but outsource the machine vision and motion-control tasks to a data centre. It makes a lot more sense than lugging around batteries and GPUs literally "in the field" with the mud, heat, humidity, and vibration! PS: As far back as the early 1990s I remember reading articles about "nobody needs 'X' upgrade", which was invalidated immediately, every time. I now have more computer power in my pocket than my first six or seven computers combined. I "found a use" for that "absurd" computer power. Not to mention that 5G to my own personal phone has bandwidth exceeding the country's entire international telecommunications bandwidth in 1990!