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I feel like the money itself makes less and less sense these days. It's just numbers that are becoming increasingly detached from the real world
by usrnm 1y ago
I feel like the money itself makes less and less sense these days. It's just numbers that are becoming increasingly detached from the real world
- Hamuko 1y agoSo, a bubble?
- fullshark 1y agoThe real world sees no other opportunities for outsized returns. Too much money chasing too little opportunity.
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoYup! Public markets are at all time highs. Other hard assets are also at all time highs. This sort of speculative investment only makes sense when nothing else is attractive. And it's cash from asset managers. Its not 10Bn worth of compute time from Microsoft or Google.
- simianwords 1y agoIts a strange way to view things.. the investors found a place to invest money from which they can make profits and they did it. Much like any other investment. What do you think makes this more speculative than any other investment?
- marcosdumay 1y agoThat's what wealth inequality does.
- triceratops 1y ago+100
- wagwang 1y agoNo that's what low interest rates does
- JimmyBuckets 1y agoThis comment seems like a rebuttal which is confusing to me because they are deeply related.
- wagwang 1y agoMaybe, but interest rates among other bad banking practices is how we got here in the first place.
- Printerisreal 1y agoNo that's what PRINTING fiat money does. Low or high interest rates, they print $trillions
- arcticbull 1y agoWho's "they"?
- Printerisreal 1y agoGovernments, CBs and investment banks. "They" do it and work together to print more.
- arcticbull 1y agoIn a centrally banked economy, retail and commercial banks create money when you take out loans. The government doesn't create money except during QE which only happened twice in the US, 2009-2014 and 2020-2021. That's why I was curious what you meant by "they." The Fed has been actively destroying money for the last 4 years.
- 1y ago
- waynenilsen 1y agocomparisons with internet age very much resonate - dark compute will be as dark fiber was
- sgnelson 1y agoFor me that brings up two questions: 1) Will I (and others) be able to get a H100 (or similar) when the bubble pops, and would that lead to new innovations from the GPU poor? 2) Will China take the lead in AI as they are less "capitalistic" with the demands for outsized returns on their investment compared to US companies, and they may be more willing to continue to sink money into AI despite possible market returns?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anthem2025 1y agoI doubt it. Some will be used a lot will be written off and tossed away.
- yabones 1y agoYou can take decades old fibre, stick some new transceivers on the ends, and have it run at the very latest speeds (unless it's cheap, damaged, etc) without having to pull it out and reinstall it. H100s will not age this well. It's not like owning old railroad tracks, it's like owning a fleet of 1992 Ford Taurus's. They'll be quickly obsolete and uneconomical in just a few years as semiconductor manufacturing continues to improve.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoMoney is impossible. Money is beautiful. Money is theft. [Voted down by the cash cabal! Arise! Knowledge workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your SPARE CHANGE!]
- ACCount37 1y agoIf I had a dime for every time I see this kind of hot take, I'd be able to buy an H200 with that. A man looks at economics. Understands nothing. Thinks it must be all fake and made up. He must be so smart for seeing it through!
- IshKebab 1y agoIt is all fake and made up, and the numbers are detached from the real world, but it's not like the market doesn't know that. Btw there's a decentish board game called Modern Art based around the pricing of art with no intrinsic value.
- xpe 1y agoPerhaps there are salient differences between art on a wall and a company.
- Workaccount2 1y agoAt heart, not really. The whole point of all of this is to motivate humans to get off their butt and reduce entropy.
- xpe 1y agoA painting on a wall is merely an inanimate object. A company has agency; it seeks to add economic value to itself over time including changing people’s perceptions. I don’t see how your comments have any bearing to the point I was making. What am I missing?
- Workaccount2 1y agoI'm not the one who decided that a painting appreciates with time and trends. But they do it pretty reliably and people keep paying the dollars that we all use for everything else for them. It's just another generally appreciating asset regardless if it's value comes from looks or tax structuring utility.
- yieldcrv 1y agoSo what should be exchanged for space inside a data center, what should be exchanged for the GPUs that they and everyone wants, what should be exchanged by the people that want to rent the GPUs before someone else All of whom have a real world standardized thing to exchange for this already Why do you think this discussion even needs to include the people who don’t have that standardized thing to exchange? If thats what you think
- xpe 1y agoNo disrespect to anyone in particular*, but I don’t care about one person’s armchair quarterback “feelings” about investment levels, bubbles, or <vague term that you won’t define>. Give me something I can learn from. * I’m an equal opportunity critic of comments that are indistinguishable from people yelling into the void with whatever pops into their head. So yes, I’m extremely critical of this very human tendency that isn’t helpful.
- utyop22 1y agoI agree to an extent. But this stuff is actually super hard to do. Humans tend not to like doing the hard stuff.
- pembrook 1y agoBefore you pat yourself on the back for being so smart and grounded... Remember, every technology you use today followed this pattern, with winners emerging that absolutely did go on to be extremely profitable for decades. Most of us remember the .com era. But in the early 1900s there was literally hundreds of automotive startups (actual car companies, and tens of thousands of supplier startups) in the metro-detroit area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_manufacturers_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man... Some of these went on to be absolutely fantastic investments, most didn't. All VCs and people who invest in venture know this pattern. Everybody involved knows exactly the high risk level of the bets they are making. This is not "dumb" money detached from reality, and the pension funds with a 3% allocation to venture are going to be just fine if all these companies implode, this is just uncorrelated diversification for them. The point of these VC funds is to lose most of the time and win big very rarely. There will be crashes, and more bubbles in the future. Humans will human. Everything is fine.
- 113 1y agoDid you respond to the wrong comment?
- fullshark 1y agoAnd they also realize they don't need to be fantastic investments to pay off, they just need to IPO/be acquired at a higher share price.
- delfinom 1y agoRIP our 401ks that will end up being the bagholders when its dumped on the market.
- pembrook 1y agoYour 401k is going to be fine, nobody goes public anymore until they're a big, dumb, boring, profitable company and all of the risk+returns have been rung out. Too many normies betting their life savings without understanding this risk in prior bubbles, so we regulated away the ability for non-institutional investors to take venture risk at all.
- ericmcer 1y agoMaybe this is a roundabout weird benefit to income inequality... Like the banks and private equity have so much cash burning that they start taking increasingly risky moonshots that result in actual innovative projects. Normally projects like this would require the government to spearhead, but now there is so much cash floating around they can just throw 13B at a totally unprofitable high risk company.