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> Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly and wearing out under constant, h

> Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly and wearing out under constant, high-intensity use. How about chips during the dotcom period? What was their lifespan?

bc569a80a344f9c 1y ago
That’s irrelevant because the primary assets left after the dotcom bubble was fiber in the ground with a lifetime measure in decades.
- cactusplant7374 1y ago
  The author of the article is comparing past and present. It's not irrelevant to the article.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 1y ago
    The whole point of the article is that the dotcom era produced long term assets that stayed valuable for decades after the bubble burst, and argues that the AI era is producing short term assets that won’t be of much use if the bubble bursts.
    - cactusplant7374 1y ago
      But the chips of the dotcom era were not long-term assets. The author appears to claim that.
      - bc569a80a344f9c 1y ago
        Where? I scanned the article again. I can’t seem to find that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 1y ago
  After the dotcom crash there was also a flood of used Cisco routers, Sun servers, and Aeron chairs and people were very happy to buy them cheap. The same thing will happen again.
stanac 1y ago
More or less every high-end hardware becomes obsolete, or in other words becomes second class. First difference is that at least networking hardware could be used for years, compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking. Second is scale. Google summary says that current investments are 17x greater than dot com investments. It may be wrong about the number but investments are at least on an order of magnitude larger. Maybe in next decade we will have cheap gaming cloud offerings built on repurposed GPUs.
- pixl97 1y ago
  > It may be wrong about the number but investments are at least on an order of magnitude larger. Which is exactly what we expect if technological efficiency is increasing over time. Saying we've invested 1000x in aluminum plants and research over the first steel plants means we've had massive technological growth since then. It's probably better that it's actually moving around in an economy than just being used to consolidate more industries. >compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking In the 90s extremely rapidly. In the 00s much less rapidly. And by the 10's servers and storage especially the solid components like boards lasted a decade or more. The reason the servers became obsolete in the 90s is much faster units came out fast and were much faster, not that the hardware died. In the 2010-2020 era I repurposed tons of data center hardware to onsite computers for small businesses. I'm guessing a whole lot less of that hardware 'went away' then you'd expect.

bc569a80a344f9c 1y ago

That’s irrelevant because the primary assets left after the dotcom bubble was fiber in the ground with a lifetime measure in decades.

cactusplant7374 1y ago
The author of the article is comparing past and present. It's not irrelevant to the article.
- bc569a80a344f9c 1y ago
  The whole point of the article is that the dotcom era produced long term assets that stayed valuable for decades after the bubble burst, and argues that the AI era is producing short term assets that won’t be of much use if the bubble bursts.
  - cactusplant7374 1y ago
    But the chips of the dotcom era were not long-term assets. The author appears to claim that.
    - bc569a80a344f9c 1y ago
      Where? I scanned the article again. I can’t seem to find that.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wmf 1y ago
After the dotcom crash there was also a flood of used Cisco routers, Sun servers, and Aeron chairs and people were very happy to buy them cheap. The same thing will happen again.

stanac 1y ago

More or less every high-end hardware becomes obsolete, or in other words becomes second class. First difference is that at least networking hardware could be used for years, compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking. Second is scale. Google summary says that current investments are 17x greater than dot com investments. It may be wrong about the number but investments are at least on an order of magnitude larger. Maybe in next decade we will have cheap gaming cloud offerings built on repurposed GPUs.

pixl97 1y ago
> It may be wrong about the number but investments are at least on an order of magnitude larger. Which is exactly what we expect if technological efficiency is increasing over time. Saying we've invested 1000x in aluminum plants and research over the first steel plants means we've had massive technological growth since then. It's probably better that it's actually moving around in an economy than just being used to consolidate more industries. >compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking In the 90s extremely rapidly. In the 00s much less rapidly. And by the 10's servers and storage especially the solid components like boards lasted a decade or more. The reason the servers became obsolete in the 90s is much faster units came out fast and were much faster, not that the hardware died. In the 2010-2020 era I repurposed tons of data center hardware to onsite computers for small businesses. I'm guessing a whole lot less of that hardware 'went away' then you'd expect.