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> short of major algorithmic breakthroughs I am not convinced the global demand for GPUs will drop any time soon Or, you know, when LLMs don't pay off.
by iLoveOncall 9mo ago
> short of major algorithmic breakthroughs I am not convinced the global demand for GPUs will drop any time soon
Or, you know, when LLMs don't pay off.
- selfhoster11 9mo agoThey already are paying off. The nature of LLMs means that they will require expensive, fast hardware that's a large capex.
- kortilla 9mo agoThey aren’t yet because the big providers that paid for all of this GPU capacity aren’t profitable yet. They continually leap frog each other and shift around customers which indicates that the current capacity is already higher than what is required for what people actually pay for.
- MrDarcy 9mo agoGoogle, Amazon, and Microsoft aren’t profitable?
- notyourwork 9mo agoI assume the reference was AI use cases are not profitable. Those companies are subsidizing and OpenAI/grok are burning money.
- onion2k 9mo agoGoogle, Amazon, and Microsoft do a lot of things that aren't profitable in themselves. There is no reason to believe a company will kill a product line just because it makes a loss. There are plenty of other reasons to keep it running.
- notyourwork 9mo agoI didn't imply anything about what big-tech would do.
- lossyalgo 9mo agoYeah but OpenAI is adding ads this year for the free versions, which I'm guessing is most of their users. They are probably hedging on taking a big slice of Google's advertising monopoly-pie (which is why Google is also now all-in on forcing Gemini opt-out on every product they own, they can see the writing on the wall).
- josefx 9mo agoAren't all Microsoft products OpenAI based? OpenAI has always been burning money.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- wolfram74 9mo agoDo you think it's odd you only listed companies with already existing revenue streams and not companies that started with and only have generative algos as their product?
- dangus 9mo agoHow many business units have Google and Microsoft shut down or ceased investment for being unprofitable? I hear Meta is having massive VR division layoffs…who could have predicted? Raw popularity does not guarantee sustainability. See: Vine, WeWork, MoviePass.
- Forgeties79 9mo agoWhere? Who’s in the black?
- selfhoster11 9mo agoThe users.
- Forgeties79 9mo agoEhhhhhhh
- unsupp0rted 9mo agoEven if LLMs didn't advance at all from this point onward, there's still loads of productive work that could be optimized / fully automated by them, at no worse output quality than the low-skilled humans we're currently throwing at that work.
- SchemaLoad 9mo agoHow much of the current usage is productive work that's worth paying for vs personal usage / spam that would just drop off after usage charges come in? I imagine flooding youtube and instagram with slop videos would reduce if users had to pay fair prices to use the models. The companies might also downgrade the quality of the models to make it more viable to provide as an ad supported service which would again reduce utilisation.
- unsupp0rted 9mo agoFor any "click here and type into a box" job for which you'd hire a low-skilled worker and give them an SOP to follow, you can have an LLM-ish tool do it. And probably for the slightly more skilled email jobs that have infiltrated nearly all companies too. Is that productive work? Well if people are getting paid, often a multiple of minimum wage, then it's productive-seeming enough.
- greree 9mo agoAnother bozo making fun of other job classes. Why are there still customer service reps? Shouldn’t they all be gone by now due to this amazing technology? Ah, tumbleweed.
- bethekidyouwant 9mo agoWho is generating videos for free?
- pvab3 9mo agoinference requires a fraction of the power that training does. According to the Villalobos paper, the median date is 2028. At some point we won't be training bigger and bigger models every month. We will run out of additional material to train on, things will continue commodifying, and then the amount of training happening will significantly decrease unless new avenues open for new types of models. But our current LLMs are much more compute-intensive than any other type of generative or task-specific model
- stingraycharles 9mo agoExactly, the current spend on LLMs is based on extremely high expectations and the vendors operating at a loss. It’s very reasonable to assume that those expectations will not be met, and spending will slow down as well. Nvidia’s valuation is based on the current trend continuing and even increasing, which I consider unlikely in the long term.
- bigyabai 9mo ago> Nvidia’s valuation is based on the current trend continuing People said this back when Folding@Home was dominated by Team Green years ago. Then again when GPUs sold out for the cryptocurrency boom, and now again that Nvidia is addressing the LLM demand. Nvidia's valuation is backstopped by the fact that Russia, Ukraine, China and the United States are all tripping over themselves for the chance to deploy it operationally. If the world goes to war (which is an unfortunate likelihood) then Nvidia will be the only trillion-dollar defense empire since the DoD's Last Supper.
- matthewdgreen 9mo agoChina is restricting purchases of H200s. The strong likelihood is that they're doing this to promote their own domestic competitors. It may take a few years for those chips to catch up and enter full production, but it's hard to envision any "trillion dollar" Nvidia defense empire once that happens.
- MichaelRo 9mo ago> short of major algorithmic breakthroughs I am not convinced the global demand for GPUs will drop any time soon >> Or, you know, when LLMs don't pay off. Heh, exactly the observation that a fanatic religious believer cannot possibly foresee. "We need more churches! More priests! Until a breakthrough in praying technique will be achieved I don't foresee less demand for religious devotion!" Nobody foresaw Nietzsche and the decline in blind faith. But then again, like an atheist back in the day, the furious zealots would burn me at the stake if they could, for saying this. Sadly no longer possible so let them downvotes pour instead!