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Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust?
- nick49488171 7mo agoNo probably not
- cammikebrown 7mo agoI hope so!
- woeirua 7mo agoBetter hope not. If the AI bubble pops it’s going to make the dotcom bubble look like a tiny divot in the road.
- starkeeper 7mo agoHow would this be a bad thing?
- SilverElfin 7mo agoI want to see these overly powerful tech oligarchs to fail too. But one issue is that all of us are tied to their performance to some extent. Our investments are exposed to them. Your 401k probably has funds that include them. When they fail, it hurts others too. It’s also why SpaceX wants to be included into index funds as soon as possible after they go public. I recall the rules may be revised to support this, meaning everyone who has money saved in those funds will automatically be tied to the fate of SpaceX.
- calvinmorrison 7mo agoLike New Caledonia the wealth of our nation has been pumped into a get rich scheme looking for a new world
- johnvanommen 7mo ago[dead]
- jen729w 7mo agoBecause everyone's retirement depends on the stock market. If you're unlucky and your portfolio vests the day after a massive crash, that can have a very meaningful impact on the rest of your life.
- emp17344 7mo agoIf it’s a bubble, it has to pop sooner or later. It’s better if it pops now before growing even larger.
- Ekaros 7mo agoMaybe that will make everyone to think what is going on with this retirement plan build on stock market growth and expectation there will be something to buy with that "wealth" in future...
- cgio 7mo agoWe already have our jobs on the line with AI, right? How will a crash be worse in personal terms?
- falkensmaize 7mo agoThere's a lot of people who think the only thing keeping us out of a serious recession or even depression is AI investment.
- cgio 7mo agoI have an unsubstantiated understanding Ai investment is disproportionately capital intensive, and at least partially funded by self-fulfilling dreams of employment disappearing. Parts of the economy are already in recession and they would not mind not being alone in it.
- elevation 7mo agoThe .COM bubble was more than a divot because .COMs in so many industries employed so many people. There was amazon.com, but also pets.com, lowermybills.com, gateway.com. But if our economy somehow loses access to AI (rationing due to wartime efforts? sabotage by a foreign nation? simply not enough grid power to turn them on at the price people are willing to pay?) I would probably need to hire more coders to get the equivalent work done.
- Spooky23 7mo agoAI is driving trades, materials, real estate, all sorts of downstream stuff. The rest of the economy is dead. Oracle is dead without OpenAI. Remember that unlike the dotcom, none of these companies are public. So when it pops, you’ll see private credit and PE funds implode, which could bring down banks with unhedged exposure. The headlines talk about JP Morgan (which likely has the risk managed), but regional banks got into that nature in the last couple of years in a big way.
- vaginaphobic 7mo ago[dead]
- mjd 7mo agoDid amazon.com go bust? Seems like I heard they were still in business as of a couple of years ago at least.
- elevation 7mo agoThe point was that Amazon wasn't independent from the frenzied, leveraged land grab that characterized the .COM bubble. Like many other companies, they were hiring aggressively until the bubble burst. Whether or not the companies went bust, a lot of people lost their jobs in a short time.
- DesiLurker 7mo agowhy? its all private money funding AI at the moment, sure some data centre reality companies would go belly up but you will be surprised to find out how much of it is big headlines and very little action. there is a lot of installations and GPUs not yet brought online but marked as sold because of .. well physical world delays. Let me put it this way, IF AI is a bubble then I'd like it to go bust asap instead of dragging along and going public and then us discovering BS/creative accounting revenue in S1 filings. by then it would be much worse. Right now VCs and PE firms will absorb it all. The thing with dot-com was that there was actual public market corruption & euphoria. that caused the bust painful for everybody. RN its bigtech & PE how has heavy cash reserver and margins to bun through. I'd much rather have them take it then average 401k.
- esseph 7mo ago> The thing with dot-com was that there was actual public market corruption & euphoria. Just like now, the financial cup game is insane. Commiting money to a company that plans on doing a thing if they can get another company to do a thing and then that company is leveraging those cumulative possibilities in its own wager. The speculation is out of control.
- mikeweiss 7mo agoOf course it's going to pop!
- danaris 7mo agoThe only alternative is to keep feeding the bubble deliberately, while knowing that it's a bubble. And no bubble can last forever. And the longer they go, and the larger they get, the worse the fallout is when they finally pop.
- mattas 7mo agohttps://archive.is/ad64x https://archive.is/ad64x
- starkeeper 7mo ago[flagged]
- VladVladikoff 7mo agoI replaced a $22/hr worker entirely with AI. And it costs me about $0.18/hr instead. The AI does a better job, is more reliable and consistent. The human was constantly behind schedule, made frequent mistakes, and also humans get sick, or call off work for other reasons. So yes, AI is a bubble, but this bubble has generated value, it’s not at all like 2008.
- akomtu 7mo agoThe value is negative to that worker, apparently.
- VladVladikoff 7mo agoSociety on the whole, but this isn’t the first time I have automated away jobs, I have been doing it for years long before we had LLMs every where. In my opinion it is the only way to sustainably grow a company. Identify your biggest man hour costs and find a way to automate away those tasks.
- akomtu 7mo agoSociety as a whole is those workers. Capital, efficiency, GDP and similar things may be sky high, but the actual people will suffer.
- chriscc 7mo agoJust curious, what did your human worker do that you were able to entirely automate?
- floralhangnail 7mo agoMy bet is something administrative, like reminding people to approve their timesheets for payroll. AI wouldn't be needed to replace that job though, just a recurring calendar event.
- VladVladikoff 7mo ago
- Melatonic 7mo agoIf it does there is gonna be a lot of cheap second hand hardware out there for those who want to build something cool
- calvinmorrison 7mo agoI'm gonna scoop my own /8 and lock a 100 year colo lease
- CamperBob2 7mo agoAlready got my 440 3-phase hookup scheduled. That NVL72 rack ain't gonna run on sunshine and pixie dust
- tempodox 7mo agoShouldn’t take too long, now that they’re switching to DC…
- esseph 7mo agoWill anybody be able to power it?
- tempodox 7mo agoBring your own nuclear power plant.
- marcosdumay 7mo agoYeah... The AI industry will die on the shadow of the Iran war, and there will be forever some people claiming that it was healthy all around and would lead to world-change if the rest of the economy didn't blow.
- monodeldiablo 7mo agoIt's not really even a question. It's an obvious boondoggle. The forecasted net new energy requirements for the AI buildout over the next couple of years are roughly equivalent to all of Western Europe's power demand today. That's absurd. It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. And the cost to get even close would make AI more expensive than just hiring knowledge workers to do the same tasks. And it's all predicated on a tower of wobbly or broken assumptions -- chief among them that increasing the size of these models yields better performance. We're going to look back on this era and wonder why anybody took any of the outrageous claims of tech CEOs seriously.
- jen729w 7mo ago> It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. China begs to differ.
- monodeldiablo 7mo agoI played a role in China's shift to renewables. It's been decades in the making.
- aoeusnth1 7mo ago> Wobbly assumption that increasing the size of these models yields better performance. I'm assuming you disagree that larger models are better? Can you expand on what indicates that AI will hit a wall in scaling given the evidence of the last 9 years of scaling transformers (or other models)? Where on the plot does the line go from exponential to flat?
- zerosizedweasle 7mo ago[dead]
- atleastoptimal 7mo agoPeople really really don’t understand the implications of AGI. Whether or not you believe we will reach it in a fee years, we are certainly wayy closer today than we were even two years ago. The possibility of genuine AGI obliterates all the financial or energy related worries, they pale in comparison to the ultimate impact of such a technology. However, yes, if you believe AGI is not possible or won’t arrive in the coming decade then all the data center buildup seems foolish.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago"any day now" Gotta love this argument. Top it off by saying anyone skeptical is a fool, because of course.
- atleastoptimal 7mo agoi’m sure my argument would have no merit if you ignored the thousands of advancements made in AI over the past few years
- CamperBob2 7mo agoI think the biggest case for a bearish attitude towards AGI is simply that we don't take advantage of the intelligence we already have. Look at our elected human leaders, for Pete's sake. If we had access to AGI today, we'd just find novel and interesting ways to ignore it, enslave it, gimp it, and/or bias it.
- adrianwaj 7mo agoIn other news: "HUT 8 Builds Flex Data Centers For AI, Bitcoin" https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/hut-8-builds-flex-data-centers-for-ai-bitcoin/ https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/hut-8-builds-fl... And they'll also do "high-performance computing." Yet, I think Sun's early 2000's vision "the network is the computer" is finally coming and these data centers will all end up becoming multi-use. Want access to apps running with 128GB of memory? Fine.. it'll just be on a thin-client with a data-center powering it (and everything else it does.) It's not a bad model. As I've mentioned previously, on the client-side I think will be a new era of all-in-one modular SBCs (medium clients.) These can become thin-clients for really beefy applications too that don't have to be "local-first" and can thus be "cloud enabled." It'd also be interesting to see crypto become more dynamic. Like making it super easy to issue a token for say an upcoming event, or better yet, a new invention looking for early adopters and supporters like Rodin Coils. The big data centers on the backend can make it secure. Just speculating. So the "big iron" compute won't ever be wasted, just repurposed dynamically. All these mad-scientist inventions will come from unemployed geniuses and tin-foil hatters, some of whom may actually be right. Let's see if they can find a way to vastly speed up radioactive decay with lasers, but, letting the bankers be fine with it all.
- augstein 7mo agoImo most AI compute will happen on-device in the near future.
- amanzi 7mo agoI hope it goes bust soon. I need to buy some RAM and an SSD for my PC...
- spl757 7mo agoA bust that the poor and middle-class will foot the bill for.
- karmakurtisaani 7mo agoWhy change a working process?
- Jamesbeam 7mo agoI hope not. Who’s going to pay me otherwise, becoming the chief security officer aboard the Altman-Musktani vessel USCSS Shiba Inu? You’re all going to eat rats on a stick while I pull the charred meat off some hostile tech CEOs’ neurodivergent talent for lunch I roasted to perfect crispiness with my boring company flamethrower arm attachment. So please all keep paying the magic word generator companies, so we can replace most of you and your miserably inefficient human production cycles, including eight hours a day not working because you lie around unconsciously, to become better human livestock, eh, I mean valued "Human Resources". /s
- keernan 7mo agoFor AI doubters, please watch Neil deGrassi Tyson's interview of Geoffrey Hinton a few weeks ago. It's 90 minutes long. For me it was a game changer. I am fully aware Hinton has been criticized for his views, but I urge you to listen to the interview and his reasoning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ZcFa8pybE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ZcFa8pybE