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Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

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Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#131

Post by chasd00 »

zer0tonin wrote: post #116
refulgentis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a greybeard, you would have lived this with many, many, companies, and I extremely doubt you'd be so fixated and angry as to mumble through a parody of what you perceive the counterargument as. Mine were Uber/Tesla, fwiw.

If you were an actual "greybeard" your references would be Pets.com and Worldcom. Those didn't end the same way as Uber/Tesla.

to be fair, Worldcom ended in an accounting scandal. I had a friend who worked at UUNET and would sneak me into the megahub in Richardson TX at night to download movies and other large, for the time, files (first time i ever saw an OC148 in real life). UUNET was bought by Worldcom and then after the implosion my friend showed me these gigantic cube farms in the office that were completely empty of people. It was very weird.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#132

Post by HDThoreaun »

mjr00 wrote: post #36
JCM9 wrote: post #3

I’m bullish on AI as tech but folks are starting to sniff out that the financials of everything going on at the moment aren’t sustainable for much longer. I hope we have more of a “reality correction” than full blown bubble bursting, but the data is increasingly looking like we’re about to have a massive implosion that wipes out a generation of startups and sets the VC ecosystem back a decade.

The most sobering statistic I've seen is that the entire combined amount of consumer spending on AI products is currently less than the revenue of Genshin Impact.

The money is in business licenses. Why only look at consumer? Consumers are mostly still using the free version which exists to convince employers to pay.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#133

Post by danielbln »

refulgentis wrote: post #86
danielbln wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_sigh_ Yes LLMs hallucinate, no it's no longer 2022 and ChatGPT (gpt-3.5) is the pinnacle of LLM tech. Modern LLMs in an agentic loop can self correct, you still need to be on guard but if used correctly (yes, yes, holding it wrong etc. etc.) can do many, many tasks that do not suffer from "need to check every single time".

Apologies that you're taking on the chin here. Generally, I'll just skip fantastical HN threads with a critical mass of BS like this, with pity, rather than an attempt to share (for more on that c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929335 ) Been on HN 16 years and never seen anything like the pack of people who will come out to tell you it doesn't work and they'll never pay for it and it's wrong 50% of the tim…

Yeah, it really pulled the veil away, didn't it? So much dismissiveness and uninformed takes, from a crowd that had been driving automation forward for years and years and you'd think they'd get more familiar with these new class of tools, warts and all.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#135

Post by neom »

cowpig wrote: post #101
neom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and then the Canadian government handed hundreds of millions to the kids at Cohere who have now gone spent it on Coreweave. When it was all announced I was very very vocal that using an inexperienced startup for the sovereign compute capabilities seemed a very poor choice. I'm so curious to see how this all plays out.

What should they have done instead? I have a lot of opinions on this but curious about yours :)

I'm Canadian and I built DigitalOcean, there is a data center in Toronto because I decided. I am one of many Canadians who have built scaled infrastructure and think this is a nightmare. Many competent people at telus and bell behind the scenes believe it or not. They should have, and still should, form a crown corp and get a bunch of us older infrastructure people to help put it together. We have crown corps for this very purpose, from my understanding the people in the rooms calling the shots had little to no experience architecting large scale physical data center build outs. Cohere, or any startups should be stakeholders, but the infra should have been home grown.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#136

Post by dchftcs »

re-thc wrote: post #126
dchftcs wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement here that Nvidia invests in OpenAI is a bit misleading. Nvidia would pay out nothing to OpenAI if OpenAI turns out to be too poor to pay for capacity. So they are not that exposed to the death of OpenAI specifically. They would be more at risk of making too many GPUs to prepare for the deals. Oracle takes a lot more risk, but in case OpenAI fails to grow quickly, it can still probably find buyers for it…

> Nvidia would pay out nothing to OpenAI if OpenAI turns out to be too poor to pay for capacity. So they are not that exposed to the death of OpenAI specifically. Nvidia has invested billions in previous rounds of OpenAI raises also. Pretty sure it is not nothing. Also OpenAI rents from CoreWeave that Nvidia has invested in.

>Nvidia has invested billions in previous rounds of OpenAI raises also. Pretty sure it is not nothing.

Ok I stand corrected, but the main point is that the "circular" risk more refers to the recent 100B "investment", and that is quite misleading.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#137

Post by SilverElfin »

chollida1 wrote: post #17

Its worse for some other "ai" related companies. Coreweave for instance, now has its CDS trade around 600bp, which is a 1/3 rise in 2 months, which implies that the probability of a default in 5 years is 40% at a 40 cent recovery rate. That makes Coreweave's credit rating the equivalent of CCC-, which aint good.

Sorry if this is basic, but do you mind explaining the logic here for those who aren’t familiar? Also where are you getting this data? Thanks in advance.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#138

Post by cyberpunk »

lambersley wrote: post #118
zkmon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about being late. They don't need to get into those. Companies should stick to their identity once they settled somewhere, instead of becoming color-changing chameleon. Database is still very relevant tech and they missed a whole lot in that domain. Infact, if anything, world is even more dependent now on data and databases. Why did Oracle not rule this kingdom?

A software company who does not change the world, and/or change with the world, will die. The world is not dependent on Oracle DB though. Enterprises are chomping at the bits trying to get of Oracle DB. Evolution is brutal.

It’s not even technical reasons my org has loads of oracle it’s compliance. We have to have vendor support for the data layer for certain financial applications which leaves us with only the companies willing to do the insane dance that is involved in getting vendor certified with my bank (6 months on avg, hundreds of pages of legal documents).

It narrows the field, at least for us, to microsoft, ibm, oracle and mongo.

So we’re all in on mongo, as it goes, but I wouldn’t really balk at running some stuff on the giant oracle clusters now and again.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#140

Post by mike_hearn »

refulgentis wrote: post #81
hvb2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech is way underpriced right now. It's basically a subsidized market right now, with the money flowing in coming from the private sector. The problem here is that it remains to be seen who is willing to pay for the service once it's priced at cost or even with a margin. And based on valuations of AI companies one would expect a huge margin.

It's not subsidized, lol. Generally, I worry HN is in a dark place with this stuff - look how this thread goes, ex. descendant of yours is at "Why would I ever pay for this when it hallucinates." I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that. I'm worried for those who do, genuinely, I hope transitions out there are slow enough, due to obstinance, that they're not cast out…

I'm a big fan and user of AI but I don't see how you can say it's not subsidized. You can't just ignore the costs of training or staff or marketing or non-model software dev. The price charged for inference has to ultimately cover all those things + margin.

Also, the leaked numbers being sent to Ed Zitron suggest that even inferencing is underwater on a cost basis, at least for OpenAI. I know Anthropic claims otherwise for themselves.

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