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Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

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Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#171

Post by bigstrat2003 »

watwut wrote: post #95
Cheer2171 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their expectations are NOT reasonable. They expect ChatGPT to do their entire job for $20/month and hire, plan, budget accordingly. This is entirely on the AI companies and their boosters. Sam Altman literally says gpt 5 is "like having a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket." All the commercials sell this fantasy.

I would blame the business people for being so gullible too.

There's some blame there, sure. But generally people would agree that between a con man and his victims, the con man has the greater moral failing.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#172

Post by pgspaintbrush »

whp_wessel wrote: post #30
pgspaintbrush wrote: post #16

Are these companies developing InfiniBand-class interconnects to pair with their custom chips? Without equivalent fabric, they can’t replace NVIDIA GPUs for large-scale training.

recent Huang podcast went into this, making the point that custom chips won't be competitive to Nvidia's as they are now making specialised chips instead of just 'gpu's'. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ieRvuJxrpTh2V626siZYQ?si=2...

Thank you for the pointer!

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#173

Post by Aerbil313 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #90
Mistletoe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should get on Reddit, people hate AI with a passion there. People I meet in real life hate it also. I think the public actually hates AI more than it should now.

I spent 13 years chronically on reddit before stumbling into a exit hatch of the bubble chamber. Those people (well really it's teens and college kids) live on reddit, they are so far from an accurate representation of reality its insane.

Everyone should learn the concept of a Skinner Box. [1]

Reddit is a Skinner Box. HN is too, though to a much lesser extent [2]. Every Skinner Box has one dominant opinion on every matter, which means, by simply using the product, your beliefs on any matter will shift towards the dominant opinion of the platform.

I was a chronically online Reddit user once. I can spot any chronically online Reddit user in just a few minutes in any social event by their mannerisms and the way they talk. I’ll ask and without fail indeed they are a daily Reddit user. It’s even more obvious in writing where you can spot them in just a few always-grammatically-correct text messages flavored with reddit-funny remarks and snarks and jokes.

Same goes for chronic X users. Their signature behavior is talking about social/political issues unprompted. It’s even easier to spot them.

I think the main reason behind platforms shaping user behavior is this: The most upvoted content will always surface to the top, where it will be seen by most users, meaning, its belief-shaping impact is exponential instead of linear. In the same manner unpopular opinions will be pushed to the bottom, and will have exponentially small impact. Some opinions will even be banned or shadowbanned, which means they are beyond the Overton Window of the specific platform.

This way, the platform both nudges you towards the dominant opinion and limits the range of possible opinions you will be exposed to. Over time, this affects your personality and character.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

2: The HN moderators and the algorithm both actively resist the effect and try to increase diversification.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#174

Post by rglullis »

bix6 wrote: post #113
rglullis wrote: post #97

The one thing I don't understand is this assumption that demand for GPUs for training is going to keep growing at the rate they grew so far. I get the demand for new applications, which require inference , but nowadays with so many good (if not close to SOTA) models available for free and the ability to run them on consumer hardware (apple M4 or AMD Max APUs), is there any demand for applications that justify a crazy…

Isn’t the whole point of the arms race that the more GPUs you have the closer you get to AGI? Which is the supposed goal here.

I do not believe for a second that any of those people investing tens of billions of dollars are doing it to "get to AGI". They would only be able to profit from a AGI if it could be simultaneously (a) weaponized and (b) strictly controlled by one party, and there is no one crazy enough that these could be achieved.

If you tell me that people are pouring all that money into data centers because they believe that most applications will use some form of LLM or VLM as the main driver of machine-to-machine and machine-to-person interface, I'd be more inclined to buy it. But then I'd respond that it seems that LLMs are reaching a point of diminishing returns and the big next move is to make it easy and faster to distill/fine-tune the LLMs for specific business needs, which is something that should be possible to do with the existing infra already (I guess?)

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#175

Post by Leynos »

skrebbel wrote: post #51
mg wrote: post #18

Fiber networks were using less than 0.002% of available capacity, with potential for 60,000x speed increases. It was just too early. I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity. As soon as we can prompt "Think about the codebase over night. Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution." we will want as much GPU time at the current rate as possible. If a minute of GPU usage is currently $0.10, a…

> improved codebase I've seen lots of claims about AI coding skill, but that one might be able to improve (and not merely passably extend) a codebase is a new one. I'd want to see it before I believe it.

It depends what you're fitting to. At the simplest, you can ask for a reduction in cyclomatic/cognitive complexity measured using a linter, extraction of methods (where a paragraph of code serves no purpose other than to populate a variable) or complex conditionals, move from an imperative to a declarative approach, etc. These are all things that can be caught through pattern matching and measured using a linter or code review tool (CodeRabbit, Sourcery or Codescene).

Other things might need to be done in two stages. You might ask the agent to first identify where code violates CQRS, then for each instance, explain the problem, and spawn a sub-agent to address that problem.

Other things the agent might identify this way: multiple implications, use of conflicted APIs, poor separation of concerns at a module or class level.

I don't typically let the agent do any of this end to end, but I would typically manually review findings before spawning subagents with those findings.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#176

Post by Leynos »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #49
cl42 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. If you speak with AI researchers, they all seem reasonable in their expectations. ... but I work with non-technical business people across industries and their expectations are NOT reasonable. They expect ChatGPT to do their entire job for $20/month and hire, plan, budget accordingly. 12 months later, when things don't work out, their response to AI goes to the other end of the…

> their expectations are NOT reasonable. They expect ChatGPT to do their entire job for $20/month and hire, plan, budget accordingly. This is entirely on the AI companies and their boosters. Sam Altman literally says gpt 5 is "like having a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket." All the commercials sell this fantasy.

I mean, the AI companies have £200 a month plans for a reason. And if you look at Blitzy for example, their plans sit at the £1000 a month mark.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#177

Post by hackthemack »

awongh wrote: post #149
watwut wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 've never heard anyone claim before that just having these laws on the books for a small period of time is "enough". Why would it be enough? This legislation prevents monopolies from abusing position, therefore we will repeal it the moment it turns out to be useful? Yeah, it takes time to consolidate power again, that does not mean the legislation is not good.

> Why would it be enough? It worked out just fine? Are you saying that post-2003 internet access should have had more regulation to allow open access? I've never heard anyone complain about that before- is there a specific issue that could have been fixed?

You bring up an interesting point. This is something I discovered years ago when I would have "political discussion lunch" with three of my friends who all had very different political views. After years of going to lunch together and debating things like, "Was giving AT&T a monopoly in 1913, good, or bad?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

The answer is... nobody will ever agree on anything. You can always cherry pick some detail to bolster your case, whatever it may be.

We can never visit the alternate reality where another choice was made and so you can not win an argument.

Now, you can go and find similar circumstances. You can find other countries who did not grant a monopoly (for instance). But then, your opponent will argue all the differences between that instance and what occurred.

Also, I think it is a shame your original reply is getting voted down. I am against people voting down comments just because they disagree. Voting down should be used for comments that are low quality.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#178

Post by rglullis »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #112
rglullis wrote: post #97

The one thing I don't understand is this assumption that demand for GPUs for training is going to keep growing at the rate they grew so far. I get the demand for new applications, which require inference , but nowadays with so many good (if not close to SOTA) models available for free and the ability to run them on consumer hardware (apple M4 or AMD Max APUs), is there any demand for applications that justify a crazy…

Inference will be cheapest when run in a shared cloud environment, simply due to the LLMs roofline. Thus, most B2B use cases are likely to be datacenter based, like AWS today. Of course, cern is still going to use their FPGA hyper-optimized for their specific trigger model for the LHC, and apple is gojng to use a specialized low power ASIC running a quantized model for hello Siri, but I meant the majority usecase.

I do not buy this premise. I think it will end up being cheaper to simply run the LLMs directly on the user device.

I think that there are plenty of competitors in the "LLMs with open weights" space to essentially make the models a commodity, so all that is left is the compute cost and there is no way that someone will be running a datacenter in a way that is cheaper than "the computer that I already have running on my desk".

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#179

Post by credit_guy »

mg wrote: post #18

Fiber networks were using less than 0.002% of available capacity, with potential for 60,000x speed increases. It was just too early. I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity. As soon as we can prompt "Think about the codebase over night. Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution." we will want as much GPU time at the current rate as possible. If a minute of GPU usage is currently $0.10, a…

> As soon as we can prompt "Think about the codebase over night. Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution." we will want as much GPU time at the current rate as possible.

That is nothing. Coding is done via text. Very soon people will use generative AI for high resolution movies. Maybe even HDR and high FPS (120 maybe?). Such videos will very likely cost in the range of $100-$1000 per minute. And will require lots and lots of GPUs. The US military (and I bet others as well) are already envisioning generative AI use for creating a picture of the battlespace. This type of generation will be even more intensive than high resolution videos.

Re: Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?

#180

Post by Workaccount2 »

KronisLV wrote: post #150
GauntletWizard wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By reddit? No. By the users? No. But they are paid.

You’d like to substantiate that? I’d love to have someone pull the curtain back and learn by whom, if that’s the case.

I don't know about money, but they definitely get ego strokes.
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