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A bubble that knows it's a bubble

craigmccaskill.com

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Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#31

Post by fhd2 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

I had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US. Long…

> however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years.

Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last:

1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside).

2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data centers - doesn't take decades to build for sure, but it's something worthwhile to already have.

3. Advances in the actual chips, i.e. more powerful processing units.

4. Advances in chip fabrication.

5. Chip fabrication facilities and organisations (similar to #1 and #2).

So sure, GPUs are highly temporary. But a lot of the things being developed and built around them much less so.

I do think one possible bubble burst scenario is that we'll have cheap compute available for decades but not a lot of great ideas of what to do with it. That is not unlike the 2000s I suppose.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#32

Post by layoric »

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.

I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives it at the other side of the transaction. It is still in circulation, it can still be used to outbid people for real things, just by different people.

Also, pets.com still exists, it just forwards to petsmart.com.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#33

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ivape wrote: post #14
FinnLobsien wrote: post #11

I think this is directionally correct. But we tend to remember the technologies which became mainstream after the bubble burst and forget those that fizzled or found a much less world-changing niche. Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.

Influencers, streamers, crypto … Housing is back … Dotcom came back… Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it. So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years. AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able t…

>Housing is back … Nothing was a bubble.

Ironic how you can contradict yourself without realizing. The fact that something "came back", meant it WAS a bubble that popped.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#34

Post by flohofwoe »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #28

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Servic…

> Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.

OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;)

I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#35

Post by Ekaros »

gligorot wrote: post #29
FinnLobsien wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Right now it’s easy to look at it as a relatively niche thing. But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything. Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.

I would argue it disrupted engineering. So many videos on YouTube can be found of people cutting out expensive molds (for example) and getting a product to market faster and cheaper. And this is happening in companies as well (Prusa released an enterprise grade printer not long ago). At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. gene…

There is places and things that work for 3d printing. Very small scale manufacturing. Prototypes. But actually selling those is somewhat hard and not scalable market. And home printing... Yeah that sounds like hobbyist to me with corresponding market.

On other side you get to complex topologies and very specialised parts. Again pretty hard to scale and limited demand.

In the end it is manufacturing and manufacturing is huge. But also generally does not have great margins. It has lot of competition. So 3D printing would end up there with others say makers of CNC machines, various presses and so on. Multi-billion dollar industry, but not tech.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#36

Post by jstummbillig »

There is hubris, but calling it a bubble simply does not check out, for one reason alone: If AI did absolutely nothing from here on out but give maybe a somewhat better version of current claude code (and it confuses me to no end that some people still refuse to see what is going on there, which admittedly are increasingly few of those who try, which makes sense because stuff gets better) that leads to, say, a ~2x dev speed up it, given the size of the market and how much software is missing still, AI as a whole would still be undervalued.

Of course, assuming that this would be the only thing where economic gains come from is already such a laughably bearish vision. It's just that that's all you need for the bubble-thesis to fall flat.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#37

Post by fhd2 »

xg15 wrote: post #24
ehnto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, i…

Completely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible. If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.

Much like wheelchairs vs exo skeletons, the simpler (and cheaper) tech tends to win. I'd imagine in a future where robots are everywhere, they'll use whatever cheap locomotion is appropriate for their tasks, probably predominantly wheels. It's a fun vision to imagine bipedal robots everywhere like in old sci movies, but I'm not convinced that's how it'll play out, the economics don't make that much sense.

Bipedal robots are more expensive to develop, build and maintain, more limited in their payloads, and because of the additional complexity, less reliable.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#38

Post by Ekaros »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #33
ivape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Influencers, streamers, crypto … Housing is back … Dotcom came back… Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it. So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years. AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able t…

>Housing is back … Nothing was a bubble. Ironic how you can contradict yourself without realizing. The fact that something "came back", meant it WAS a bubble that popped.

Also nothing says that same thing can't be a bubble over and over again. Especially something as fundamental and old as housing. Those in power might even want it to be boom and bust cycle.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#39

Post by dandanua »

xg15 wrote: post #22
aurareturn wrote: post #19

FYI, Altman also said OpenAI is planning to invest “trillions” into AI in the “near future”. He said this at the same time as saying AI is bubbly. This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.

Self-contradictory communication seems to become his style. "AI is an existential risk for humanity, that's why we have to dump all resources we have into building it". "It's critically important that AI as an industry is regulated, but also we'll pull out of the EU if they try to regulate us"

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