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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

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Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#51

Post by zerosizedweasle »

hx8 wrote: post #48
zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

A lot of the infrastructure made during the Dotcom boom was shortly discarded. How many dial-up modems were sold in the 90s? The current AI bubble is leading to trained models that won't be feasible to retrain for a decade or longer after the bubble bursts.

The wealth the Dotcom boom left behind wasn't in dial up modems or internet over the telephone, it was in the huge amounts of high speed fiber optic networks that were laid down. I think a lot of that infrastructure is still in use today, fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#52

Post by rhetocj23 »

lumost wrote: post #9
Insanity wrote: post #3

I think most level-headed people can see this is a giant bubble which will eventually burst like the dot-com crash. And AI is technology that's hard to understand to non-technical (and even some technical) investors. But of course, every company needs to slap AI on their product now just to be seen as a viable product. Personally, I look forward to seeing the bubble burst and being left with a more rational view of A…

OpenAI has a reasonable path to reduce their costs by 10-100x over the next 5 years if they stop improving the models. That would make them an extremely profitable company with their only real risk being “local ai”. However customers have wanted their data in the cloud for years, local inference would likely just mean 0 cost tokens for OpenAI. The challenge is the rest of the industry funding dead companies with bill…

The problem is OAI has very firece competition - folks who are willing to absorb losses to put them out of business.

Uber and Amazon are really bad examples. Who was Amazons competition? Nobody. By the time anyone woke up and took them seriously it was too late.

Uber only had to contend with Lyft and a few other less funded firms. Less funded being a really important thing to consider. Not to mention the easy access to immense amounts of funding Uber had.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#53

Post by rhetocj23 »

rchaud wrote: post #45
lumost wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has a reasonable path to reduce their costs by 10-100x over the next 5 years if they stop improving the models. That would make them an extremely profitable company with their only real risk being “local ai”. However customers have wanted their data in the cloud for years, local inference would likely just mean 0 cost tokens for OpenAI. The challenge is the rest of the industry funding dead companies with bill…

OpenAI is trying to launch a hardware product with Jony Ive, an ads company, a AI slop-native version of TikTok and several other "businesses". They look well on their way to turning into a Yahoo! than a Cisco or VMWare.

Yeah they are all over the place and this should be a huge red flag.

Some marginal investors know this but they are okay because the music is still playing - but when they think its time to leave the bubble will pop.

People seem to forget that its not about whether or not its actually a bubble, its really about when will certain people who set these stock prices for valuations, decide its time to exit and take their profit.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#54

Post by threecheese »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #19
mattnewton wrote: post #2

Seems like a measured approach- my read is him saying it’s probably a bubble in that bad ideas are being funded too, but there are a lot of really good ideas doing well. Also nit: Typo right in the digest I assume, assuming “suring” is “during”, does cnbc proofread their content?

Typos are proof something wasn't Ai written. Everyone should make at least one tyop in their writing.

I see what ya did tbere :)

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#55

Post by [deleted] »

gizajob wrote: post #31
arisAlexis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is AI hard to understand when you enter a cafe and everyone is chatting with their LLM?

The part that’s hard to understand is how the sunk costs of hundreds of billions in capex gets repaid by all those people in cafes paying hundreds of dollars per month to use those LLMs.

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#56

Post by simonw »

zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

That's true for the GPUs themselves, but the data centers with their electricity infrastructure and cooling and suchlike won't become obsolete nearly as quickly.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#57

Post by wmf »

zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

They're only replacing GPUs because investors will give "free" money to do so. Once the bubble pops people will realize that GPUs actually last a while.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#58

Post by davnicwil »

simonw wrote: post #56
zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

That's true for the GPUs themselves, but the data centers with their electricity infrastructure and cooling and suchlike won't become obsolete nearly as quickly.

this is a good point, and it would be interesting to see the relative value of this building and housing 'plumbing' overhead Vs the chips themselves.

I guess another example of the same thing is power generation capacity, although this comes online so much more slowly I'm not sure the dynamics would work in the same way.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#59

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

hx8 wrote: post #49
formerly_proven wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not really true, e.g. Cogent was basically created by buying bankrupt dotcum-bubble network providers for cents on the dollar.

Also AOL was a mix of dialup provider and Dotcom service. There were many other popular examples of such.

I don't think it is fair to characterize AOL as a bubble baby- they were a thing before that

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#60

Post by munk-a »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #44
zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

Personally I think people should stop trying to reason from the past. As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you are not thinking about how this particular situation is going to impact society and the economy. Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point? personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original thinking…

Doesn't that line of reasoning leave you in danger of being largely ignorant? There's a wonderful quote from Twain "History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes" there are two critical things I'd highlight in that quote - first off the contrast between repetition and rhyming is drawing attention to the fact that things are never exactly the same - there's just a gist of similarities - the second is that it often but doesn't always rhyme - this sure looks like a bubble but it might not be and it might be something entirely new. _That all said_ it's important to learn from history because there are clear echoes of history in events because we, people in general, don't change that fundamentally.
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