Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

blog.robbowley.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 489 posts

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#51

Post by cactusplant7374 »

bc569a80a344f9c wrote: post #39
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #32

> Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly and wearing out under constant, high-intensity use. How about chips during the dotcom period? What was their lifespan?

That’s irrelevant because the primary assets left after the dotcom bubble was fiber in the ground with a lifetime measure in decades.

The author of the article is comparing past and present. It's not irrelevant to the article.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#52

Post by zkmon »

Also, the eco-system plays the biggest controlling role in the bubble and its aftermath. Ecosystem of social, political and business developments. Dotcom aftermath still had the wind from all the ecosytem trends that brought the dotcom back with bigger force. If the post AI hype world still has high priority for these talking bots, then maybe it's comparable to dotcom. If the world has other bigger basic issues that need attention, then yes, it could become a pile of silent silicon.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#53

Post by cactusplant7374 »

mikert89 wrote: post #8
Mistletoe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we make money on it, especially if massive amounts of the population lose their jobs?

dude again, we have computers that can talk and make decisions. We have birthed something here. We have something, this is big.

You should post something more substantial than this.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#54

Post by maxglute »

AI chips and bespoke data centers are closer to tulips than rail or fiber in terms of deprecated assets. They're not fungible stranded assets with long shelf life or room for improvment. Bubble bursting also points to current model towards AI is inherently not economically viable, i.e. we'll still be inferencing off existing models but won't be pouring 100billions into improving them. TLDR much more all or nothing gambit than past infra booms.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#55

Post by cactusplant7374 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #26
mjhay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even by HN standards, this is just an incredible comment. You’d think it’s satire, but I doubt it.

One of the reasons I like to swing by HN on the weekend is that the flavor of the comments is a lot spicier. For better or worse.

Is that a thing now?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#57

Post by antonvs »

rjh29 wrote: post #46
scellus wrote: post #17

He writes as if only datacenters and network equipment remain after the AI bubble bursts. Like there won't be any AI models anymore, nothing left after the big training runs and trillion-dollar R&D, and no inference served.

Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.

I run models for coding on my own machines. They’re a trivial expense compared to what I earn from the work I do.

The “at a loss” scenario comes from (1) training costs and (2) companies selling tokens below market to get market share. Neither of those imply that people won’t run models in future. Training new frontier-class models could potentially become an issue, but even that seems unlikely given what these models are capable of.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#58

Post by bc569a80a344f9c »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #51
bc569a80a344f9c wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s irrelevant because the primary assets left after the dotcom bubble was fiber in the ground with a lifetime measure in decades.

The author of the article is comparing past and present. It's not irrelevant to the article.

The whole point of the article is that the dotcom era produced long term assets that stayed valuable for decades after the bubble burst, and argues that the AI era is producing short term assets that won’t be of much use if the bubble bursts.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#59

Post by qgin »

rjh29 wrote: post #46
scellus wrote: post #17

He writes as if only datacenters and network equipment remain after the AI bubble bursts. Like there won't be any AI models anymore, nothing left after the big training runs and trillion-dollar R&D, and no inference served.

Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.

The models get more efficient every year and consumer chips get more capable every year. A GPT-5 level model will be on every phone running locally in 5 years.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#60

Post by ff2400t »

mikert89 wrote: post #13
parineum wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone underestimates that and a lot of people can't wait to see it.

anyone mentioning a bubble is underestimating the gravity of whats going on

I think you aren't understanding the meaning of the world bubble here. No one can deny the impact LLM can have but it still has limits. And the term bubble is used here as an economic phenomenon. This is for the money that openai is planning on spending which they don't have. So much money is being l poured here, but most users won't pay the outrageous sums of money that will actually be needed for these LLM to run, the break even points looks so far off that you can't even think about actual profitability. After the bubble bursts we will still have all the research done, the hardware left and smaller llms for people to use with on device stuff.
Post reply on HN