A bubble that knows it's a bubble
craigmccaskill.com
A bubble that knows it's a bubble
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Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#2Citing Ray Dalio makes me question the credibility of the whole article.
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#3Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#4I 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 term, I think the real winners are going to be in robotics. Still an unsolved field, but Waymo proves that even a nearly 20 year slog to the finish line is viable. And robotics infrastructure may be more robust to obsolescence than the underlying compute. I find it odd so many companies are making humanoid robots though... Over engineering that reeks of bubble economics and possible fraud.
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#5> The speculation democratized investing in a way never seen before. Clerks, shopkeepers, and domestic servants, people who had never owned stocks before, mortgaged their homes and borrowed money to buy railway shares.
I like the term "democratize investing" here. "We're granting the masses the privilege of dumping their lifesavings into this overhyped project, so we can make a clean exit".
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#6I 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…
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, in all degrees of motion a human has etc.
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#7I 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…
Yes the thing that might be missed in the point about how the big buildout of GPU compute is going to be the backbone of the future etc is that, unlike railroads and dark fibre, the GPU compute gets obsolete really really quickly. So it's not the same.
I had a friend who got a Sun cluster for basically free when the 2000 dot com bubble burst. And when we were doing recreational math contests a couple of years later it was slower than our laptops.
So it is very likely that a load of today's GPU compute is very competitive next year or the year after?
The AI bubble bursting will kill investment in the next gen hardware in the west.
But china will come to market with its first gen that it is currently building to replace its dependency on the west and will leapfrog the west etc. China isn't really completely dependent on competing in our AI bubble, its using AI for its own things and will plough on even when the west bubble bursts. Seems obvious?
Still, there has been so much talk about the AI bubble bursting last week and this is the the best writeup.
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#8> Anthropic raised $450 million at a $4.1 billion valuation despite negligible revenue
What year is this from? The author might want to do a recent news search.
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#9I recently gave an unprompted tirade about bubbles creating pockets of fake economic activity with no “real” economic output or value creation tied to them, and how sometimes, the circulatory systems in those bubbles feed into themselves.
E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property.
Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble
#10I 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…
The half-life of iron is pretty low too, the advantage of the rail system is what it allowed us to do when it was cheap enough.
All the investment in AI should help bring infrastructure up to a higher level, power distribution and cooling for example are at a much higher level than would have otherwise been.
Who knows what use that might have if it suddenly becomes incredibly cheap.
(this is my silver lining thinking)