I mean, hardware prices will fall if there’s a crash, like they did with crypto GPU mining.
I am salivating over this. Bring out the firesale A100s.
Comment on The New Yorker Asks: Is the A.I. Boom Turning Into an A.I. Bubble?
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
For some it will be. For the pure AI software companies, yes. For the hardware vendors and data centers, less so. Even if it’s not for generative AI, there will always be need for hyper scale compute.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
misk@piefed.social 2 days ago
What’s the commercial use for current capacity of hyper scale compute?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not a lot? The quirk is they’ve hyper specialized nodes around AI.
The GPU boxes are useful for some other things, but they will be massively oversupplied, and they mostly aren’t networked like supercomputer clusters.
misk@piefed.social 1 day ago
That’s what I figured but was open to hearing how data centers won’t go bankrupt when current VC / investor money stops propping up AI arms race. I’m not even sure lots existing hardware won’t go to waste because there’s seemingly not enough power infrastructure to feed them and big tech corpos are building nuclear reactors (on top of restarting coal power plants…). Those reactors might be another silver lining however similar to cheap compute becoming available for scientific applications.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
because there’s seemingly not enough power infrastructure
This is overblown. I mean, if you estimate TSMC’s entire capacity and assume every data center GPU they make is full TDP 100% of the time (which is not true), the net consumption isn’t that high. The local power/cooling infrastructure things are more about corpo cost cutting.
Altman’s preaching that power use will be exponential is a lie that’s already crumbling.
But there is absolutely precedent for underused hardware flooding the used markets, or getting cheap on cloud providers. Honestly this would be incredible for the local inference community, as it would give tinkerers (like me) actually affordable access to experiment with.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
When entire state governments can fit in a single Rack, why bother?
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
An entire state government could fit it your cellphone. That’s never been one of the use cases for data center level compute.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Ok; what application (which benefits society) requires data center level compute beyond physics simulations (which are better suited for quantum computers).
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 days ago
An entire state government could run on your phone but requires an entire data center because it’s written in JavaScript that emulates the original COBOL code that ran the government in the 1960’s.