Assuming that all the claims are true, this would lead to a collapse under its own weight, because at that point, supposedly, most people won't be needed in the jobs they currently occupy.
Assuming the claims aren't true, there will be a reckoning where all the glitter thrown will hit the ground and people that invested would like to have their marbles back at whatever the cost.
I'd be betting on the latter rather than the former. BECAUSE all those companies are RUSHING for an IPO because none of them want to be left with the bag.
Just for the sake of comparison and to put things in perspective, just for the spaceX situation, running a datacenter is no easy task and require significant maintenance and supporting infrastructure, now you're going to tell me that you can achieve the same and even more in space where virtually everything is more complicated to achieve? And you're telling me that your entire business, or at least a big majority of it, will be this entirely unproven infrastructure? Seems like a bit of a stretch to me...
Now this being said, somehow some things may lie in the middle, but people seem to be a bit either too fond of the claims or too aggressive towards some part of the tech stack.
I’m willing to believe the construction is plausible (maybe not cost-effective, but possible), and robotic operation of it is a stretch but with some optimism I could be convinced.
I don’t see how they can get rid of the heat, at least in a realistic way that isn’t “a square kilometer of black body radiation surfaces” or something equally “works on paper, so uneconomical it will never actually happen”.
Either there's a revolutionary heat dissipation system in the works they're keeping a secret, or my ass is getting a smoke rash.
I see this sentiment often, and think it is short-sighted:
1. The tech fails at the goal - profitability is what we see for any tech that augments humans, which isn't anywhere close to satisfying the trillions in debt, busting the market and bleeding trillions from the economy.
OR
2. The tech succeeds at the goal - humans are mostly not needed anymore other than for menial low-paid work. Economy slows, then almost completely stops.
What is the outcome you see that keeps you optimistic? How do you intend to avoid the soup kitchen if this all works out? Because, you see, if this all works out you will have nothing of value to contribute too.
I think the tech will work well for some tasks where a formal feedback loop exists (such as coding). In other areas it will take many years to adapt business processes and roles to make the best use of this technology. The total productivity boost could be around 1% p.a similar to the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
Stock prices could be at risk not from lack of demand but because the data center buildout is bound to slow dramatically as we come up against some serious bottlenecks like energy, grid, fab capacity, permissions, etc. Not much will have to be written off, but the delays could cause big problems for debt funded projects and companies.
This slowdown will allow the economy and the workforce to evolve away from execution and towards planning, strategy, research and development, idea generation, experimentation, oversight as well as manually handling a million exceptions and gaps left by current AI models.
I don't think there has ever been a tech boom without a tech bust. But that's not the same thing as the tech not working or causing economic collapse. Maybe this time is different. Who knows.
Economy slows or stops when AI robots are producing goods and services for much lower cost than human workers? Perhaps, but I think the obvious next development would be massive deflation: even on welfare or UBI, you would be able to afford the same quantity of goods/services than with normal wage today, because the stuff produced by robots would be significantly cheaper. Just like stuff produced in factories is much cheaper than hand-made stuff we had before factories were invented.
> Economy slows or stops when AI robots are producing goods and services for much lower cost than human workers?
You can't have an economy without employment.
>you will have nothing of value to contribute too
So perhaps I can finally rest and solely focus on the stuff that I like. For this to be a problem, we need to imagine a dystopian scenario where our systems (and those who run 'em?) are effectively all-powerful and also cartoonishly selfish for no good reason at all.
You can do that now anyway, but you aren't.
I repeat my question - how do you imagine the economy will function if humans have nothing of value other than janitorial work to offer?
In the long term there will be a lot of work that AI _can_ do as well as (or better than) humans, where the human is still nominally doing the work, because of liability and verification requirements (e.g. medicine). Beyond that, I expect influencer/independent media to become the new it job.
Same as the dotcom and same as the railroads.
These three companies can do great while their valuations go nowhere.
The problem there isn't the models, it's consumer hardware. Even 16GB cards aren't the norm, and even with massive improvements in per-parameter performance we probably still need 48GB memory to get models that feel smart enough to trust.
If you scoped it to “average gaming desktop”, double digit VRAM is pretty normal at this point. If costs came down, I imagine the higher end GPUs would start including enough VRAM for 30B-ish models.
How? They're building out on debt. The investors need to offload at a profit otherwise the company can't sell more shares to acquire the cash needed (share price too low).
Sure, it's possible that a recent IPO does poorly but the company soldiers on regardless, but it's not likely.
SpaceX sort of is. OpenAI almost certainly is. Anthropic doesn't appear to be.
How do you value the AI market? Sometimes inventions change the world and companies struggle to make money. Airlines and the entire aerospace struggle to make money but no one can doubt airplanes are one of the biggest changes an inventions in human history.
It does not necessarily follow that it being a technological revolution also means that it is a good investment—at least, perhaps, at this point in time. Railroads were a tech revolution, but a lot of them—and their investors—went bankrupt once the hype subsided and the overbuilding stopped. Once consolidation happened after their crash then railroads became a stable investment.
There are numerous examples of this in history, starting with (at least) canals; see Perez:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
If all that works out. Most people including me so far don't see the promised revolution, productivity gains are meager since not all of us work in code sweatshops churning simple crud or similar apps out like there is no tomorrow, llm models are extremely unreliable, confidently hallucinating shit out of blue, their quality highly varies over time as compute is present or not.
If thats your revolution, well fuck that revolution we can do better as mankind. Its probably a change, but bearing hallmarks of the worst in mankind we could muster together and seems to bring the worst traits out of humans, ie greed.