Nvidia is self-dealing by investing in its own customers so they can keep buying its GPUs. That's something companies do when real investment starts to dry up.
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@freakazoid Sure, but it seems to me that those numbers currently just mean that they've gone from "absolutely bonkers ridiculously over-valued" to "very slightly less absolutely bonkers ridiculously over-valued".
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@[email protected] @[email protected] Stock price is pretty disconnected from reality. I'd guess that the reality is they can't let GPU demand drop without risking a glut and fall in future demand for chips in the pipeline. It takes years from design to production to sales and if the sales flag for too long, all their current investments on future chips are put at risk. If they overinvested based on hype-fueled projections, they'd have an incentive to drive demand harder than usual. Hard to say.
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@abucci @datarama I shared the stock price trajectory only because I think it's a hint that people are starting to wake up to the hype. My guess is that Nvidia already knew well before the peak that they had overinvested in capacity.
This represents a small shift from investing in supply to investing in demand, but of course only for the GPUs themselves. I wonder if they've thought about the fact that datacenters are still only intermediaries?
I am confident the AI crash is going to precipitate a cloud computing crash as well. That whole space is filled with self-dealing. Microsoft has been literally buying customers by trading Azure credits for shares. And venture capitalists get the companies they invest in to do business with one another in order to inflate their perceived value. All incredibly scammy, but the regulators do nothing about it because they only act when the money runs out.
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@freakazoid @abucci I'd personally say the biggest indicator that the party is coming to a close is that Jensen Huang personally sold off an enormous pile of his stock a couple weeks ago.
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@abucci @freakazoid About 630 million dollars worth of stock IIRC, just a couple weeks ago.
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@datarama @abucci Perhaps another reason for Nvidia to invest in future customers: competition from OpenAI, or at least the potential to lose them as a customer.
And as an aside, no reduction in the US's dependency on Taiwan for chips in the foreseeable future. Things will get real interesting in the latter half of this decade.
OpenAI allegedly wants TSMC 1.6nm for in-house AI chip debut
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/openai_ai_chips_tsmc/ -
@freakazoid @abucci Though that's less an indication of winter, and more one of market diversification? (which, on the other hand, is something that basically never happens in that particular line of business.)
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@datarama Indeed, it seems like it can only be a good thing for AI generally.
The fact that this "boom" has happened despite Nvidia's stranglehold and with interest rates being closer to historical norms than they've been since 2008 means the coming crash may not be so bad. On the other hand, I think the AI hype may also be delaying the worst of the fallout from the latest tech bubble bursting, which in turn was precipitated by interest rates going up. So it'll really be multiple bubbles bursting at once, at least AI+cloud.
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@freakazoid @abucci Unfortunately, I don't think "good for AI generally" is the same thing as "good".
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@freakazoid @abucci That'd be swell!
In all seriousness, while it's *evident* that there's a bubble going on and a crash is coming, I have a hard time predicting how terrible it's going to end up getting. I don't think AGI is around the corner, but I *do* fear that Mass Layoff As A Service might be.
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@datarama Yeah, unlike a lot of bubbles it seems really hard to separate it from everything else that's going on right now. It's right up there with the Internet and mobile when it comes to companies going "all in" on it, but there's no guarantee that it's going to amount to much, and even mobile and the Internet were full of missteps and promises that they never delivered on.
And it also feels like peak late stage capitalism. In some ways it feels like a last gasp from Silicon Valley as it gets kicked off its pedestal, too. And in some ways it's been helping kick Silicon Valley off its pedestal. Google, for example, are a laughingstock now. Intel is running into serious trouble because of the shift to ARM and Nvidia's rise. So I suppose it could just be a reshuffling, too.
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@freakazoid @abucci Someone else here on fedi remarked the other day:
"The tech industry has lost the Mandate of Heaven".
And yeah - that is very much what I *feel* these days. (I live far, far from Silicon Valley - yet, thanks to the magic of the internet, it feels like all the tech sector awfulness is right next door.)
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@freakazoid @abucci A somewhat more personal observation:
I think I've finally figured out why, despite frequently descending into poignant retrocomputing nostalgia, I am not a retrocomputing enthusiast.
The thing that made computers feel fun in the 80s-90s in a way that they don't now wasn't anything about the computers themselves, or that I was younger and life was simpler. It was about the future they seemed to promise. That promise is broken now.
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@datarama Hard same. I have tried REALLY HARD to get back into it and have the projects & hardware to prove it, but it really just makes me feel kinda sad.
But I don't think it's just life or youth. I think there's probably a hint for improving/rescuing computing there. I'm just not quite sure what it is. Or maybe I'm just deceiving myself in an attempt to justify not letting go completely.
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@freakazoid @abucci The story changed. "Bicycles for the mind"; a story about empowerment and liberation. But then it became a story of surveillance and manipulation, and now a story of replacement, powerlessness and immiseration.
Despite my political leanings, I don't really think tech needs another revolution - the last many ones only led to things getting worse. I think tech needs a renaissance; a rediscovery of values we shouldn't have dropped.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] When I first got into computing as a kid, the names of the companies making the stuff I used weren't shoved into my face with every keypress. Obviously I knew about Microsoft and Apple and whatnot, but they weren't a presence in my life. Now they're ever present, constantly looking over your shoulder. The companies demand you allow them constant access to everything you do with a computing device. The companies demand a seat at the table at every meeting about any new standard, law, or regulation. The companies spawn new companies, which make even more demands.
Computing today is oppressive. That should change, but for now it's hard to even imagine how.
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@abucci @freakazoid I shielded myself from some of it by using desktop Linux on my daily driver. But so much software and so many of the things we do with computers are online-first or -only now, so it doesn't matter as much.
I have a hard time imagining a non-terrible future for computing, and it pains me. (So does the risks generative AI bring to our profession, but I suppose that's a different discussion.)