alt Hacker NewsI keep hearing AI companies say the demand is outstripping their supply and they need to build more data centers right now. And then I also see and read about how every company is cramming AI down everyone's throats in every product whether or not it's useful and/or wanted. I've used enough AI to see that it's revolutionary, but I'm also old enough to see the parallel to the dotcom days.
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I think there are two things that can be true at once:
1) For about 1% of people AI is completely transformative to their jobs and let's them work much much faster. Many engineers could easily blow $5,000 in compute per month on AI, and that number is only going up as AI gets better. A year ago, it would have been insane to spend that much on AI, now it's normal. This is driving all the demand, and will continue to be useful.
2) For 99% of people they have no use for AI short of better search. All of the AI tools being crammed everywhere are businesses trying to figure out how to not "get left behind" and ride the hype train. There is no demand for this stuff and I see the parallels to the dotcom bubble.
The AI being packed into everything are lightweight models that are not compute intensive at all to run.
It's the behemoth models (and their agents) that are actually constrained. There is not enough compute to meet the demand for people offloading their day job sized models (and the agent teams they spawn).
The demand is not real. They are hunting for any market that can pay. Nvidia was forcing companies to buy hardware they did not need or they would not be allowed to buy in the future. This created artificial scarcity that skyrocketed prices. Large data centers don't make sense, they require massive expensive grid upgrades to centralize all the gpus. Put those same gpus in each home and no one needs to upgrade anything.
It looks like jensen did this to increase nvidia production, so it would be easier to smuggle gpus to china. US businesses and consumers have had to pay billions more for their hardware because of jensen's smuggling ring.
The only winners were jensen's bank account and chinese businesses that wanted nvidia gpus.
The app I use to remote start my car just got a fancy new upgrade from the manufacturer. Now I've got to dismiss a popup that wants me to talk to an AI to remote start the car instead of just pressing a button.
Can't imagine when consumer demand isn't surging for AI.
Also the dogma is "AI is inevitable so you better just get used to it and start using it or you will be left behind."
But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
Something that bothers me with hn is that despite the amazing shit we see with AI, a big chunk of it has somehow decided that the corpo bloodsuckers are also amazing and should be protected at all costs. I wish we could have more nuanced conversations, considering the majority here think of themselves as some sort of high iq individuals.
What is the lesson of the dotcom days? There will be a brief pullback - and a couple goofy businesses will live in infamy - before that tech actually does go to the moon?
The demand seen by the big AI companies is largely from those others putting the AI features into everything. In this particular gold rush we actually have two sets of shovel sellers: Nvidia and the big AI companies.