It's going to take a year or two more. Will the humanoid robots being built be useful? Will Tesla's robotaxi ever work without a huge number of remote monitors? Will the free models start to displace the expensive ones? Will someone figure out a way to do all this at lower cost? We don't know yet. But there are too many huge companies with rather inflated market caps. Some of that has to be air.
[–] gizajob 1 day ago
[–] rolisz 1 day ago
[–] lelanthran 1 day ago
Pity you qualified your prediction with "immediate"; a simimlar sentiment was around just before the dot-com crash: "There's no version of the future where we won't be able to use all that extra network infra."
Turned out, in the immediate future, just post-crash, we actually didn't need them. They only got used a decade later.
Will we need every larger compute and RAM?
Sure?
Will we need it in a post-crash scenario?
Nope!
[–] gizajob 1 day ago
And an RTX5090 is going to drop down to a few hundred dollars is it? Just because the price of stonks is temporarily correcting downwards?
[–] lelanthran 1 day ago
No, but we may have enough GPU (with their RAM) sitting around in datacentres that our AI needs will be taken care off for the foreseeable future.
I mean, RAM is not really fungible - these valuations are not tied to RTX5090s, they are tied to the server GPUs.
The investment was not used to buy RAM sticks for desktop and server m/boards. ANthropic did not use their VC money to buy RTX5090s. The VC money went to power generation, datacentres, and server GPUs with 768GB of RAM.
So, yeah, if the bubble pops, we're well taken care of in the immediate future by the stuff the VC money already bought.
[–] gizajob 1 day ago
And what about local AI and agentic stuff? We can all stick with 32Gb of ram at home and piddly lil GPUs?
In my opinion this turmoil is hedge funds and market makers flushing out liquidity, same as they always do. Paying Bernie Sanders to tweet “no more datacentres” is pretty cheap to do.
Extreme fear = always a buying opportunity.
[–] lelanthran 1 day ago
That's literally the definition of a bubble-pop. The assets get sold for pennies on the dollar (sometimes even fractions of a penny on the dollar).
> And what about local AI and agentic stuff? We can all stick with 32Gb of ram at home and piddly lil GPUs?
Won't matter if there's demand for that, that specific market can't use the stuff already purchased by VC money. TBH, I won't even care about self-hosting if the bubble pops, because all those things the VC money purchased will get bought up for basically scrap prices, then hosted for cost of hosting + tiny markup.
There's no principle to repay, so prices are going to be opex + markup, not opex + training costs + repayment on loan + commitment penalties + markup.
> Extreme fear = always a buying opportunity.
Which brings me back to your assertion: that all these things already purchased by VC money will still be needed. We found that to be untrue during the dotcom crash: Hardware makers (those that survived) stock took 17 years to get back to where they were pre-crash, the 0.01% software stock that survived the crash took a decade to recover.
The only way this is a buying opportunity is if there is no crash.
[–] gizajob 1 day ago
These assets aren’t going to get sold for pennies on the dollar. Too many people would be interested in them and they’ll get bid back up to 90 cents on the dollar.
We’re currently in a situation similar to the dot com crash but one that has enough differences for one to not apply the logic of that crash to it. The main difference being hardware companies are making huge amounts of money and cannot keep up with production due to excess of demand compared to supply. Their only approach in your crash scenario would that they would drop prices, but that will lead to yet more demand and prices rising.
I’d happily heat my house on a rack full of GPUs and memory and use all the AI capacity that came with it. But there’s no way hardware prices are going to also crash to allow me to do that.
[–] eli_gottlieb 8 hours ago
Tesla? Waymo is operating in American cities right now. I've taken them.
There’s no version of the immediate future where this isn’t the case.