When mainstream media starts asking if something is a bubble, it's not only already been one for quite a while already, but it's about to pop.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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yeah. I'm wondering if GPT-5 being a wet fart is going to be the thing that pops the bubble.
Was there a lot of hype surrounding the new launch? I didn’t really keep up with it.
Regardless, I think it’ll take a bigger disappointment to burst it. Maybe something on the corporate side, like big players not seeing a return of their investment.
Ohhh yes. Altmans promotion for it was the Death Star coming up from behind a planet.
Maybe something on the corporate side, like big players not seeing a return of their investment.
Ohhh, it is. The big corporate hosters arent making much money and burning cash, and it’s not getting any better as specialized open models eat them from the bottom up.
GPT-OSS was kinda a flop too, even with decensoring.
AI isn’t gone, but the corporate side is realizing this is as good a way to make money as selling air.
Thanks, now my mental image of the AI bubble is now shit-coloured.
I don't know about that. I remember reading about the housing bubble in 2005 and it took 2 more years for it to pop
It's been a bubble since GPT2 guys, get with the program.
There is zero chance even half of all these AI product companies still exist in half a decade.
Now if you don't mind I reckon I'm gonna Alta Vista search for CDNow and then webvan something from pets.com
Always has been.
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀🌌
Is it really a boom when it's literally forced upon you unwillingly? Shoehorned into all the products you used to like?
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.
I mean, GPU box hardware prices will plument if there’s a crash, like they did with crypto GPU mining.
That’s how I got my AMD 7950 for peanuts. And a Nvidia 980 TI!
I am salivating over this. I am so in for a fire sale MI300 or A100.
What’s the commercial use for current capacity of hyper scale compute?
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.
Scientists will love the cheap CUDA compute though. I am looking forward to a hardware crash.
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 it 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.
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.
When entire state governments can fit in a single Rack, why bother?
An entire state government could fit it your cellphone. That's never been one of the use cases for data center level compute.
Ok; what application (which benefits society) requires data center level compute beyond physics simulations (which are better suited for quantum computers).
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.
No. A state government needs to support 1/10th of its population actively using its services. Say that state has 10M people; you will want 10k cores for all state services. an 8P server has about 1536 cores and you will need about 7 of them. So it still takes a whole rack even with the COBOL programs and applications written in C and Assembly.
"State services" is database lookups and billing. Back in the 90's, I supported 10k users (1.5k active at any moment) on a Pentium 3 with 512MB of Ram.
Constraint solvers for things such as Medicaid eligibility; OCR tagging for scanned documents; Anti-AI detection for uploaded images; but yes most state services are data entry and batch processing with web front ends.
Also the number of supported users does not scale linearly with the number of CPU cores as Amdahl's law showed back in 1967.
Also the number of supported users does not scale linearly with the number of CPU cores
US population has grown 25% from the year 2000. Other than Anti AI detection, everything worked on the hardware of 25 years ago. Single core performance has gone up more than 25% over the past 25 years.
25 years ago an 8P server had only 8 cores (even if you bought Alpha 21364s) And states needed whole buildings to host their servers. Scaling that down to a single rack is the progress that occurred.
Its like bubble wrap, because someone is gonna have fun popping it
ROFL. iS iT a bUBblE?!?
Always has been
lol
