Tired: homelabbers bringing decommissioned datacenter gear home.

Wired: homelabbers moving into decommissioned datacenters.

You're out of luck because I am willing to pay at least $2.

In TX? In Russian blogosphere it is a standard staple that Trump is rushing Ukrainian peace deal to be able to move on to the set of mega-projects with Russia - oil/gas in Arctic and data centers in Russian North-West where electricity and cooling is plentiful and cheap.

Right, THEY can't, but cloud providers potentially can. And there are probably other uses for everything not GPU/TPU for the Google's of the world. They are out way less than IBM which cannot monetize the space or build data centers efficiently like AWS and Google.

Or endure and contract.

The key difference between AI and the initial growth of the web is that the more use cases to which people applied the web, the more people wanted of it. AI is the opposite - people love LLM-based chatbots. But it is being pushed into many other use cases where it just doesn't work as well. Or works well, but people don't want AI-generated deliverables. Or leaders are trying to push non-deterministic products into deterministic processes. Or tech folks are jumping through massive hoops to get the results they want because without doing so, it just doesn't work.

Basically, if a product manager kept pushing features the way AI is being pushed -- without PMF, without profit -- that PM would be fired.

This probably all sounds anti-AI, but it is not. I believe AI has a place in our industry. But it needs to be applied correctly, where it does well. Those use cases will not be universal, so I repeat my initial prediction. It will endure and contract.

The difference is that the Internet was actually useful technology, whereas AI is not (so far at least).

I was looking at my Newegg orders recently. 7/18/2023 - 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6000 (PC5 48000) --> $260. Now, $750+.

GPUs have a very high failure rate…

Cheap compute would be a boon for science research.

It wasn't an 'it' it was a 'some'. Some of these companies that are investing massively in data centers will fail.

Right now essentially none have 'failed' in the sense of 'bankrupt with no recovery' (Chapter 7). They haven't run out of runway yet, and the equity markets are still so eager, even a bad proposition that includes the word 'AI!' is likely to be able to cut some sort of deal for more funds.

But that won't last. Some companies will fail. Probably sufficient failures that the companies that are successful won't be able to meaningfully counteract the bursts of sudden supply of AI related gear.

That's all the comment you are replying to is implying.

Given the amounts being raised and spent, one imagines that the ROI will be appalling unless the pesky humans learn to live on cents a day, or the world economy grows by double digits every year for a few decades.

I mean that is how capitalism works, no?