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| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Elaborate. In the dotcom era the demand was far lower than the projections, and orders of magnitude less than what they were building out to. The "products" like catsdotcom and dogsdotcom had massive investments with 0 real-world demand. Even hardware stuff like fiber rollouts were severely overestimated, and led to very cheap dark fiber for a while, because the demand simply wasn't there. We know now, with hindsight, that the demand eventually overtook those projections and deployments 10-15 years later. In comparison, today we see huge demand, and all of the providers seem to be swamped. The hardware pricing has gone through the roof. Environment stuff + public "opinion" + outside influence campaigns have led to a very hostile environment for building out capacity. Real constrains for power generation. The providers are so eager to get more capacity online that even the most "religiously self proclaimed good guys" had to sign with spacemanbad to get more compute yesterday. It's that bad. And despite all of this, all the providers are reporting increasing revenue. Even "wrappers" like cursor reported 4+B/y revenue. The top labs are remporting several B /mo in revenue, and growing. Even goog's cloud stuff is starting to be a sizeable chunk of their revenue, and that's competing with the ads cash cow. Hell, even meta had a record quarter, driven by increased traffic in their products, likely because they deployed chat stuff. There is real demand in the market today, and with model capabilities going up, that's bound to continue for the foreseeable future. The dotcom bubble and this thing are nothing alike. Any of the large "products" can (and some probably will) fail, but the tech behind it is like the Internet. It will only grow, and be ubiquitous in a decade. | | |
| ▲ | camillomiller 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The dotcom bubble and this thing are nothing alike. Any of the large "products" can (and some probably will) fail, but the tech behind it is like the Internet. It will only grow, and be ubiquitous in a decade. You dismantled your entire argument with this closing sentence.
I do not doubt that gen AI is here to stay in some form, but that is not what we’re discussing here.
What you’re showing as weak proof of demand is billions in revenue that pale in front of hundreds of billions, soon to be a trillion, in yearly capex spending.
That is not regular spending for a tech buildout unless you are somehow certain that the tech in question can radically upend the global economy. Right now that is very much still wishful thinking. Even the dotcom Internet buildout cost a fraction of this current frenzy, and yet the demand justifying our current situation is moot at best.
Or you want me to really accept that these companies will generate trillion/s in revenue within 5 years to justify the absolutely insane level of investment? | | |
| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, no. How much is invested doesn't matter. Look at who is investing. Every big tech firm (literally, each and every one of them). They'll make the money back, one way or another. Unless you're willing to claim that the entire tech sector goes poof tomorrow. They won't. They'll still be here 10-20-50 years, and they'll make their trillions back. | | |
| ▲ | vitally3643 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Who was investing in the dotcom bubble that wasn't "everyone"? This is an appeal to authority that doesn't check out. | |
| ▲ | camillomiller 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I guess that if NitpickLawyer says we're fine, there's no problem with the capex we're seeing then.
They won't go puff, they'll go Cisco. | |
| ▲ | owebmaster 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm sure someone said that about Yahoo and eBay during the dotcom crash | | |
| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Sure they did. And that's why I said "Any of the large "products" can (and some probably will) fail, but the tech behind it is like the Internet." But then again they also said the same thing about Amazon. And google. And (at one point) MS. And the others. To reiterate: some might fail, but the field as a whole won't go anywhere. To look at the past 3 years, look at the current demands, and pretend that they'll all fail is insane. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and it's not going back in. |
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| ▲ | 486sx33 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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