Outside a relatively small world of circular investment and FOMO feeding FOMO the general consensus seems to be “let it burn.”

It appears very unlikely we will ever see an IPO of OpenAI. Anthropic appears less doomed, but still iffy at best. Tons of other large, but little discussed, AI startups are just dead-companies-walking at this point.

The likes of AWS are showing good headline numbers but are taking out massive debt to build infrastructure that looks increasingly unneeded. Those with capacity are looking to offload it, quickly. Yes AWS has “committed contracts” for this capacity but if those commitments are with shaky AI startups then it’s mostly just fluff PR and these hyperscalers will get left holding the bag on all this debt.

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energy123 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> infrastructure that looks increasingly unneeded

This is the crux that needs to be substantiated. Without substantiation none of your other arguments hold up.

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cmiles8 an hour ago | parent [-]

Are you saying people haven’t been throwing unneeded GPU capacity on the market? That is happening.

Frankly it’s the opposite scenario (that’s there’s all this demand) which is struggling for any hard evidence.

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ckastner 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Are you saying people haven’t been throwing unneeded GPU capacity on the market? That is happening.

That, by itself, doesn't have to mean anything.

AWS is far more compute capacity than Amazon needs, but that's not because Amazon misjudged how much capacity they need. They built it out to sell it to others, leveraging know-how and economies of scale to do so very profitably.

	▲	surgical_fire 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They only need companies to suddenly need their GPU compute if those committed contracts don't make it. How hard can that be?

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prodigycorp 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which players, specifically, are you talking about? Everything you said is opinion passed off as fact.

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cmiles8 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

SpaceX has put a ton of excess capacity on the market.

Meta tanked chip stocks by saying it was considering the same.

Worries about compute overcapacity, via folks saying they want to offload capacity, is literally the thing that nuked the “situational awareness” fund last week.

It’s long term demand that matters, not just “price.” High prices without true demand is the literal definition of a bubble.

	▲	prodigycorp 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		SpaceX has put a ton of excess capacity on the market that was subsequently absorbed by Anthropic. There's a reason why Grok is no longer free. Meta said it was considering doing the same because they saw how valuable excess capacity was. You're misinterpreting what actually happened.
	▲	energy123 25 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		SpaceX is selling compute to a willing buyer. You can't point to one side of the trade as evidence for under/over capacity. The way we usually judge such things is the price. If the price for compute is going up, which it is, then that's the thing to look at.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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inigyou an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's holding up the entire US stock market and therefore the entire US economy and the dollar value. You probably don't want this particular Atlas to shrug.

	▲	DanTheManPR 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would rather be market-corrected out of a job for a few weeks or months than have this inflate into an economy-wrecking bubble that derails my career and life for years. I'm worried that we're at that state already...
	▲	cmiles8 an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The “Let it burn” attitude doesn’t mean people think they are immune. Yes the overall market will take a hit but, like a forest fire we need a healthy burn to just wipe out the weaker players so the older more mature trees can get on with it. Yes the big trees will get burned a bit but they’ll be fine in the long run. We need a good brush fire to just wipe out all the iffy startups and investors that over-indexed here. Thats what people want with “let it burn.”
	▲	Waterluvian an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You can’t threaten me with two good times. Long term that would help correct the overemphasis on the U.S. economy and AI.
	▲	theideaofcoffee an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I do. The faster it happens, the faster a recovery begins and we can devote resources back to doing more practical things. Get it over with as soon as possible, rip the bandaid off, insert your idiom of choice.
	▲	delfinom an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's inevitable though. The funny-money has outpaced actual money by lightyears at this point. On the plus side, our interest rates aren't 0% right now, so there's some room there. On the down side, our national debt generation now exceeds 125% of GDP and bond rates are shooting up because nobody wants to buy our debt.

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onlyrealcuzzo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic is almost purely a model company. They own close to no data centers.

If models are becoming commodities, and the main bottleneck is actually serving them at scale, Anthropic does not appear particularly well positioned.

If AWS had a ~60-80% margin for decades, I see no reason why inference can't have a ~60-80% margin for quite some time.

The problem is, if costs continue to drop ~90% for the same level of quality every 18 months, demand is unlikely to grow 10x to keep the revenue stable.

Who knows. Jevon's paradox. But the cost/quality is dropping too fast that it's hard for me to imagine demand keeps up long term to keep revenues (and profits) GROWING.

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farseer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

More and more companies are signing up with OpenAI and Anthropic at near exponential growth to automate everyday tasks. If anything, these two should manage to IPO just fine. The rest of the downstream startups probably won't make it.