If a company says they are not like Enron, it means they 1000% are exactly like Enron
Yeah. Enron’s scheme was trading money back and forth with itself to inflate its value until it all came crashing down, tanking Enron.
Nvidia is at the center of a scheme involving the entire economy trading money back and forth between a few companies to inflate value, so when the scheme tanks it’ll crush everybody.
Big tech is just trading the same $100b between each other to generate infinite shareholder value.
Man that reminds me of an old comic where two guys give each other the same $50,000 back and forth to eat horse shit and in the end their like, “we just created two jobs and grew GDP by $100,000!” Lol
In Russia it’s an anecdote about two cowboys with one saying in the end “Bill, I think we’ve both just eaten shit for free”.
hot potatoes, but they do need someone to hold on to that 100bn debt, usually other industries outside the tech sector. thats why they peddle it so hard to trump, to be used with palintir, and then other services.
They are going to do a lot more damage then Enron when their bubble pops.
EDIT: LOL, found the techbro.
What if it’s not a bubble?
So I tried using some AI chatbots to find a movie recently, it made up a few, none being the answer.
(The question was about a historical movie, made in perhaps 1970s by the feeling, set someplace in southern France somewhere around 1650s, has a few beautiful views of nature and castles ; one scene where a guard captain enters a room, asks a question, as a power gesture drinks a glass of wine on the table and a minute later falls ; another scene where for whatever reason a rapier fight happens in something like a tavern, two women in pastel dresses are descending by an open ladder from the second floor, seeing the brawl take our pocket pistols, one of them is stabbed with a rapier ; another scene where a guy is getting questioned with his feet over the fire ; another when another guy is climbing a tower clinging at brick mortars outside and hears guards’ boots on the ladder very loudly ; when I was a kid and saw that, someone said it’s an adaptation of something by Lope de Vega, but I’m not sure that’s correct ; that’s just in case someone reading this knows such a movie.)
But some googling sessions they do optimize, without you the user ever having to browse a webpage, and just getting a textual answer. That’s a valid use.
And some other processes. They don’t have to be useful for all things they are applied to, just some profitable.
Being a bubble does not mean the service they provide is useless. It means that the service is never generating enough profit to repay for the huge cost of providing it.
Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?
Because these AI companies are currently burning through literally a good chunk of all the cash in the world and they will eventually need to make even more gigantic profits to repay that cash. And the only one that is currently making money from AI seems to be NVIDIA, by selling the hardware that powers the AI giants.
I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.
Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?
There might be a more direct parallel than originally intended in this with the explanation how one person works hard all day and makes less than another person who pushes a few buttons. The latter knows which buttons to push.
This technology is useless for my movie searches, but it might be useful in the same way as radar was for air defense.
BTW, I’m not sure what I’d choose if offered to pay 500 dollars for knowing what that movie is. There’s one girl, if she’d be interested too to find that movie, perhaps I would.
So if such an expensive technology would allow this kind of nuanced search, and more seemingly efficient wouldn’t, then we have a use case.
Or a model allowing to predict actions of other people sufficiently well, based on seemingly not precise enough data. However much it would cost, that would be justified, similarly to high-frequency trading, because it would operate on all existing value, not just what it generates.
I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.
I know, I was making two points, one is that everything is relative (what you’ve just agreed to), another is that it might not at all be a bubble.
On the air defence note, specialist systems are already amazing at tasks like this and can usually run fine on high end consumer tier hardware (up to a single server rack) rather than data centres with the power requirements of small countries. AI is here to stay but LLMs are absoloutely a bubble.
Open AI has announced over $1trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. I think you’ll find near on everyone agrees it’s a bubble, just not agreeable how big or the timeline of the burst.
Well, one can say then also that US military is a bubble, it also hogs resources far bigger for the same results that poorer nations achieve. There are some things it does that can’t be compared to others because nobody has the need or that much money, but what can be compared is not even factor 10+.
It keeps getting that funding because of the position in the world it occupies.
Or one can say that the Danish kingdom sitting on the Sound relying on custom fees for its budget and then going on adventures with mercenary troops was a bubble. That bubble was inflated and burst a few times before that happened finally (something-something Kiel canal), and for long enough periods of history that just was the reality.
It’s a relative thing if something is sustainable or not. When people are talking about Earth being expected to exist for enough time to be more afraid of global warming and microplastics and such, it means that Earth’s existence itself is usually assumed to be indefinitely sustainable in our frame of evaluation.
So what you said is true, but dotcoms also were a bubble.
It’s a relative thing if something is sustainable or not. When people are talking about Earth being expected to exist for enough time to be more afraid of global warming…
Global warming is already having impacts on marine life, weather patterns etc. I’m not quite sure if I understand your point here.
So what you said is true, but dotcoms also were a bubble.
Yes they were, and a lot of money was lost. Much like AI. Many companies are pumping atronomical amounts of money into AI. They won’t all succeed. There will be a significant loss of capital. AI will definitely stay in this world, but to what degree is the question… enough to warrant over half the GDP of Australia being spent in a year by one company? Probably not.
Remember that when the news article talks about the economy, it’s mostly talking about rich people’s yachts.
Obviously there are some people nearing retirement age who need their pension plans not to lose value rapidly, they do exist. But the vast majority of the money that is being discussed here, that a bubble might make or break, is millionaires and billionaires savings accounts… So when this bubble bursts and when these companies go bankrupt, to hell with the ultra rich. If we want to help out people who are struggling to live out their retirement because of the stock market collapse that will occur, let’s do that, and let’s just tell the billionaires to go to hell.
deleted by creator
Nvidia is just selling overpriced premium shovels in a gold rush. They don’t care if there’s gold there or not.
Enron went bust by hiding debts. Making a loss is one thing, but lying about it to shareholders (and getting found out) is a one way trip out of the stock exchange.
Me: Come on, pop already. There are funds betting on AI bubble burst, ready for me to invest in.
If you want to get advantage from a speculative fund making a bet on a popped bubble, then you need to be already invested now, before the bubble bursts. (And also, you/your fund need to be right that it’s really about to pop now, and not later)
Once the race is over it’s too late to bet on the ponies.
OpenAI is more like Enron that NVidia I would assume.
Nvidia is Cisco in this analogy
openai has practically no value and that’s well known… nvidia is paying companies to buy their chips and playing bullshit shell games
the difference is openai is a pretty well known unprofitable company, and they aren’t doing quite as much of the bullshit shell games. nvidia is selling to basically everyone, taking stakes in companies, giving weird deals… it’s bloody impossible to track how much of their sales are real and how much those real sales are actually worth, or if those sales are loss leaders for some investment then those investments look a lot like openai
so nvidia not only is invested in a lot of very questionable AI bubble companies, but also their own sales figures are… unreliable
they’re making billions upon billions because they’re using their own money multiple times. it’s kinda like leveraged trading with all the risk and it’s incredible arrogant at the scale that nvidia is doing it
Regurgitating Zitron with kid gloves.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/
LinkedIn perverts could write long screeds about AI…
Lmao
Just crash and burn already please, so other companies can rebuild and take your place. Please, for the love of god.
Wall Street is Enron now. It’s a house of cards
“We are not Enron, damn it! They were an energy company, we make computer parts!”
My “We’re totally different from Enron” accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.
NVIDIA isn’t Enron but they definitely are Cisco.
Just tell me when the memory shortage ends.
