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0 pointskevin0613mo ago0 comments

The dotcom bubble was a bunch of Silicon Valley types buying fancy domain names and getting showered in money before they even released anything remotely useful.

AI companies are releasing useful things right this second, even if they still require human oversight, they are also able to significantly accelerate many tasks.

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dragonwriter3mo ago

> The dotcom bubble was a bunch of Silicon Valley types buying fancy domain names and getting showered in money before they even released anything remotely useful.

The AI bubble involves a lot of that, too.

> AI companies are releasing useful things right this second, even if they still require human oversight, they are also able to significantly accelerate many tasks.

So were the Googles and other leading firms in the dotcom bubble era, and if you said the dotcom bubble wasn’t a bubble because of that, you’d obviously have been wrong.

keeda3mo ago

I feel like this bubble actually has two bubbles happening:

1. The infra build out bubble: this is mostly the hypescalers and Nvidia.

2. The AI company valuation bubble: this includes the hyperscalers, pure-play AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the swarm of startups that are either vaporware or just wrappers on top of the same set of APIs.

There will probably be a pop in (2), especially the random startups that got millions in VC funding just because they have a ".ai" in their domain name. This is also why the OpenAI and Anthropic are getting into the infra game by trying to own their own datacenters, that may be the only moat they have.

However, when people talk about trillions, it's mostly (1) that they are thinking of. Given the acceleration of demand that is being reported, I think (1) will not really pop, maybe just deflate a bit when (2) pops.

kevin061OP3mo ago

OK, that is interesting. Separating infra from AI valuation. I can see what you mean though because stock prices are volatile and unpredictable but a datacenter will remain in place even if its owner goes bankrupt.

However, I think the AI datacenter craze is definitely going to experience a shift. GPU chips get obsolete really fast, especially now that we are moving into specialised neural chips. All those datacenters with thousands of GPUs will be outcompeted by datacenters with 1/4th the power demand and 1/10th the physical footprint due to improved efficiency within a few years. And if indeed the valuation collapses and investors pull out of these companies, where are these datacenters supposed to go? Would you but a datacenter chock full of obsolete chips?

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