I replaced a $22/hr worker entirely with AI. And it costs me about $0.18/hr instead. The AI does a better job, is more reliable and consistent. The human was constantly behind schedule, made frequent mistakes, and also humans get sick, or call off work for other reasons.
So yes, AI is a bubble, but this bubble has generated value, it’s not at all like 2008.
Yeah... The AI industry will die on the shadow of the Iran war, and there will be forever some people claiming that it was healthy all around and would lead to world-change if the rest of the economy didn't blow.
It's not really even a question. It's an obvious boondoggle. The forecasted net new energy requirements for the AI buildout over the next couple of years are roughly equivalent to all of Western Europe's power demand today.
That's absurd. It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. And the cost to get even close would make AI more expensive than just hiring knowledge workers to do the same tasks.
And it's all predicated on a tower of wobbly or broken assumptions -- chief among them that increasing the size of these models yields better performance.
We're going to look back on this era and wonder why anybody took any of the outrageous claims of tech CEOs seriously.
It quite likely won't become a $9T bust though because the investment so far is more like $0.8T. If things slump shortly it might be more like a $0.5T bust if you assume the things are worth 50% of what is being paid - there are a lot of paying users.
People really really don’t understand the implications of AGI.
Whether or not you believe we will reach it in a fee years, we are certainly wayy closer today than we were even two years ago.
The possibility of genuine AGI obliterates all the financial or energy related worries, they pale in comparison to the ultimate impact of such a technology.
However, yes, if you believe AGI is not possible or won’t arrive in the coming decade then all the data center buildup seems foolish.
Next, you have to have a clear path to reaching it.
Then, you have to have the resources to actually walk that path.
Only with all three of those can you make any credible claim that AGI is near.
As it stands, we have none of them—and the lack of the second is the most damning. It's very, very clear at this point that just scaling up the existing LLMs is not going to reach some critical mass and result in AGI, like the serendipitous sapience of Mycroft in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Given that, any path to AGI necessarily includes some new breakthrough on it (or more than one). And by their essential nature, breakthroughs are not something you can predict or schedule. Indeed, you cannot even be guaranteed that they will ever happen. (It is likely, assuming that it is physically possible to build AGI, that we will figure out how at some point...but not guaranteed.)
I don't even need AGI/RSI to have unlimited demand for tokens.
Spending even a few days with Claude Code/Codex (using opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4) should convince anyone that the demand for tokens will be vast and infinite.
Yet, I think Sun's early 2000's vision "the network is the computer" is finally coming and these data centers will all end up becoming multi-use. Want access to apps running with 128GB of memory? Fine.. it'll just be on a thin-client with a data-center powering it (and everything else it does.)
It's not a bad model. As I've mentioned previously, on the client-side I think will be a new era of all-in-one modular SBCs (medium clients.) These can become thin-clients for really beefy applications too that don't have to be "local-first" and can thus be "cloud enabled."
It'd also be interesting to see crypto become more dynamic. Like making it super easy to issue a token for say an upcoming event, or better yet, a new invention looking for early adopters and supporters like Rodin Coils. The big data centers on the backend can make it secure. Just speculating. So the "big iron" compute won't ever be wasted, just repurposed dynamically.
All these mad-scientist inventions will come from unemployed geniuses and tin-foil hatters, some of whom may actually be right. Let's see if they can find a way to vastly speed up radioactive decay with lasers, but, letting the bankers be fine with it all.
Except the price of personal computing is skyrocketing due to the build out of these data centres! I'd love to build a personal computer to run local models, but it's just not affordable any more.
Who’s going to pay me otherwise, becoming the chief security officer aboard the Altman-Musktani vessel USCSS Shiba Inu?
You’re all going to eat rats on a stick while I pull the charred meat off some hostile tech CEOs’ neurodivergent talent for lunch I roasted to perfect crispiness with my boring company flamethrower arm attachment.
So please all keep paying the magic word generator companies, so we can replace most of you and your miserably inefficient human production cycles, including eight hours a day not working because you lie around unconsciously, to become better human livestock, eh, I mean valued "Human Resources".
24 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] threadAnd no bubble can last forever.
And the longer they go, and the larger they get, the worse the fallout is when they finally pop.
So yes, AI is a bubble, but this bubble has generated value, it’s not at all like 2008.
That's absurd. It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. And the cost to get even close would make AI more expensive than just hiring knowledge workers to do the same tasks.
And it's all predicated on a tower of wobbly or broken assumptions -- chief among them that increasing the size of these models yields better performance.
We're going to look back on this era and wonder why anybody took any of the outrageous claims of tech CEOs seriously.
It's the money. Without it, "no one" would take these ideas seriously. We know this because before the money "no one" took such ideas seriously
Whether or not you believe we will reach it in a fee years, we are certainly wayy closer today than we were even two years ago.
The possibility of genuine AGI obliterates all the financial or energy related worries, they pale in comparison to the ultimate impact of such a technology.
However, yes, if you believe AGI is not possible or won’t arrive in the coming decade then all the data center buildup seems foolish.
Next, you have to have a clear path to reaching it.
Then, you have to have the resources to actually walk that path.
Only with all three of those can you make any credible claim that AGI is near.
As it stands, we have none of them—and the lack of the second is the most damning. It's very, very clear at this point that just scaling up the existing LLMs is not going to reach some critical mass and result in AGI, like the serendipitous sapience of Mycroft in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Given that, any path to AGI necessarily includes some new breakthrough on it (or more than one). And by their essential nature, breakthroughs are not something you can predict or schedule. Indeed, you cannot even be guaranteed that they will ever happen. (It is likely, assuming that it is physically possible to build AGI, that we will figure out how at some point...but not guaranteed.)
Spending even a few days with Claude Code/Codex (using opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4) should convince anyone that the demand for tokens will be vast and infinite.
https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/hut-8-builds-fl...
And they'll also do "high-performance computing."
Yet, I think Sun's early 2000's vision "the network is the computer" is finally coming and these data centers will all end up becoming multi-use. Want access to apps running with 128GB of memory? Fine.. it'll just be on a thin-client with a data-center powering it (and everything else it does.)
It's not a bad model. As I've mentioned previously, on the client-side I think will be a new era of all-in-one modular SBCs (medium clients.) These can become thin-clients for really beefy applications too that don't have to be "local-first" and can thus be "cloud enabled."
It'd also be interesting to see crypto become more dynamic. Like making it super easy to issue a token for say an upcoming event, or better yet, a new invention looking for early adopters and supporters like Rodin Coils. The big data centers on the backend can make it secure. Just speculating. So the "big iron" compute won't ever be wasted, just repurposed dynamically.
All these mad-scientist inventions will come from unemployed geniuses and tin-foil hatters, some of whom may actually be right. Let's see if they can find a way to vastly speed up radioactive decay with lasers, but, letting the bankers be fine with it all.
Who’s going to pay me otherwise, becoming the chief security officer aboard the Altman-Musktani vessel USCSS Shiba Inu?
You’re all going to eat rats on a stick while I pull the charred meat off some hostile tech CEOs’ neurodivergent talent for lunch I roasted to perfect crispiness with my boring company flamethrower arm attachment.
So please all keep paying the magic word generator companies, so we can replace most of you and your miserably inefficient human production cycles, including eight hours a day not working because you lie around unconsciously, to become better human livestock, eh, I mean valued "Human Resources".
/s
I am fully aware Hinton has been criticized for his views, but I urge you to listen to the interview and his reasoning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ZcFa8pybE