> I look forward to the "personal computing" period, with small models distributed everywhere...

One could argue that this period was just a brief fluke. Personal computers really took off only in the 1990s, web 2.0 happened in the mid-2000s. Now, for the average person, 95%+ of screen time boils down to using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud".

Why would companies sell you the golden goose when they can instead sell you an egg every day?

Funny you would pick this analogy. I feel like we’re back in the mainframe era. A lot of software can’t operate without an internet connection. Even if in practice they execute some of the code on your device, a lot of the data and the heavyweight processing is already happening on the server. Even basic services designed from the ground up to be distributed and local first - like email (“downloading”) - are used in this fashion - like gmail. Maps apps added offline support years after they launched and still cripple the search. Even git has GitHub sitting in the middle and most people don’t or can’t use git any other way. SaaS, Electron, …etc. have brought us back to the mainframe era.

this -- chips are getting fast enough both arm n x86. unified memory architecture means we can get more ram on devices at faster throughput. we're already seeing local models - just that their capability is limited by ram.

Dial-up + mainframe. Mainframe from POV as silos, dial-up internet as the speed we have now when looking back to 2025 in 2035.

Don't we already have small models highly distributed?

We are also in the mainframe period of computing, with large centralised cloud services.

I actually think we are much closer to the sneaker era of shoes, or the monorail era of public transit.

I think we are in the dotcom boom era where investment is circular and the cash investments all depend on the idea that growth is infinite.

Just a bunch of billionaires jockeying for not being poor.

I actually don’t look forward to this period. I have always been for open source software and distributism — until AI.

Because if there’s one thing worse than governments having nuclear weapons, it’s everyone having them.

It would be chaos. And with physical drones and robots coming, it woukd be even worse. Think “shitcoins and memecoins” but unlike those, you don’t just lose the money you put in and you can’t opt out. They’d affect everyone, and you can never escape the chaos ever again. They’d be posting around the whole Internet (including here, YouTube deepfakes, extortion, annoyance, constantly trying to rewrite history, get published, reputational destruction at scale etc etc), and constant armies of bots fighting. A dark forest.

And if AI can pay for its own propagation via decentralized hosting and inference, then the chance of a runaway advanced persistent threat compounds. It just takes a few bad apples, or even practical jokers, to unleash crazy stuff. And it will never be shut down, just build and build like some kind of kessler syndrome. And I’m talking about with just CURRENT AI agent and drone technology.

But do you have the audacity to be wrong?

The problem is that the bubble people are so unimaginative, similar to Krugman, that those who have any inkling of an imagination can literally feel like visionaries compared to them. I know I’m describing Dunning-Krueger, but so be it, the bubble people are very very wrong. It’s like, man, they really are unable to imagine a very real future.

takes a lot of hubris to be sure it's a bubble too.

That would require people that know about AI to actually choose to cancel it - which nobody that actually knows what AI can do, would ever actually do.

The Apple engineers, with their top level unfettered access to the best Apple AI - they'll convince shareholders to fund it forever, even if normal people never catch on.

Do you know a single person who'd buy an iPhone without a camera? I don't

To your point, AT&T's "You Will" commercials started airing in 1993 and present both an optimistic and fairly accurate view of what the future would look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo

That’s how I remember it too. The video is from 1999, during the height of the dot-com bubble. These experts are predicting that within 10 years the internet will be on your phone, and that people will be using their phones as credit cards and the phone company would manage the transaction, the prediction actually comes pretty close to the prediction made by bitcoin enthusiasts.

https://bsky.app/profile/ruv.is/post/3liyszqszds22

Note that this is the state TV broadcasting this in their main news program. The most popular daily show in Iceland.

Before I got my first full time software engineering gig (I had worked part time briefly years prior) I was working full time as a carpenter. We were paying for an expensive online work order system. Having some previous experience writing software for music in college and a couple /brief/ LAMP stack freelance jobs after college I decided to try to write my own work order system. It took me like a month and it would never have never scaled, was really ugly, and had the absolute minimum number of features. I could never had accepted money from someone to use it but it did what we needed and we ran with it for several years after that.

I was only able to do this because I had some prior programming experience but I would imagine that if AI coding tools get a bit better they would enable a larger cohort of people to build a personal tool like I did.

I don't think his quote is that extreme and it was definitely not obvious to most people. A common thing you heard even around 95 was "I've tried internet but it was nothing special".

> basically everyone knew the internet would be revolutionary long before 1995. Being able to talk to people halfway across the world on a BBS? Sending a message to your family on the other side of the country and them receiving it instantly? Yeah, it was pretty obvious this was transformative.

That sounds pretty similar to long-distance phone calls? (which I'm sure was transformative in its own way, but not on nearly the same scale as the internet)

Do we actually know how transformative the general population of 1995 thought the internet would or wouldn't be?

Yeah, the short-lived GPU deprecation cycle does feel very relevant here.

I'm still a fan of the railroad comparisons though for a few additional reasons:

1. The environmental impact of the railroad buildout was almost incomprehensibly large (though back in the 1800s people weren't really thinking about that at all.)

2. A lot of people lost their shirts investing in railroads! There were several bubbly crashes. A huge amount of money was thrown away.

3. There was plenty of wasted effort too. It was common for competing railroads to build out rails that served the same route within miles of each other. One of them might go bust and that infrastructure would be wasted.

What percentage of data centre build costs are the GPUs vs power stations, water cooling plants, buildings, roads, network, racks, batteries, power systems, etc

There's a lot more to infrastructure spending than GPUs. Companies are building data centers, cooling systems, power plants (including nuclear), laying cables under oceans, launching satellites. Bubble or not, all of this will continue to be useful for decades in the future.

Heck if nothing else all the new capacity being created today may translate to ~zero cost storage, CPU/GPU compute and networking available to startups in the future if the bubble bursts, and that itself may lead to a new software revolution. Just think of how many good ideas are held back today because deploying them at scale is too expensive.

A bunch of the money is being spent on data centers and their associated cooling and power systems and on the power plants and infrastructure. Those should have much longer depreciation schedules.

>> basically all the money will have been spent on Nvidia GPUs that depreciate to 0 over 4 years

I agree the depreciation schedule always seems like a real risk to the whole financial assumptions these companies/investors make, but a question I've wondered: - Will there be an unexpected opportunity when all these "useless" GPUs are put out to pasture? It just seems like saying a factory will be useless because nobody wants to buy an IBM mainframe, but an innovative company can repurpose a non-zero part of that infrastructure for another use case.

The recycling industry will boom. From what demand you ask? We'll find out soon enough.

Railroads need repair too? Not sure if it's every 4 years. Also, the trains I take to/from work are super slow because there is no money to upgrade.

I think we may not upgrade every 4 years, but instead upgrade when the AI models are not meeting our needs AND we have the funding & political will to do the upgrade.

Perhaps the singularity is just a sigmoid with the top of the curve being the level of capex the economy can withstand.

Imagine the progress we could have made on climate change if this money had been funneled into that, instead of making some GPU manufacturers obscenely wealthy.

I think the hardware infrastructure may be obsolete but at the moment we are still just beginning to figure out how to use AI. So the knowledge will be the important thing that’s left after the bubble. The current infrastructure will probably be as obsolete as dial up infrastructure.

The boom might not last long enough for western countries to pull heads out of their collective asses and ramp up production of nuclear plants.

It takes China 5 years now, but they've been ramping up for more than 20 years.

This is precisely why the AI bubble is so much worse than previous bubbles: the main capital asset that the bubble is acquiring is going to depreciate before the bubble's participants can ever turn a profit. Regardless of what AI's future capabilities are going to be, it's physically impossible for any of these companies to become profitable before the GPUs that they have already purchased are either obsolete or burnt out from running under heavy load.

Yep.

Stockmarket capitalisation as a percentage of GDP AKA the Buffett indicator.

https://www.longtermtrends.net/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett...

Good luck, folks.

I was happy to come into this thread and see I was not the first person for whom that quote came to mind. The dial-up Internet comparison implicitly argues for a particular outcome of current AI as a technology, but doesn't actually support that argument.

There's another presumably unintended aspect of the comparison that seems worth considering. The Internet in 2025 is certainly vastly more successful and impactful than the Internet in the mid-90s. But dial-up itself as a technology for accessing the Internet was as much of a dead-end as Laserdisc was for watching movies at home.

Whether or not AI has a similar trajectory as the Internet is separate from the question of whether the current implementation has an actual future. It seems reasonable to me that in the future we're enjoying the benefits of AI while laughing thinking back to the 2025 approach of just throwing more GPUs at the problem in the same way we look back now and get a chuckle out of the idea of "shotgun modems" as the future.

Agreed. It would probably be better to keep improving AI before investing that much into infrastructure.

> Couldn't AI like be their custom inventory software?

Absolutely not. It's inherently a software with a non-zero amount of probability in every operation. You'd have a similar experience asking an intern to remember your inventory.

Like I enjoy Copilot as a research tool right but at the same time, ANYTHING that involves delving into our chat history is often wrong. I own three vehicles, for example, and it cannot for it's very life remember the year, make and model of them. Like they're there, but they're constantly getting switched around in the buffer. And once I started positing questions about friend's vehicles that only got worse.

"That side of prime rib is totally in the walk-in, just keep looking. Trust me, bro"