Comment by jmyeet
2 hours ago
Some context:
- In 2017, the v100 was a ~$10,000 GPU. I believe there was a PCI-e version but this is probably so cheap because SXM2 is going to be harder to use;
- A 5090 has 1800GB/s of internal memory bandwidth (compared to 900GB/s in the 9 year old GPU). Of course a 5090 is substantially more expensive;
- A 5090 has ~21k CUDA cores vs ~5k;
- The current $10k NVidia GPU is the RTX 6000 Pro w/ 96GB of VRAM. It has slightly more CUDA cores but it otherwise pretty much just a 5090. This is unsurprising. NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation.
Consider this: in 5-10 years, the trillions spent on AI data centers will likewise be sold for scrap most likely. That's how short the runway is for OpenAI and Anthropic to recover that investment.
Anyway, I'm kind of impressed the author managed to get this all to work. I don't think it even would've occurred to me that someone had made an SXM2 adapter, particularly because it's not even used anymore. Like props to whoever did that.
> Consider this: in 5-10 years, the trillions spent on AI data centers will likewise be sold for scrap most likely. That's how short the runway is for OpenAI and Anthropic to recover that investment.
Even more interesting: it'll devalue all of SaaS and the entire US tech sector.
We might have just shot our most valuable non-AI tech products in the foot.
How so? I understand that flooding the market with physical goods will reduce prices and thus profits. But how would that also reduce the nonphysical SAAS stuff?
> We might have just shot our most valuable non-AI tech products in the foot.
Counterpoint: the fiber buildout during the dotcom boost. That crashed the economy pretty hard when the bubble burst, but we are still benefitting from all the dark fiber that was arranged for and built out back in that era. A lot of today's ISPs were able to grab up that fiber after the bust for cents on the dollar.
Assume that OpenAI and Anthropic go bust, which at least one of them likely will, and possibly a fair few of the datacenters that are under construction will also collapse. Someone will be able to snatch these physical assets again for cents on the dollar and run open-weight models on them or train new ones.
The problem isn't (and no, this is not an AI tell, everything I write here got typed on a 2022 M2 MBA by hand) the assets, they will be put up for productive usage, just as with any other large bankruptcy or bubble in history. The problem is the "IOU" that is being passed from one hand to the next like a hot potato. Assuming a recovery of, maybe, 20% after the collapse, at 1.6 trillion dollars of assets under management by some kind of private investment/debt we're looking at about 1.3 trillion dollars in valuation that is going to be wiped out.
And given that a lot of the investment market is actually backed by pension funds... this is going to be a bloodbath. Not only will there be a lot of people laid off in addition to the layoffs we already saw "due to AI", but when the pension funds and thus their payouts collapse? We'll see retirees flooding the employment markets who just try to make a living, rendering the situation for everyone else even worse. Flipping burgers used to be a gig for students, these days students compete with people of all ages desperate to survive - and thus desperate to undercut others in wages.
Another problem will be the capacity buildout in the semiconductor industry. It's already heading toward an oligopoly after numerous boom-bust cycles: you only have two and a half GPU chip vendors (NV, AMD, Intel), two vendors of general-purpose CPU vendors (Intel and AMD - I exclude Apple because they do not sell their CPUs to any third party and ARM because 99% of non-Apple ARM chips do not go towards servers, desktops and laptops), three RAM manufacturers (Samsung, SKhynix, Micron) and two and a half physical chip manufacturers (TSMC, Samsung, Intel). When the AI bubble bursts, it will be one of a hell of an effort to prevent at least one actor from going bankrupt.
[1] https://prospect.org/2025/11/19/ai-bubble-bigger-than-you-th...
I bet 3 years, but otherwise agree.