Comment by JumpCrisscross

Compute has already lost value for me. Six months ago I thought you needed a 1T+ model to be useful coding. Now I am able to get by just fine with a 27b model.

I see two factors converging to cause a collapse of this house of cards:

1. People are realizing that what they need isn't more general intelligence, it's more specialization. A small but well tuned coding model, a small but well tuned customer service model, a small but well tuned document explorer.

2. Specialized hardware - TPUs and NPUs - especially coming out of china. The latest GLM model was trained and runs on Huawei hardware. Nvidia is only worth so much because they are the biggest and best provider of the kind of compute needed to run llms, but the export bans mean china has a lot of incentive to topple that monopoly.

The amount of compute we need to do the things llms do is falling rapidly, the number of people who can provide that compute is rising.

> if OpenAI can’t use the compute, someone else can.

The problem with that is that OpenAI can only afford to pay for the compute because they are burning investor money (and so are most of OpenAI's biggest clients). They are losing billions. If they stop burning money, nobody else will be there to pay for that compute at OpenAI's cost.

Sure, somebody will probably be able to use these GPUs, they just won't be able to pay nearly as much for them as OpenAI does.

In reality, it's just nowhere near worth as much as OpenAI pays for it. Inflating the cost of compute is part of the problem caused by the circular financing, and if (or maybe when) OpenAI goes, the price of compute will go with them.

Devil's advocate: OpenAI not being able to use compute is highly correlated to many other AI companies not being able to find a meaningful use of this compute.

Failure to take into consideration those kind of correlations ("If my biggest client isn't able to buy it, I would be able to find someone else who will") is one of the principle causes why many risk models turned out to be garbage during the Great Financial Crisis.

The problem is that if OpenAI doesn't want the compute nobody does. All of these companies' demand for compute are correlated. It isn't likely that OpenAI will want less compute in isolation. Furthermore, the circular financing structure means that if OpenAI buys less chips it means that Nvidia has less money to give to say Anthropic to buy more chips and suddenly the exponential growth that circular financing has allowed to grow runs in reverse.

Maybe I’m just old and cynical but that sounds like the kind of assumption of independence of events that led to the GFC .

> they would have to become insolvent in a way that makes compute lose value

They would have to go insolvent in a way that hits Nvidia revenue. Those are related by distinct factors, a difference that may matter in a crisis.

If AI wasn’t a thing would Nvidia be worth 1/10th is current value?

Gaming is lucrative but not THAT lucrative…

> if OpenAI can’t use the compute, someone else can

This is the big point IMO since I have never given $1 to OpenAI but I subscribe to Vidu and Typecast, and have given money to Kling, Hailou, and even Gemini in the form of Google Workspace.

So these other guys have products and use cases, which OpenAI has never been able to crack beyond ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was never worth paying for, IMO.

If OpenAI dies, it's not because there is no market for the technology (which is all NVIDIA cares about), it's more that OpenAI doesn't know how to run a relevant technology company.

They were given everything, not just NVIDIA's billions of dollars and credit backing but all the first-mover advantage, all the respect and credibility early on, so it's really sad to see them unable to develop interesting products and turn a profit in a space they helped pioneer, while so many others are making money with the tech all around them.

NVIDIA is fine. The technology will continue to improve and NVIDIA will stay at the center. OpenAI is fucked - knew it when they retired Sora to focus on text-to-text and coding (a largely solved problem).

Granted OpenAI going insolvent

All the "frontier" AI companies *are* currently insolvent. They have never been anything other than cash burning machines.

The only way they keep the lights on and the doors open is by borrowing money --- and epic amounts of it. If those operating the cash spigot decide to turn it off, all AI companies will likely be similarly affected --- and so will Nvidia.

OpenAI expects to burn through more cash between 2024 and 2029 than Uber, Tesla, Amazon and Spotify did - combined - before those companies started making money

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251205243/thi...

> if OpenAI can’t use the compute, someone else can

How? The hardware is in OpenAI's datacenters. Does Nvidia have a couple hundred semi trucks, contractors, and IT technicians, to repo the hardware and resell it to someone else before it's lost most of its value? These chips will be replaced approx every 3-4 years. So if OpenAI tanks, after Nvidia pays for and waits for the process to collect the hardware, they then have to sell it for pennies on the dollar. They lose almost all the investment.

Also consider that SpaceXAI already had datacenters full of gear that they basically weren't using because nobody wanted their product, so they now rent it to Anthropic. The demand for hardware isn't really there at the scale of OpenAI.

This is the fun part: the AI bubble bursts and the price of components keeps rising. Why? Because companies can just sell you a glorified thin client and force your average user to buy their compute, all subscription-like, from data centers.

Or you might find out how little people care about AI. Which would not bode well for bearing load.

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> It absolutely is. Similar to the way banks create money [1]. The commitments support credit that wouldn't exist without it.

Making a loan/offering credit isn't automatically money creation - the amount of money in the system before and after the loan might be the same. Haven't been following Nvidia all that closely, but it seems a little bit unlikely that they're a commercial bank. Financial chicanery they may be doing but offering deposit accounts would be new territory. The loan has to be made in a very particular way for it to be money creation (notably, in a way that creates new money), and it should be illegal for most people to do that otherwise we'd all be printing our own money instead of the printing being directed to wealthy asset owners first and foremost.

Traveler’s cheques? Who even sells them anymore. American Express was the biggest issuer and they stopped years ago.

Ok how much did the fed sign up to backstop then? Surely it’s more than physical currency

All debt is money. Anybody can create money, the trick is getting other people to accept it.

Nvidia is vendor financing its output.

An ai company order $100m of GPUs. Nvidia delivers and holds onto that debt as an asset - like a bank loan.

The production company uses AI to create better plant and purchases $100m of AI tokens to do so. The ai company hold that debt like a bank loan

Nvidia requests $100m of production based on its $100m of orders. The production company holds that debt like a bank loan.

You now have a monetary loop. Take a single $10 bank deposit and Nvidia pays the production company, who pays the ai company who pays Nvidia. Run that round the circle a few million times and everybody has been paid.

Rinse and repeat.

> Only the fed can actually order more money to be "created"

No. Most money in modern economies is created by private parties [1].

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

> Only the fed can actually order more money to be "created".

If you go to a bank and get a loan, that is literally money that did not exist before you got a loan. People think that you are borrowing money that somebody else put in the bank, but that's not true. Banks can lend out a lot more money than people put into them.

Any time sometime makes a loan at a bank, that money is created. An accompanying debt is also created. It's like matter and antimatter. And when the debt is repaid, the matter and antimatter disappear again.

NV gives out a $100 to Party A, who puts it in their bank.

Bank takes $90 of that deposit (assuming 10% fractional reserve rule, no idea what the actual number is), and loans it out to party B, who pays it into either the same or another bank. Same rules apply -- except now it's down to $81 being loaned out, and so on and so forth, until that 100$ generated $1000 in total bank deposits.

edit: of course, it's never actually directly like this, a lot of other factors are involved, maybe the money is spent, maybe no one wants to borrow it, etc etc -- so it's more complicated but that's I think what they mean

I think at the top level between Govt and Industry and understanding has been reached that AI industry will be backstopped

If they’re effectively guaranteeing $500B in loans that adds close to $500B to M1, basically, that banks were not otherwise providing or loaning - at least that was my calculation.

Every form of lending that is specified via currency increases the supply.

If I give you GPUs worth $1bn, but take 100m payments for 11 years, then during that time you can use your other mony to buy other things that arent GPUs

If we stop after the 11 years and dont make new loans, the supply has shrunk back

Private banks increase money supply by lending. If 10 people deposit $1000 in a bank, it can loan $9000 to an 11th person. Now the economy has $19000 total.

Banks create money when issuing a loan. This is how fractional reserve banking works. They lend money they don't have (most of). This is institutionalized fraud, and it's been standard operating procedure for centuries.

They aren’t; the parent comment is incorrect. It’s safer to say Nvidia is encouraging the money that already exists to be deployed on AI buildouts.

But everyone is now chasing the same opportunity (AI and its dependencies like hardware and power) that will drive prices higher in those sectors until supply responds (or demand disappears).

It’s a fair point. Definitely depends on the how. I was figuring that adding $500B to a hot part of the economy while the rest of the economy shrinks might nudge a bit toward inflationary tendency, but at this point it’s hard to say what tenets of economics actually hold since the entire concept of “rational actors” went into the dustbin :)

People claimed bernie madoff was running a pyramid scheme scam for like 20 years, boy did they look dumb!