This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm getting distinct "fire sale" vibes from all of this.
Oh my god we're having a FIRE ^sale^
Oh when will China start making HDDs and SSDs and GPUs and CPUs
PLEASE China PLEASE flood the market with cheap, top shelf computer parts that will force Western corporations to lower their prices or go bankrupt when they don't
They do make hardware in most of those categories, actually, but they don't sell much of it direct to consumer in the West. And unfortunately, the way things are going, they're going to be able to get better prices for it from the AI-entranced idiots too.
I had an ExcelStor hard drive in the past and it was the most reliable drive I've ever had. I normally replace them when they die but that one never did, I just ended up retiring it when its capacity was no longer worth the electric cost to keep it running.
Haven't seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?
The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It's an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I'm missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?
Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it's running. Text slop requires negligible storage.
They want to log ALL user data in the world. Every convo you ever had with the ai, in text or audio, images video, etc.
It may be a little tinfoil hat like, but you cannot convince me that these companies are shoving AI in literally everything, buying all the hardware in existence, and building data centets on land that no one wants them at, just to "make a better ai for the consumer." I believe this is an attempt at hardcore tracking and surveillence.
I think it's a combination of that and the worry that there will be one winning ubercorp that practically merges with the US Government.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It's like they know it's now or never.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
Even if they didn't, they probably don't want to seem like they're falling behind, so once one person goes all in, so do the others.
Unfortunately the most refined usage, and money dumped sector of Ai by far is image recognition
Its where all the money from Amazon and others has been dumped (Flock Surveillance, Amazon Ring, FedEx Trucks, Wal~Mart and your choice of store)
Surveillance, ALPR, Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. It takes a massive amount of data
Go see how much space you need if you want to secure data from 10,000 cameras at 480p/720p/1080p for a few weeks, let alone a year or two
This is the plan. They want us to rent virtual machines from them. No buy, only rent. You will own nothing, think of the shareholders and be happy, no….proud, you are here for their benefit.
OnlyPhones is the future they want. Walled gardens and highly addictive apps and subscriptions and micro transactions. Freedom and real compute power will be locked away in their servers. And the top of the line phones are already expensive enough that pretty much everyone that has one is on a payment plan for it
That argument always befuddled me. There will be a saturation point of AI data centers when there's enough equipment already installed and ready to use by these over bloated behemoth corporations. Once that's over or when the market hopefully pops, the demand for memory should have a steep decline. With their cash cow tapped out, WD and all the other memory manufacturers would then have to go back to consumers they previously fucked over to sell their new production stock. I doubt it'll be at the prices we saw a year ago but once enough memory hits the consumer market for a while, prices should start to dip back down.
Regardless of whether the bubble bursts, the massive amount of compute in these data centers won't go away. It will be up for rent when this AI training falls out of fashion.
Why would a chip maker try to predict the market when they can make contracts for years worth of production?
If the manufacturers never go back to producing the useful consumer hardware, we would be forced to rent this data center compute.
Smells like cloud gaming.
So basically the consumer market is screwed until the AI bubble bursts and manufacturers (GPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc.) can rebalance their production lines back to the pre-AI division of enterprise vs consumer product.
That's about the size of things, yes.
In 2030 you will own nothing.
And you will be happy.
I wish I believed the happy part
I think the happy comes with the unsaid "or else"
You be happy or you be soylent.
As workers, we are majorly screwed no matter what happens. Either AI/Robotics takes off, and creates a permanent 50% unemployment class, which MAGA will solve by exchanging basic subsistence needs like shelter and water in work camps, where we will be leased out to corporations as slaves, under the 13th Amendment. Also a good place for any dissenters, journalists, attorneys and judges who won't go along, etc.
Or maybe the bubble will pop, and we'll have a repeat of 2008, except 100 times worse.
No matter what happens, the citizens are going to take it in shorts.
The AI bubble is starting to pop. All of these companies have made hardware and data center investments far beyond what is needed or can be sustained. The debt is piling up and they are scrambling to justify the immense build out. Musk allowing porn and CSAM on Grock for paid users , Chat GPT pushing commercials, Microslop putting copilot in everything and forcing adoption. Oracles server utilization remains low, Etc. etc.
They now need to show immense growth and adoption in order to keep getting loans or justify burning cash to their shareholders.
Chat GPT and Oracle will be the first to fall, then xAI etc. Google and Microslop have other revenue sources that can weather the storm. But they won’t continue their massive investments.
I'm pretty sure the massive buildout is for training new models not for compute power for end users. Their justification is they need more compute to get the superhuman level intelligence AIs that they have been claiming. So if that pans out their probably gonna be fine, but seems unlikely that'll pan out how they want it to
A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It's got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I'll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it's obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can't get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don't want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
Shit's gonna get stupid, fast.
Its the "service economy." Instead of making things, industry (in the US at least) is heavily skewed towards providing services (aka things you subscribe to or need to buy each time you use).
It does not benefit the individual.
Businesses want AI because it solves what they perceive as a problem: how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour.
Remember: AI is meant for wealth to access labour without cost, not for labour to access wealth. It’s a golden gate meant to permanently separate the wealthy from what used to be the working class.
Are all these companies going to go bankrupt when the AI bubble pops and their products flood the market?
They'd only go bankrupt if they were spending the capital to increase capacity and were left holding the bag. And nobody's interested in doing that.
These psychopaths are absolutely giddy about taking all our jobs away.
While simultaneously acting like a bunch of whiny little crybabies about falling birth rates.
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