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.
Heh, that applies to most of my idiot peers but not me!
I see the writing on the wall and I’m fighting back every way I can.
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.
Rather US centric view there. What’ll happen to the majority of the world’s population?
I can’t speak to what the rest of the world might do. Some countries may choose to prohibit fully automated operations.
I just know that in America, any chance to mitigate the damage caused by widespread adoption of automation like fast food operations, will be completely dismissed under a MAGA administration.
Dems should introduce a “Robot Tax” which at least makes up for the lost tax that the now unemployed employee would have been paying. Otherwise we have unemployment rise sharply, as tax collections shrink sharply.
I was just speaking to a MAGA business acquaintance, and HE brought up the idea of the Robot Tax, calling it stupid. When I pointed out the tax situation, he just said “Taxes should be illegal, they’re immoral.” As if MAGA hadn’t given up on morals long ago. He doesn’t have a problem with the morality of completely ending an entire industry’s employment base, just to increase profits for a billion dollar company.
“Why aren’t people reproducing anymore?”
Get a pet, a small dog, or a couple of cats. Seriously. I’m not saying that they’ll replace the emotional connection with children, but they come close.
I’m many ways, a pet is even better than a child.
Or maybe the bubble will pop, and we’ll have a repeat of 2008, except 100 times worse.
The AI spending and stock is much more localized. It’s not grown over more years and integrated into many financial systems. So the results may be much less severe.
Circumstances will be different, and the problems may manifest differently, but it will still be very bad for workers. When those companies are forced to realize that they threw away a decade of profits on nothing, they will make up for it by closing locations, and firing lots of people. Those businesses that don’t fold up entirely, that is.
I am sure you will be able to subscribe to use a share along with hundreds of other people for 1 computer at $19.99 a month going forward.
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.
We might dine well on used datacenter hard drives in the coming years.
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.
They‘ll just make it with secret phone-home spying and backdoors.
E: what‘s this? All these folks either saying the US does it or skipping past all the phone-home spyware China includes in devices? Guess that means cheaper spying hardware is ok then?
Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!
Well if the choice is between cheap spying hardware and expensive spying hardware…
It seems to be that you’re mistaken, the NSA and Snowden aren’t Chinese, they’re from the USA
Also it is a bit easier to de-spyware chinese devices.
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.
They can service deez nutz
Bastards
They BADLY want to be able to monitor our every communication, because an authoritarian government that sees North Korea as a prime example, needs to be able to clamp down hard on any notion of dissent.
And we will have huge work camps all over America to send seditious traitors to, to be leased out as slaves to corporations, under the 13th Amendment. You love your precious Constitution, don’t you? You expect MAGA to abide by every word, don’t you? Well then you better love the 13th Amendment, too.
It’s awful.
I bought a second laptop for general use, because I wanted a Linux laptop and a gaming-dedicated laptop running Windows. (Seeing as how digital surveillance made privacy more important.)
I got a very nice, used Acer for about $600 that runs everything I need AND functions well with a dual-boot, so I was thinking of selling my gaming laptop. Now? I’m holding onto it so I don’t have to get price gouged if my main computer fails.
Wild world we live in.
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.
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.
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
It’s the grift that keeps on grifting. How long can it keep going
Broadly speaking, yes, and it’ll keep going until they run out of money. However, I think there is a very small chance that one of the companies is able to make a breakthrough probably with a different kind of architecture than our current LLMs that does get us to models that make genuine discoveries and breakthroughs.
Very unlikely though.
At which point the government will step in because they will have become too big to fail
Partially correct. They’ll step in because they signed contracts and have moved AI under the umbrella of National Security. Brockman donated $25m back in September. Trump signed Project Genesis in November. So all these hardware companies feel pretty good because it’ll be backed by taxpayers.
I’m getting distinct “fire sale” vibes from all of this.
Oh my god we’re having a FIRE sale
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.
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.
And govs are pushing it because it’s yet another arms race.
The logical course of action is to collectively just not do AI. But you can’t prevent your adversaries from doing such, so it ends up being like some sort of prisoner’s dilemma.
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
Gotcha, wasn’t thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain’t got shit on our authoritarian future.
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.
Caching. I’m guessing they download the internet to large storage arrays and then run neural network learning on them. Its probable they download all videos too and transcribe them later. So its not so much used for hosting content, but for teaching models.
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.
Onion Prices Reach Record Highs; Data Center Security Guards Secure Soup Contracts for Three Years
Onion prices have surged to unprecedented levels, setting new records in markets across the country. Traders report that supply shortages, rising transportation costs, and increased demand have all contributed to the sharp increase, placing pressure on households and restaurants alike.
In response to the soaring prices, security guards working at several major data centers have taken an unusual step to manage costs. The guards have collectively signed contracts to secure soup supplies for the next three years, aiming to stabilize their food expenses amid ongoing market volatility.
Industry analysts say the spike in onion prices reflects broader trends in food inflation, which continues to impact consumers and businesses. Meanwhile, the long-term soup contracts highlight how workers are adapting creatively to rising living costs.
Market observers will be watching closely to see whether onion prices stabilize in the coming months or continue their upward trajectory.
Won’t bother me, I despise onions. Cry, onion lovers, cry.
All these companies suck.
Fuck AI
I have the HDDs, but I can’t get a nas at a decent price at all. These fucking billionaires have to go or they will happily end us all before taking their claws out
Find some random used office PC and strap the drives inside. Install treunas and let it ride.
Yeah, I just ordered some cheap stuff from Ali Express to build one out instead, 150 instead of like 500. I figured I’d rather have new old parts than used old parts, even if the specs are lower, I guess we’ll see how it pans out, at least it’ll probably have a better uptime than my old hobbling pc.
Thanks for the heads up on truenas though, wasn’t sure what I’d need to use, cheers for that!
Sounds convenient after not long ago they cut production on the back of slowing demand.
“AI” more like thinly veiled business cartel on the back of low to no chances of law enforcement and regulation.
