Technology

The amount of money that's been invested in this will require 100 million people to pay $10,000 per year so they can have a 5% return on investment.

Who is actually going to be paying that kind of money for AI services? Has anyone ever actually worked for a company before? You need to go through layers of red tape to requisition a new office chair. Are companies actually going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for AI?

I've asked people that have used AI to alter photos (currently free to them, paid for by investors) how much they'd for such a service. Nothing, just would leave the photo as-is. There's a big market for "free AI" but the market for AI where the users pay the cost + profit margin is a small fraction of that.

So why is this stuff valued in the trillions? Simply because the greater fool will buy shares so line goes up. Once the pension funds buy in, then a bunch of billionaires get together and short it simultaneously. They'll make money and everyone else loses. That's how it worked in the dot com bubble, there's no reason to expect it will go any differently for AI.

Of course you might have gotten confused because there's real tech in the story. Same as there was in the dot com bubble. We're having this conversation on the internet right now. But seeing tech, using the tech doesn't mean the tech isn't overvalued. One of the "ridiculous" claims of the dot com bubble was that you'd be able to pet food over the internet. Today we most definitely can do that. Just because that eventually proven correct, it didn't make sense in 1999, and having billions invested in something that wouldn't have results for more than a decade isn't a good investment. Equipment depreciates, and high-tech equipment depreciates rapidly. Buying networking equipment for an online retailer ten years before the logistics needed are in place is just throwing away money.

Buying GPUs before there's a data center built to put them is throwing away money. Facebook is putting them in tents, Samsung wants to put them on ships. Obviously these GPUs aren't going to last long operating in these conditions, but it'll take years before there's data centers built and even longer before there's enough power generation needed to run them. They're just milking every last dollar from investors by doing these things.

Many of the things promised are straight up lies (Halting Problem, anyone?) and it'll be years before the the infrastructure is built. Right now they're maxing the hype and making as much as they can before the bubble bursts. And why not? Fraud is effectively decriminalized in the US.